Welcome!

On here, you will mostly find articles on running my home lab, in the hopes that others can benefit from my own trials and tribulations.

Thank your for Trävelling with Deutsche Bahn

I’m traveling with Deutsche Bahn again, and it’s frustrating again. I decided: Enough is enough. Yesterday’s journey went off the rails before it even began. Instead of just quietly fuming, I decided to write about it. And not just this one. Instead, I decided to write one post about every train trip I take. And not just the bad ones! The good ones as well. It’s just that the bad ones generally motivate me to write more readily. ...

A Few Thoughts On Self-Hosting and its Viability as a Solution

Please allow me to ramble a bit about a Fediverse post I saw around this time last year, and a few blog posts discussing self-hosting as a solution to the dominance of big tech. It all started with this post scrolling through my timeline last year. Are there any guides on self hosting for complete beginners out there? Especially those that have choice paralysis and care about privacy. Ones that walk you through buying a domain name, setting the DNS or whatever it’s called for it, setting up a hosting server (and which to choose), what OS to use on it etc? Or are you just expected to know all this? ...

A picture of the Volla tablet package sitting on my desk. It is a black rectangle with a picture of the tablet on the front, with the slogan 'Volla Tablet' and 'Erlebe mehr' (meaning 'Experience more' in German) below that. The tablet itself is a very archetypical black rectangle. In the picture, it shows the dawn over a hilly and wooded area. In short, if you've ever seen an Android tablet, you know exactly what this one looks like.

Volla Tablet Part 1: Volla OS

I needed to replace my old tablet, and decided to buy the Volla Tablet from a German company. Let’s start with where I’m coming from, a Lenovo Yoga Tab: My old Lenovo Yoga Tab ...

S3 Performance and Homelab Hardware Musings

Wherein I figure out why my Ceph S3 is so slow and think about potential hardware upgrades. As part of my goaccess post, I had to copy around almost 60 GB of logs, from my laptop to my desktop. I decided to do that via my Ceph S3. And it was very, very slow. There were 185 files to copy, with a total size just shy of 60 GiB. The majority of that size comes from two Traefik log files, both around 30 GiB in size. I used Rclone to sync the files to an empty directory on my desktop with this command: ...

FreshRSS: An RSS/Atom Feed Reader

Wherein I end up replacing my Brief setup for RSS with FreshRSS. Over the holidays, I visited my family and only had my laptop with me. While I have most things properly synced, my RSS feed subscriptions are not. Up to now, I’ve been using the Brief Firefox extension. It looks like this: Example of the Brief UI ...