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.

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! ...

A picture of a gamery Asus laptop resting on the tray of a Deutsche Bahn ICE first class seat. It has an empty terminal window open, just showing the prompt with the username 'michael'.

Bahn Journey Nr 5 & Nr 6: Way too early, but going well

Getting there, 2026-06-12 The main feature of this one was the really, really early start. I had to get up before 6 AM to catch my train at 07:59. Contrary to my normal habits, I did have an appointment on the day of the train journey. So I decided to go for an early start to have a Deutsche Bahn safety margin. I got the chance to try something new from the Deutsche Bahn restaurant for breakfast: The antipasti plate. Can’t recommend. It comes in a plastic holder, not on a proper plate. Two pieces of “too cheesy” cheese, a couple of pieces of salami, a few crackers, some soggy olives and a dip. None of it of any quality. First time in quite a while that I got disappointed by Deutsche Bahn’s food offering. ...

Yacy Part 1: Deployment

Welcome to the newest rabbit hole I’ve found myself in. This post starts a new series where I’m taking a look at the YaCy self-hosted, distributed peer to peer search engine. And probably web crawling and search ranking algorithms. In this post, I will concentrate on how I deployed YaCy into my Kubernetes cluster, and a few pieces about my first steps with it. You won’t find answers to questions like “how good is it as a Google replacement?” in this post. There’s a lot more work ahead for me to actually make that judgment. ...

A picture of the MNT Reform Next laptop. It's a 12.5 inch model, a bit thicker than other modern laptops.

Wants vs Needs: Trying to Talk Myself out of Ordering an MNT Reform Next Laptop

I don’t really need a new laptop right now. But I do want an MNT Reform Next. This laptop has been scrolling through my Fediverse feed for quite a while now, and I’ve found myself scrolling through that CrowdSupply page every time it comes up. It is an Open Hardware machine, meaning for most pieces, detailed schematics and data sheets are available, so that it could be easily modded. Specifically, the motherboard and keyboard are entirely open. The CPU itself, the Rockchip RK3588, is not open. But small steps. ...

A picture with the logos of three projects: The Golang gopher, the PostgreSQL elephant and the WoodpeckerCI woodpecker. The Golang gopher is pretty goofy looking, showing two large front teeth in a small mouth, tiny ears and two large eyes. The Postgres elephant is a stylized front view of an elephant, including tusks and a large trunk. finally, the WoodpeckerCI woodpecker is more of an outline of the namesake bird.

Smokeweb: Setting up Database Connections

After implementing a lot of helpers and basic infrastructure for my Smokeweb app (see here if you’re interested in what the project is about), I finally arrived at creating the database connection. In this post, I will give an overview of the Golang test helpers I implemented for tests which need a database, show you how I implemented some scripting for a Postgres database using Podman and then I will tell you how I implemented database tests in WoodpeckerCI. ...