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.

Nice improvement from Woodpecker CI Update

A few months ago, I wrote about my CI setup for my Smokeweb project, and how I had to take a few workarounds to make it work. And recently, Woodpecker release v3.16.0 fixed a couple of the issues I had. 🎉 If you recall, my main issue was that I couldn’t use Woodpecker’s Service feature. That was due to the fact that I’m using a Ceph RBD StorageClass to provide the pipeline volumes. And those are RWO by nature, meaning they can only be mounted on a single node of my k8s cluster. This, ultimately, meant that if the service for running my test Postgres instance got scheduled on a different node than all of the pipeline steps, there would be a deadlock. The steps won’t be able to start because the pipeline volume is already mounted on the node the Service is running on. ...

July 14, 2026 · 3 min · Michael
A picture of a gamery Asus laptop. The machine is resting on the tray table in front of a Deutsche Bahn ICE seat. The color scheme is still the older dark blue leather. The screen shows an open terminal, with only the prompt with the username 'michael' visible at the time. Desktop environment is Sway.

Bahn Journey Nr 7 & 8: Hoping for Excellence in Train Service

This journey is a bit special. I’m off to visiting a friend near Hamburg, in the north of Germany. As I live in the south of Germany, this means an overall distance of around 700 km. The best train connection I could find with only one switchover has me sitting in an ICE for about 6.5 h, with a regional train to get to/from my final destination. The special thing about this journey is that I broke with one of my principles: Never have fewer than 20 minutes for switching trains. In this trip, it’s only 8 minutes. Which is probably going to be fine on the return journey. But on the journey there, it might get rather tricky, considering that that 8 minute switchover happens after a 6.5 h journey over about 700 km. ...

July 7, 2026 · 7 min · Michael
The Rogue Trader Logo over a combat scene. In the background, a number of the possible companions can be seen in a battle scene, defending again Drukhari attackers on a starship, with the typical Warhammer 40k high gothic windows in the background. The visible companions are a space marine, a Navigator, a Psyker and an Eldari sniper. Over that background, the Warhammer 40k logo in stenciled steeled is followed by the Rogue Trader name.

Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader

Time for another game review, this time the classical RPG Rogue Trader. IMPORTANT: This review will contain some mild spoilers for the beginning of the story. Rogue Trader is a classical RPG set in the Warhammer 40k universe. It has all of the classical elements of an RPG, from a multi-character party, over round-based combat straight to the fact that there’s a lot of dialogue to read. I played the game on Linux on my Radeon RX 580 without any issue. ...

June 27, 2026 · 8 min · Michael
The YaCy logo. It shows the YaCy name, with a star next to the final Y. Below it are the words 'Search Engine'.

Yacy Part 2: Crawling and Putting it on the Backburner

This is the second post in my series on the YaCy distributed, self-hosted search engine. The main topic this time is getting pages into the search index via crawling. In contrast to search engines like Google, Bing or Kagi, the content of the search index in YaCy is driven by its users. YaCy has an integrated web crawler to crawl pages and add them to the search index. It can be invoked in one of three ways: ...

June 21, 2026 · 12 min · Michael

I'm Frustrated about my Inability to Advise Homelab Newcomers

I’m going to vent a bit in this one, mostly about myself. Just a few minutes ago, the following post scrolled past me in my Fedi timeline: Anybody self host their blog on their sbc or pc at home? Is there a good tutorial I can follow? I’m especially concerned about opening up ports or exposing my home ip to randos. I read that post and immediately thought: Running my blog on an SBC at home? I’m doing that! Concern about opening ports and “exposing” the home IP to the wider internet? I’ve certainly got opinions on that! ...

June 16, 2026 · 3 min · Michael