21 Sep 2025
This blog post is being written in the middle of conker season in the UK. Yesterday me and my lovely, knowledgeable partner walked through Greenwich Park which has both sweet chestnuts and horse chestnuts. Horse chestnuts are the ones used as conkers, whereas sweet chestnuts are the ones you can cook for a delicious snack. Despite having walked through Greenwich Park a number of times I'd not realised it has both a deer enclosure and a pond with a fountain. It seems like we never appreciate the things closest to us.
So what has happened in my life since the last blog post? Well we made a last-minute decision to go to see Chappel Roan at Leeds Festival. That was pretty wild, but my passionate and intelligent partner had already missed out on multiple opportunities to see her live so this seemed like potentially the last opportunity in a long time. We also saw High Vis and The Chats, which lead me to buy High Vis' latest album. I've been working on a new page for this website, to list out all the albums I've bought, so it is easier to share my music purchases with other people. It isn't finished yet but I'm hoping it will be done in a few weeks.
On the way back from Leeds Festival we visited the National Space Centre, a great place to visit for the massive planetarium alone. Aside from that the Pi cluster is basically put togther from a hardware perspective, so I just need to install operating systems, Kubernetes, etc. I also had an idea for a video game that I don't think has ever been done before, so I'd like to put some concepts together and have a think about how all the systems would fit together.
I have a few other little side projects I'd like to put some time towards but Baldur's Gate 3 has been eating up loads of my time and with FC 26 releasing next week I suspect I won't have a lot of time for other things for a while.
13 Aug 2025
It's been a while since my last post but honestly there hasn't been any truly huge events that would be appropriate to share here. I don't especially want to fill up this blog with such factoids as "we bought a new mop". So instead I'll mention something that I am working on, still very early stages, in the hope that shouting about it on here will guilt me into definitely finishing it.
Around a month back I decided that I wanted to have my own Kubernetes cluster at home, just for playing around with. The component list I came up with was:
So far I've only constructed one of the Pi cluster nodes, I needed to use some extra stand-off nuts to get it to screw onto the mounting plate, due to the push-grips on the active cooler protuding from the bottom a little bit longer than I wanted. Once I have them all constructed the way I want I also need to buy the M.2 SSDs to be the actual storage and a micro SD card to use for installing the operating system on to each node. Once that is all done I then need to figure out how I'm actually going to install Kubernetes on each node. Hopefully it doesn't start to feel like I'm just doing my job at home because that really wasn't my intention!
I initially had the idea to put a Rasperry Pi Kubernetes cluster to validate some work I am doing on Luncher Kubernetes Engine 1, but I now don't think there is as much of an urgent need to do that. I may still use LKE1 as the method for installing and managing Kubernetes on this cluster, but I suspect kubespray would be significantly easier.
Well tomorrow I am off work and have a trip to a lido to look forward to, so I should probably stop this post here. When I complete my setup I'll make another with photos, diagrams and GitHub repos - all that good stuff!
29 Jun 2025
Another few weeks have passed and some more things have happened in my life. I'll start with the most recent and most interesting: me and my lovely partner took Friday off to stay a night in Margate and go to see HAIM play at Dreamland. Dreamland is a great outdoor venue and the gig itself was fantastic, I remember being blown away at just how loud everybody was singing along to every word. It turned out to be their warm-up gig for Glastonbury but I won't complain at a great live music experience and some time by the sea.
England has seen some very high temperatures throughout this year and this weekend was no different, the two of us melting in the 30 degrees sun (we made full use of the Slushee machines at Dreamland!). We did get to have a dip in a tidal pool, but not before managing to get quite badly sunburnt. All of the heat really makes me very thankful we have air conditioning, something that is quite rare in domestic properties in the UK. I really struggle in the heat so having our home be the temperature of a refridgerator is a huge relief and I think genuinely make a massive difference to my comfort.
Otherwise there's some quite mundane things that happened this week, like after literally months of me trying to figure out what I should do about it I finally gave my old jeans that still fit me to the drycleaners to get repaired, gave a whole bunch of T-shirts that don't fit me to a charity shop and also dropped my old jeans that don't fit me to a fabric recycling bin. It's a little embarassing to admit how long it took me to find the time and effort necessary to get it all sorted, and perhaps more so now that it is so hot again I haven't even worn jeans in weeks. I try not to beat myself up over that sort of thing though, I've got a wonky brain and the world isn't made for me.
Perhaps this is a little too "behind the scenes" but sometimes when I need to remember what has happened since my last blog post I'll take a look through the message conversations between me and my amazing partner. In scrolling through I read a message from her that read "activism is stickers and maps" and there isn't a whole lot of analysis I can add to that because as I get older I realise that simple things like maps and stickers are rebellious. Signage and pictograms can be positively revolutionary.
We visited the roof garden at the Southbank Centre, on another punishingly hot evening. Although we stayed for a drink, a walk around the garden was quite pleasant, and as my multi-talented partner has turned her hand to gardening it gave us all sorts of ideas for things we would like to try in our garden. Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy gardening, and I very much enjoy the fruits of her labour, quite literally in the case of our dwarf mulberry. I do plan to make some more wooden planters at some point, I bought myself some right-angle clamps and even invested in a new drill to prepare for the next one.
This was supposed to be a vaguely tech-related blog but the only thing of interest I can talk about is I had a sort of business idea that I think could probably work. The problem is that I'm not an entrepreneur, have no desire to be one, and I have no experience in anything related to running a business. I'd also need a lot of support, and quite possibly funding, to get it off the ground so it will probably just die on the bonfire of okay-ish ideas.