22 Dec 2025
I'll skip the obligatory apology for leaving such a long time since the last post and instead skip straight to the interesting stuff. We spent around a week in Berlin at the end of September and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Everything from the food to the culture to the shops were great, it really felt like there was something interesting for us to find wherever we went. Some of those discoveries have stayed with us, we've had a few pretzels since!
The next month I did a combined work and holiday trip to Paris, my partner scoped out all the good tourist spots while I was at a conference so we could then go see all the best sights. It was around the time of the Louvre heist, but we definitely both have alibis. We went on a day trip to Monet's house in Normandy, ate French onion soup and explored the Musee d'Orsay - along lots of other sights.
The month after we then had a trip to the Peak District. The weather was quite variable so we did a day of walks and then a day of visiting a local town. We got 2 long walks and two town trips in, and two trips to the Denby Museum, very recommended for their pies!
December has been the usual whirlwind of buying presents, lots of work and my birthday. The pick of the birthday presents was (of course) from my partner, she got me a Kobo Clara BW. It's a great device and way less locked-down than the hand-me-down Kindle I had been using. I used the device to finish my reading of Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
On that note my partner has more premium model of Kobo, and that allows you to synchronise your books from Google Drive or Dropbox. My model doesn't have that built-in but luckily it is easy enough to enable with Nickel Menu. If you are looking for an ereader that respects your privacy more than Kindle and gives you proper ownership over your device, I'd highly recommend Kobo.
Now with you all caught up on my life I'd like to wish everyone who reads this happy holidays, and I hope the next year treats you tremendously.
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!