Although I had previously played around creating various mini-sites, today marks the 20th Anniversary of the initial posts onto my first durable site (benscomputer.no-ip.org), which would eventually evolve into this blog. I've always primarily written about tech, but have also never sought to limit myself to it. As a result, I've written about a range of topics including privacy, dogs, health, legal dealings, solar, vehicle maintenance and even creating furniture. Life comes with highs and lo...| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've got an SMK Synergy XS26 Air Pistol. It's a pretty satisfying gun to shoot, but ever since I got it, it's been intermittently dieseling (when lubricant gets from the cylinder into the barrel and ignites under pressure). It dieseled whilst attached to my chronograph and was measured throwing a 15.89 grain pellet out at 430 foot/s. That works out to around 6.53 ft/lbs, which is over the UK legal limit for an air pistol! A louder bang and bit of smoke might be a bit of fun, but getting prose...| www.bentasker.co.uk
Back in 2006, Tony Blair was extremely keen on the idea of introducing mandatory ID cards. Fortunately, they were scrapped by the coalition government following Labour's 2010 general election drubbing (for the historians, though, it is worth noting the cards were originally a Tory idea, and that Blair originally campaigned against them). 19 years later, Tony Blair (via the Tony Blair Institute) continues to hawk the idea of a "super identity card". Unfortunately, the current government have a...| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've been getting back into shooting recently. There's a fantastic outdoor centre just up the road, boasting a number of woodland ranges. But, although trips there are good fun, it's not exactly the most cost-effective way to shoot an air-rifle. We're pretty fortunate in that we have quite a long and wide garden so I decided to build a small backstop to allow me toshoot safely in the garden. This post describes the process of building a semi-portable backstop for air-rifle shooting. Note: the...| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've made no particular secret of the fact that I am not a fan of large language models: they're overhyped, under deliver and were built off the back of a ripping off of others work at a scale that (for anyone else) would have resulted in jail and/or bankruptcy (even before the more incontrovertible acts of copyright infringement are considered). But, I also work in a industry which is going through a phase of significant AI use (even if a lot of companies do come to regret being over-eager)....| www.bentasker.co.uk
I quite like Nextcloud as a self-hosted alternative to Dropbox - it works well for making documents and password databases available between machines.Where photos are concerned, the functionality it i| www.bentasker.co.uk
The website of Ben Tasker, IT Manager, Linux Specialist and software developer. I'm based in Suffolk in the UK but work with customers worldwide| www.bentasker.co.uk
Recently, I've been getting back into shooting air rifles and wanted to be able to do so in the garden. To aid in this, I wanted to build a backstop able to trap and stop any pellets that hit it| www.bentasker.co.uk
Our sofa is actually part of a corner sofa. When we moved, we took the other end off it because it didn't fit well into our current living room. The remaining sofa-bit is big enough for 2 or 3 people| www.bentasker.co.uk
I started a project to categorise and report on my todo lists, using a local AI model to assist with categorisation. This post talks about that experience| www.bentasker.co.uk
Now that the Online Safety act has come into effect and the inevitable consequences are starting to play out, I decided to email my MP to try and find out what the Government intends to do to unpick the mess. Doing this felt particularly important in light of the divisive comments made by Peter Kyle MP (I feel extremely dirty agreeing with anything that Farage has said, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day). Although I didn't want my email to focus on Kyle, it is a topic which merits...| www.bentasker.co.uk
The events of last week presented quite a challenging question. Should you attempt to address the issue of friends consuming and accepting misinformation, or do you simply accept it as a sign that it's time to break contact? Humans are very good at ignoring points of contention, particularly if addressing them might be inconvenient, but there are also things which cannot easily be brushed over. Last week presented one of those, inaction wasn't a (realistic) option and we had to make a conscio...| www.bentasker.co.uk
Bonnie came to live with us at the beginning of last year. She joined our family unspayed and so was still having regular seasons. I don't think that her previous owner had tried to breed her but, as he had a breeder in the family, I'm guessing that it was an option that he wanted to keep. Intact dogs aren't just exposed to the risk of accidental pregnancy, they also have an increased incidence of cancer and Pyometra (on average, 19% of intact females will suffer this before age 10). On top o...| www.bentasker.co.uk
Yesterday, I read an interesting article about this spring's UK solar output being 42% higher than in the same period last year. The article notes that, although the sun shone a lot more, increased sunlight wasn't the only driver of this increase in generation: capacity also expanded. I was curious, though, to see what kind of increase (if any) our solar had achieved over that period. This post looks into our levels of production as well as going down some rabbit holes looking at changes in t...| www.bentasker.co.uk
After reading a blogpost recently, I was inspired to add Webmention support to my sites. However, because I use a static site generator (SSG), there isn't a dynamic stack to handle sending or receivin| www.bentasker.co.uk
Post describing how I've configured pihole to return different results to clients on my tailnet than those on the LAN.| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've deployed Imaginary to help Nextcloud with thumbnailing our fairly sizeable image collection. This post talks about creating a k8s deployment and pointing Nextcloud towards it| www.bentasker.co.uk
A little while ago, I wrote some musings on Home Automation and made reference to our heating setup.As it's had a bit of time (and some poor weather) to run and be improved upon, I thought it might be| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've dabbled with elements of Home Automation in the past.In a previous rental, we only had storage heaters, so I equipped each room with an Oil Radiator and an energenie RF plug socket (like these ht| www.bentasker.co.uk
We recently had solar installed and I wanted to be able to pull stats from the inverter down into InfluxDB so that I could use the metrics to monitor system efficiency as well as for various bits of a| www.bentasker.co.uk
A message to any russian visitors to try and help communicate the truth of what's happening to and in Ukraine| www.bentasker.co.uk
I received a copyright infringement email from Copytrack, asserting rights over an image on behalf of concept-productions. Only, concept-productions don't seem to hold the rights, and the image was ac| www.bentasker.co.uk
Today, I did an assessment of my mastodon service for the online safety act. This blog post talks about the experience and my take-aways from the process.| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've put a weather station, but wanted to collect the data locally rather than relying on the supplier's app. As well as writing into InfluxDB, I've been able to implement writing onward to the Met Of| www.bentasker.co.uk
We added a solar install to our house earlier in the year, including a 6kWh battery for storage. I've been working on a dashboard to analyse our path towards break-even, and was quite surprised to see| www.bentasker.co.uk
Last month I found that the break-even period of our solar battery measures in decades, far longer than its useful life. Although it will probably never be possible to optimise enough to correct that,| www.bentasker.co.uk
At the beginning of January, I noticed that our Pylontech US2000C solar battery wasn't starting to supply household usage at the time that it should have done. In fact, on some mornings, it wasn't eve| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've switched away from Joomla to Nikola, this post details how and why| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've built an automated workflow to watch for external links in my blog posts and then preserve a copy in a private Linkwarden instance. The aim is to provide a form of insurance against link rot - wh| www.bentasker.co.uk
I have a couple of aftermarket amplifiers in my car. I spend a lot of time in it, so felt it was worth the effort needed to improve the audio system.Both amps have a dedicated lead running to the batt| www.bentasker.co.uk
Documentation describing how to deploy, configure and run Grafana in a Kubernetes cluster.| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've been setting up a new tropical fishtank and decided that I wanted to build some automated monitoring to help keep an eye on the state of the tank. So, as a starting point, I built a raspberry Pi| www.bentasker.co.uk
A short walkthrough on deploying the Linkwarden collaborative link preserver into a kubernetes cluster.| www.bentasker.co.uk
I was recently having a conversation with a colleague about a youtuber who built a home cable-tv channel. It occurred to me that having an always-on broadcast of stuff I like would greatly simply the| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've run kubernetes at home for quite some time, but because I was only using it as a sandpit didn't bother setting up monitoring. I've started using it for more productiony stuff though, so I decided| www.bentasker.co.uk
Bucket Day| www.bentasker.co.uk
Last week, I deployed ShotShare - a php application written using Laravel. However, I started to encounter validation issues when uploading an image from my phone. Troubleshooting showed that the issu| www.bentasker.co.uk
I spent part of today figuring out how to deploy ShotShare into Kubernetes so that I can easily share screenshots and the like with others. This post details the headaches I ran into (self-inflicted a| www.bentasker.co.uk
After reading an excellent blog post last week, followed by some news stories, I decided to have a play around with Perplexity.AI to see whether I could reproduce what was reported. However, I got a l| www.bentasker.co.uk
My note taking habits have meant that I've long needed a self-hosted search engine to help with finding old stuff. However, because my searches were generally quite specific, I started to find that fu| www.bentasker.co.uk
We temporarily plugged a heater into a switched extension lead. It ultimately killed part of the lead, so I've taken it apart to see what went wrong.| www.bentasker.co.uk
I was recently lucky enough to be invited along on a trip to Sizewell Bs operations training centre to see and try their control room simulator.| www.bentasker.co.uk
At the beginning of February, we agreed to give a border collie a new home. As the 2 month point approaches, I wanted to publish a post to mark the progress that's already been made.| www.bentasker.co.uk
About 6 months ago, I added support for webmentions to my site - displaying comments and interactions posted elsewhere. However, I've not been comfortable with some parts of this - something brought b| www.bentasker.co.uk
This winter, we've been using electricity to provide additional heating in the living room. This post looks at how our usage differed to the prior year where we relied on bottled gas for additional he| www.bentasker.co.uk
Having now fixed a reporting bug, I wanted to revisit charging our solar battery in the morning to see whether further savings can be unlocked. I also look at why lower (and negative) savings seem to| www.bentasker.co.uk
I recently tried charging our battery from the grid in order to reduce our exposure to the morning peak in prices. In this post I briefly share the results| www.bentasker.co.uk
