First off, I any of you have been waiting for me to get around to publishing parts 2 & 3 of my SnapCast series, I apologize for the delay. I've finally got my homelab to a state where I can start transitioning my wife over from some of the cloud services we've been using to my self-hosted alternatives. The final push on that was to get backups working properly. Anyways, time just disappeared on me.

So here's those two articles:

Part II

Part III

I've had a whole bunch of infrastructure type articles in progress for months now. I finally took the time to wrap a bunch of them up. Part of the issue is that so much of the content is inter-related that it feels wrong to publish a single article when a whole bunch of the information depends on understanding some other concept that is covered in a different article that hasn't been completed yet.

What am I trying to accomplish here?

As someone who has always considered himself primarily a programmer, I've also had to be "The IT Guy" for decades, and also "The Unix Guy". This meant that I ended up with a lot of practical experience with networking and data centre configuration and planning. I was in charge of configuring the rulebase on a CheckPoint FW1 firewall before some of you were born.

At the same, I never really wanted to do this stuff, but somebody had to, and it had to be done right. But it was all "hands-on", and I would have killed myself before I'd go through the misery of getting something like a Cisco certification.

On top of that, as a programmer I was quite a bit more involved with the business of the company than any of the networking guys we eventually ended hiring. This meant that my role morphed into being the guy that could help the network techies understand how their plumbing was going to be used by the business.

I look at what it takes me to build a homelab, and I realize just how much I lean on the things I learned over decades of being "The IT Guy", and I wonder how hard it must be for people without that kind of a background.

I've read through much of the FUTO article, and i can only think that even that is a hard slog for non-technical beginners. I thought that if I could share some of the things that I've learned about putting together a homelab over the past year or so, while trying to explain the underlying concepts involved, then it might help someone...and it keeps me busy and off the streets.

Back to the article dump...

Next is an article about DNS servers and, specifically, Technitium.

Going hand-in-hand with that, is an article about how You Need a Public Domain.

Finally, an article I've been sitting on forever that talks about the Lenovo M910Q Servers that I have been using in my Proxmox cluster.

In case you're interested, I'm also working on articles about systemd, a Proxmox introduction, resilency and recovery, network security, accessing services, VPN integration and linux basics.

As always, I'm interested in any feedback you may have, including stuff I got wrong or missed out, and whether there's any content you'd like to see. Thx.

For the past few years I’ve been building and maintaining website/blog at www.pragmaticcoding.ca. It has mostly about programming, and more specifically it’s ended up having a lot of content about JavaFX with Kotlin.

Lately, I’ve been spending all of my time building out my own homelab and self-hosting the services that I need. I’ve got a little stack of M910Q’s running in a Proxmox cluster with an HP T740 running OPNSense.

One of my big successes so far has been to replace my Google Home devices streaming music all over the house with a SnapCast network using RaspberryPi Zeros as the streaming clients. I've been working on documenting how to do this, and the result is a three part series that explains what SnapCast is, how it works and how to combine it with Mopidy to stream music around the house.

I have to admit that this one got away from me. It was all one article until I noticed that Jekyll was estimating it at oven 1/2 hour to read, which is way, way too long. So it became three parts, which also gives me the opportunity to release it over time, and make sure that each part is nice and clean before I post it live. Part I is an introduction to SnapCast and explains how it works and how to set up a SnapCast server in Proxmox.

If you're interested, take a read and let me know what you think.

For the past few years I've been building and maintaining website/blog at www.pragmaticcoding.ca. It's mostly about programming, and more specifically it's ended up having a lot of content about JavaFX with Kotlin.

Lately, I've been spending all of my time building out my own homelab and self-hosting the services that I need. I've got a little stack of M910Q's running in a Proxmox cluster with an HP T740 running OPNSense.

Since I've been spending all - and I do mean all - of my time futzing about with this self-hosted stuff, I thought I'd try to add some content to my website to help people doing the same thing. My idea was to make it more "bloggish", talking about the tricky things I've had to master along the way as I implement various services.

But I feel like there also needs to be some foundational content. Articles that explain concepts that a lot of people, especially people without professional networking experience, find difficult to grasp. So I've started working on those.

While I think of myself as mostly a programmer, my career (now, thankfully over) had me as an "IT Guy" more often than not. I spent 24 years at the same mid-sized company with a tiny IT department and simply had to get involved with infrastructure stuff because there was nobody else to do it. It was very hands-on at first, but as we grew I was able be limit my involvement to planning and technical strategy.

Since the mid 90's, we went from self-hosted physical servers, to colocated servers, to colocated virtual servers to cloud servers and services. So I feel like I have the insight to provide help.

Anyways, this is the first article in this new section. I've seen a lot of people posting questions about how VLAN's work and I know that it's mystifying to many. So I wanted to push it out before I have the supporting framework put together on the website, and it's just sitting there as the first post that's not about programming.

My goal is to provide practical, pragmatic advice. I'm not particularly worried if some particular facet of an article isn't 100% totally correct on some obscure technical level...as long as the article gives solid practical advice that readers can act on.

Anyways, take a look and let me know if you think this kind of article might me of use to yourself or other people getting started on self-hosting.

A friend of mine has come up with a new on-line word game that seems to me to be pretty fun. I'll give the you the description from the announcement he sent out a few days ago:

You start with a set of 7 letters. Make a word, ideally using some letters more than once. That’s how you score big: for example, COFFEE is worth 8 points, TEAMMATE is 12, but DONUT is just 5.

The letters you play will be replaced with new ones from today’s predetermined sequence, until it runs out. Here is a short video.

Your goal is to squeeze the highest score you can out of today’s challenge. You can also play it again, making different choices, to beat your earlier score.

It’s free, fresh every day, and just enough of a mental workout to leave you smiling (or muttering about that one word you should have seen).

I know, from the discussions that we've had as he was developing it, that he has spent a huge amount of time working on the algorithms to ensure that the letter sets that loaded up each day have a maximum amount of playability.

The game runs in two modes: one with a short list of 30 letters, and one with the "regular' list of 60 letters. Personally, I find the shorter game a good fit for my attention span. If you didn't pick up on it from the description, the letter lists are updated each day, so you get two games a day, one short and one long.

I think it's worth a try.

https://letteragegame.com/

For some reason, the wife decided to pull out all of the amigurumi critters that she's made since she started doing this at the beginning of the year.

So, here you go, the group shot:

She said that the pattern was awful and that she had fudge all kinds of stuff to make it work. The hat needed to be completely redesigned.

I'm beginning to think that this sub will never be ready. What's the hold-up????

The wife has started to make these amigurumi creatures. Here's her latest two.

She uses worsted weight wool (she tells me) which generally results in bigger creatures.

I wanted one of these back in 1980 when I was 16. I remember that they were $1,200, but they might as well have been $1,200,000 as far as I was concerned.

Many years later I had the $$$ to buy one, and this one is a beauty. Koa, with Bill Lawrence pickups.

Look at all the knobs and switches!!!

This is the beside the time since the post was created. I cannot figure it out.

I live in Canada, where we are graced with the most expensive cell phone plans in the developed world. One of the "features" of my plan is something they call "Roam Like Home". With this feature, I can use my data and time from my plan just like I haven't gone anywhere, for the low, low price of $15 a day!!!

This is activated automatically the moment that they detect that I am roaming. I cannot opt out of this "feature", and the only way to avoid it is to put the phone in airplane mode and then activate wifi. There is a cap to the number of days you can be charged, but runs on a calendar month basis, so if you are away across the end of the month, you can get charged more than that maximum.

For me, the answer came in the form of eSIMs. I ditched my old Galaxy S9, and bought a Pixel 7 in May. Then I purchased an eSIM for France for both data and talk (30GB for 30 days for around €45) and went to France for 24 days.

I was really pleased with the Pixel 7 in the week or two that I had it before we left on vacation. The battery life was way better than the S9, and 2 hours at the gym, with YouTube Music on Bluetooth and "Strong" running to track sets and timing left me with close to 90% battery left. It would be closer to 50% on the S9.

No heat issues here in Canada.

When the plane landed in France, the eSIM automatically activated, and I turned it on for both data and voice/SMS. Nothing could be easier, and it works like a charm.

At around this time, the issue with hot Pixels started, and eventually Google found the issue with their servers that was causing this. Hot Pixels with short battery life faded from the news.

But not for me.

Ok, so battery life was still better than my old S9, but not by much. And it got hot, too. It seemed to be particularly bad when I set up a hotspot for my wife - as this was the plan, she would use wifi off the Pixel hotspot since her phone doesn't support eSIMs. Out and about, I could expect to lose up to 15% in the first hour, and then it would maybe go even faster after it was down below 70%.

Taking pictures seemed to be especially hard on the battery, too. Not surprising, really, as the new camera features use a lot of computing power. We had Android Auto in our rental car, and Google Maps would drain the battery at almost the same rate that the car would charge it.

I was waiting for the new updates to drop, hoping that might have a fix, but as of June 13, we still haven't seen it. In the meantime, we've returned to Canada and I've turned off the eSIM.

And now the battery life is back to where it was before we left. I haven't once noticed the phone getting hot either.

So there you go. Has anyone else noticed this kind of issue with eSIMs?