I am experimenting with proxmox, as a way of getting to learn more about containers. At the moment, I have a fleet of aging Intel NUCs running most of my services, with a few Raspbery Pis picking up some of the load. I’ve brought an older HP Microserver back into commission, and I’m experimenting with proxmox on that. And, so far, so good. I’ve still got plenty to learn, since at the moment I’ve basically done a lift-and-shift of what I would do on a NUC to each container. I’m not s...| Neil's blog
Here’s a dull blogpost: I replaced the battery in our Dyson vacuum cleaner, and now it powers the machine for longer. We have a Dyson V8 vacuum cleaner, which we bought six or so years ago. Not unexpectedly, the battery started to hold less and less charge, until it was capable of running the machine for about three minutes at most. I bought this battery for about £35 (including a 10% off promotion). It took about five minutes to swap the old battery for the new one, following the included...| Neil's blog
edent asked: All my DVD and CD rips are sat on a plain filesystem with an NFS share.| neilzone.co.uk
I genuinely thought that the days of men jumping on women’s, non-binary people’s, and enby’s blogposts and toots, mansplaining their own points back to them, or assuming that they are ignorant and in need of basic instruction, was in the past. Boy was I wrong. I’ve seen it myriad times this week, particularly in the context of the Online Safety Act. Women explaining what position they have reached after careful thought - in some cases, with a detailed post explaining their position - ...| Neil's blog
Last year, I started to use LiberaForms for forms. They replaced a combination of CryptPad (which offered end-to-end encrypted forms, but with an interface with which quite a few people struggled), and my own hand-crafted php forms (which worked, but were clumsy). The LiberaForms experience is so much better, but - until recently - it lacked end-to-end encryption. This arrived with release v4.0.0, and I was keen to give it a go as soon as I could. Installing and using it The upgrade was seaml...| Neil's blog
I currently use Firefox as one of my main browsers.| neilzone.co.uk
In my spare time, I’ve been trying to looking at the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023. This is a broad-reaching piece of legislation, which impacts some of the hosted services that I run. While I am broadly content that many of my services will be out of scope, I am less convinced about my Mastodon instance. I’ve written up why I think this, but that’s not really the scope of this post. I already use the tools provided by Mastodon to lock my server, and my account on it, down: Registration...| Neil's blog
I recently bought a used ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6 on eBay. One of the risks of buying a used machine is that one never knows in what state the battery will be. And, on this machine, while it was not dreadful - it had about 75% of its capacity - it was not ideal either. But, it is a ThinkPad, so replacing the battery is easy. Fortunately, when I fitted the skin, I made sure that the screws remained accessible. I would have preferred to have bought a replacement battery from iFixit, but they were...| Neil's blog
I had a Phillips beard trimmer for years, but it has finally got to the point where the battery does not hold charge.| neilzone.co.uk
I thought that it might be a good idea to have a local (well, on my local network) copy of Wikipedia, and some other bits. The go-to tool for this seems to be kiwix, and that’s what I used, running on a Raspberry Pi. The gist was: add a fresh 1TB SSD to the Raspberry Pi add some content for kiwix install kiwix and create a library file put an nginx proxy in front of it (for TLS termination) Adding a 1TB SSD to the Raspberry Pi I created a mount point: mkdir -p /media/1TB Using lsblk -f to g...| Neil's blog
A couple of years ago, I wrote about using NetworkManager’s dispatcher.| neilzone.co.uk
I bought a(nother) “faulty” Kobo eReader on eBay. This time, a Kobo Mini.| neilzone.co.uk
Hot on the heels of upgrading my own Kobo Clara HD’s battery and micro SD card, I turned to another eReader project: reviving a Kobo Aura HD, that would not turn on.| neilzone.co.uk
I love my Kobo eReader, which I’ve had for quite a long time now.| neilzone.co.uk