First off, I any of you have been waiting for me to get around to publishing parts 2 & 3 of my SnapCast series, I apologize for the delay. I've finally got my homelab to a state where I can start transitioning my wife over from some of the cloud services we've been using to my self-hosted alternatives. The final push on that was to get backups working properly. Anyways, time just disappeared on me.

So here's those two articles:

Part II

Part III

I've had a whole bunch of infrastructure type articles in progress for months now. I finally took the time to wrap a bunch of them up. Part of the issue is that so much of the content is inter-related that it feels wrong to publish a single article when a whole bunch of the information depends on understanding some other concept that is covered in a different article that hasn't been completed yet.

What am I trying to accomplish here?

As someone who has always considered himself primarily a programmer, I've also had to be "The IT Guy" for decades, and also "The Unix Guy". This meant that I ended up with a lot of practical experience with networking and data centre configuration and planning. I was in charge of configuring the rulebase on a CheckPoint FW1 firewall before some of you were born.

At the same, I never really wanted to do this stuff, but somebody had to, and it had to be done right. But it was all "hands-on", and I would have killed myself before I'd go through the misery of getting something like a Cisco certification.

On top of that, as a programmer I was quite a bit more involved with the business of the company than any of the networking guys we eventually ended hiring. This meant that my role morphed into being the guy that could help the network techies understand how their plumbing was going to be used by the business.

I look at what it takes me to build a homelab, and I realize just how much I lean on the things I learned over decades of being "The IT Guy", and I wonder how hard it must be for people without that kind of a background.

I've read through much of the FUTO article, and i can only think that even that is a hard slog for non-technical beginners. I thought that if I could share some of the things that I've learned about putting together a homelab over the past year or so, while trying to explain the underlying concepts involved, then it might help someone...and it keeps me busy and off the streets.

Back to the article dump...

Next is an article about DNS servers and, specifically, Technitium.

Going hand-in-hand with that, is an article about how You Need a Public Domain.

Finally, an article I've been sitting on forever that talks about the Lenovo M910Q Servers that I have been using in my Proxmox cluster.

In case you're interested, I'm also working on articles about systemd, a Proxmox introduction, resilency and recovery, network security, accessing services, VPN integration and linux basics.

As always, I'm interested in any feedback you may have, including stuff I got wrong or missed out, and whether there's any content you'd like to see. Thx.

For the past few years I’ve been building and maintaining website/blog at www.pragmaticcoding.ca. It has mostly about programming, and more specifically it’s ended up having a lot of content about JavaFX with Kotlin.

Lately, I’ve been spending all of my time building out my own homelab and self-hosting the services that I need. I’ve got a little stack of M910Q’s running in a Proxmox cluster with an HP T740 running OPNSense.

One of my big successes so far has been to replace my Google Home devices streaming music all over the house with a SnapCast network using RaspberryPi Zeros as the streaming clients. I've been working on documenting how to do this, and the result is a three part series that explains what SnapCast is, how it works and how to combine it with Mopidy to stream music around the house.

I have to admit that this one got away from me. It was all one article until I noticed that Jekyll was estimating it at oven 1/2 hour to read, which is way, way too long. So it became three parts, which also gives me the opportunity to release it over time, and make sure that each part is nice and clean before I post it live. Part I is an introduction to SnapCast and explains how it works and how to set up a SnapCast server in Proxmox.

If you're interested, take a read and let me know what you think.

For the past few years I've been building and maintaining website/blog at www.pragmaticcoding.ca. It's mostly about programming, and more specifically it's ended up having a lot of content about JavaFX with Kotlin.

Lately, I've been spending all of my time building out my own homelab and self-hosting the services that I need. I've got a little stack of M910Q's running in a Proxmox cluster with an HP T740 running OPNSense.

Since I've been spending all - and I do mean all - of my time futzing about with this self-hosted stuff, I thought I'd try to add some content to my website to help people doing the same thing. My idea was to make it more "bloggish", talking about the tricky things I've had to master along the way as I implement various services.

But I feel like there also needs to be some foundational content. Articles that explain concepts that a lot of people, especially people without professional networking experience, find difficult to grasp. So I've started working on those.

While I think of myself as mostly a programmer, my career (now, thankfully over) had me as an "IT Guy" more often than not. I spent 24 years at the same mid-sized company with a tiny IT department and simply had to get involved with infrastructure stuff because there was nobody else to do it. It was very hands-on at first, but as we grew I was able be limit my involvement to planning and technical strategy.

Since the mid 90's, we went from self-hosted physical servers, to colocated servers, to colocated virtual servers to cloud servers and services. So I feel like I have the insight to provide help.

Anyways, this is the first article in this new section. I've seen a lot of people posting questions about how VLAN's work and I know that it's mystifying to many. So I wanted to push it out before I have the supporting framework put together on the website, and it's just sitting there as the first post that's not about programming.

My goal is to provide practical, pragmatic advice. I'm not particularly worried if some particular facet of an article isn't 100% totally correct on some obscure technical level...as long as the article gives solid practical advice that readers can act on.

Anyways, take a look and let me know if you think this kind of article might me of use to yourself or other people getting started on self-hosting.

A friend of mine has come up with a new on-line word game that seems to me to be pretty fun. I'll give the you the description from the announcement he sent out a few days ago:

You start with a set of 7 letters. Make a word, ideally using some letters more than once. That’s how you score big: for example, COFFEE is worth 8 points, TEAMMATE is 12, but DONUT is just 5.

The letters you play will be replaced with new ones from today’s predetermined sequence, until it runs out. Here is a short video.

Your goal is to squeeze the highest score you can out of today’s challenge. You can also play it again, making different choices, to beat your earlier score.

It’s free, fresh every day, and just enough of a mental workout to leave you smiling (or muttering about that one word you should have seen).

I know, from the discussions that we've had as he was developing it, that he has spent a huge amount of time working on the algorithms to ensure that the letter sets that loaded up each day have a maximum amount of playability.

The game runs in two modes: one with a short list of 30 letters, and one with the "regular' list of 60 letters. Personally, I find the shorter game a good fit for my attention span. If you didn't pick up on it from the description, the letter lists are updated each day, so you get two games a day, one short and one long.

I think it's worth a try.

https://letteragegame.com/

For some reason, the wife decided to pull out all of the amigurumi critters that she's made since she started doing this at the beginning of the year.

So, here you go, the group shot:

She said that the pattern was awful and that she had fudge all kinds of stuff to make it work. The hat needed to be completely redesigned.

I'm beginning to think that this sub will never be ready. What's the hold-up????

The wife has started to make these amigurumi creatures. Here's her latest two.

She uses worsted weight wool (she tells me) which generally results in bigger creatures.

I wanted one of these back in 1980 when I was 16. I remember that they were $1,200, but they might as well have been $1,200,000 as far as I was concerned.

Many years later I had the $$$ to buy one, and this one is a beauty. Koa, with Bill Lawrence pickups.

Look at all the knobs and switches!!!