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
I recently added webmention support to www.bentasker.co.uk. Hkwever, I wanted to be able to generate some basic stats showing the sources of webmentions, as well as providing notifucations to enable m| www.bentasker.co.uk
Taking a look at data in the light of a recent claim that, this spring, UK solar generation increased 42% YoY. Inevitably features a couple of rabbit holes.| 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 couple of years ago, as part of adopting a POSSE (Publish On Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) approach, I started to automate syndication of my content into other networks. In the time that's passed since, I've added and removed automation for various networks (at one point, managing to get myself banned from Threads in the process). This post is about adding support for syndicating into a Telegram channel, allowing Telegram users to receive notifications when I publish something new. It cove...| www.bentasker.co.uk
I'm going to an in-person event later this year and, in preparation, attendees have been asked to read (and make notes on) a specific book. For me, this presents something of a challenge: although I used to be an avid reader, nowadays I really struggle to be able to sit and read. I think it's a combination of a busy life and having two dogs who'll happily find something (usually ball related) for me to do if I seem even vaguely idle for more than a few seconds. I didn't particularly want to a...| www.bentasker.co.uk
This week, I've been wrong about (at least) two things, believing that: I was done with the Copytrack stuff: I sent them proof of license and subsequently audited my image use to ensure they'd never have any excuse to darken my virtual doorway again. I could have a lazy Friday afternoon: I had a day off and intended to doze in front of Four in a bed. Unfortunately, I was wrong on both counts. Not long after I had settled down to watch people complain about the quality of sausages, my phone we...| www.bentasker.co.uk
For the last couple of years, we've used a free-standing oil radiator to provide additional heat in our attic room. However, I've never been overly comfortable with the risk that it'll get knocked ove| 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
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
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
I'm knackered and so am taking a (belated) weekend of not doing anything around the house. That's being helped along by having seen a toot about a game earlier in the week - so in a short break from p| 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
