Posts

Basically my entire Homelab is build upon HashiCorp’s products. On August 10th, HashiCorp announced that they would switch all of their products to the BSL, the Business Source License, where they had been licensed under the Mozilla Public License before. From my (rather rudimentary!) understanding, the license basically says that all “non-production” use is perfectly fine. I’m pretty confident that that covers all of my own personal usage. But as it was pointed out to me today, that formulation also creates a lot of uncertainty for commercial entities of all kinds. ...

I started my Fediverse journey a little over a year ago, with my account creation date being August 3rd, 2022. I was initially drawn to the Fediverse due to the simple fact that this was social media I could host myself. Neat, right? And I want to reflect a little bit on how it’s going. So let’s start with my social media usage in the past, so you can properly classify where the following comments are coming from. ...

It has been a whole year since my first blog post. And to my surprise, I’ve kept to it. 😅 Sure, it’s just been a post a month for the most part, but I still managed to write a grant total of 31 posts. And it’s been fun! The blog was born out of the fact that while tinkering with my Homelab, I’ve been reading so many niche blogs of other Homelab enthusiasts who did the same things I was trying to do. And I thought to myself: Hey, if I write about my tinkering, there might be somebody, someday, who finds one of my posts useful. And even if it’s just one person per post, it was already worth it. ...

I’ve long been wondering how much power my Homelab consumes, especially with my switch from a single relatively beefy server to a gaggle of Raspberry Pis. In the end, I put in three smart plugs supporting MQTT. I would have loved to have per-machine power consumption stats, but I didn’t want to invest that much money into smart plugs. To wet your appetite a bit, here is a snapshot of the resulting Grafana dashboard: ...

I’m now about a month into learning the Elixir programming language. See my previous post for my initial thoughts. And I don’t hate it. In contrast to my earlier encounter with Haskell, I’m keeping at it, and I’m enjoying it. Because Elixir is not quite as strict as Haskell, it has been way easier to wrap my head around it. There was a very steep hurdle in the beginning - everything requiring any amount of design beyond “just a single function” was (and to a degree, still is) rather hard. I had single functions down relatively quickly, but building anything that required chaining multiple functions had me blank quite often. I spend an entire Sunday solving this exercise. It should have been relatively simple: Just mark the cells on a minesweeper board with the number of adjacent mines. And the hard part was not the syntax for doing it, but coming up with a design and architecture to solve the task. ...