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.
31 May 2025
It's been a little while since my last blog post so I'll once again forgo the tech rambling and focus on the life rambling. The most exciting thing that happened was probably that I made a planter out of wood we had lying around. For someone who hasn't done any woodworking since secondary school I am probably more proud than any man should be over a rectangular box with legs.
I also worked with my partner on a very strange issue where her GitHub account couldn't connect to the Visual Studio Code installation. The problem turned out to actually be that Microsoft doesn't package Visual Studio Code as a proper MacOS app installation, but as a sort of portable application. Removing that and installing it through Homebrew instead resolved that issue. The moral of the story is that Homebrew is an absolute necessity on MacOS, I think.
I attended the London Web Standards GAAD event, along with my amazing partner. The talks were interesting and energising, giving me plenty of ideas for how to improve my own website. I was asked why, as a cloud engineer, I found the London Web Standards talks so interesting. I think it's because you have a great group of people committed to both doing things the right way and also being fun and silly. There isn't an awful lot of that in the cloud infrastructure world!
I was also mercifully bullied about not being able to figure out Mastodon. I took some time to figure it out a bit more and have come to a different conclusion: I just don't like it. Searching doesn't seem to really work across instances and it just isn't as nice to use as Bluesky. I know some parts of Bluesky aren't practical to self-host unless you have a spare bare-metal server in your larder but I prefer it, so that's where I am.
We took advantage of the bank holiday weekend to do a little getaway to Yorkshire. With Weird Walk, The Old Stones and a few Google Map searches as our guides we visited The Druid’s Temple, The Devil's Arrows, The National Video Game Museum, Mother Shipton's Cave, Thornborough Henges, and even found time to visit a couple of garden centres and Sheffield Central Library. My collection of library cards grows ever larger.
This week I had a day off to experience The Suffolk Show. It was a very pleasant day out, and any day I can eat a massive bag of pork scratchings and a couple of bags of fudge is a very good day indeed.
I find myself writing this on Saturday, my copy of Worms W.M.D. has arrived in the post (after playing Worms 2 at the National Video Game Museum it gave me an itch and my partner seemed interested) and there are a few projects I'd like to finish so I'll bring this post to a close. I promise at some point I'll talk about actual tech stuff!