Posts

  As of the time of this writing there are significant wildfires in my area. Usually they don’t bother me all that much, but, this time around they did. So I decided to go out and buy a couple IKEA STARKVIND1, these are nifty little devices as it seems IKEA has gone all in on Zigbee devices, so HomeAssistant integration was a breeze!

In a previous post I explained why it was I wanted an ISO store, and explained that I wrote a quick script to achieve that. There is a new problem now, what if the TrueNAS system hosting it dies?

Generate static ISO directories for Garage to serve.

Recently I realized I know very little about LLMs, and how to make effective use of them. The writing is on the wall, sooner or later I will have a client intending on deploying some LLM workload, while I may not need to be the expert in LLM workloads I will need to be prepared enough. I have also taken some time to come around to LLMs, being confidently fed blatantly false information has always evoked a certain ire in me, but, I have started to find use in them lately. All that to say……I dropped some money on an AMD AI PRO R7000 on a whim and need to justify that expense to myself.

  As usual I have an aversion to creating “pet” VMs, and as such I decided to deploy my Forgejo runners on RKE2. Sticking to the Rancher philosophy of “cattle not pets” (a philosophy I strongly agree with), I decided to go this route. Of course deploying Forgejo runners in Kubernetes comes with its own issues, mainly, unlike GitLab, Forgejo can not create pods in a cluster natively. The recommended way to deploy runners in Kubernetes is via DinD (Dock in Docker), this means my workflows will be in containers, in an DinD container (on RKE2), in a container (on Harvester, also RKE2). It really is containers all the way down!

  To save you from thinking too hard, dear reader, the answer is: incredibly lazy, I am pretty sure that’s how I got into this career in the first place. As the lazy man I am, I have become tired of remembering to restart my deployments, and spell check my posts when I make changes to this site. So I did what any proper lazy person would do, I spent more time automating my tasks, rather than just being careful, and diligent.

  As much as I love Proxmox, if it is anything, it is basic. This is a double edge sword of course, it is rock solid and stable (foreshadowing), and it is also exceptionally basic with few features I want, especially as a Kubernetes user.

I recently needed to flash some Sonoff S31 power switches, and realized I forgot to write down what I did and how to do it. Thankfully the process (thanks to ESPHome) is exceptionally easy. So this is a quick write up to explain the disassembly and flashing process.

In the previous post “Installing NixOS on BTRFS: Part 1” I realized only after installing NixOS that I had forgot to encrypt my installation, so I have decided to reinstall. This is a small follow up to that post.

It has been many months since I had decided to update my HTPC running NixOS. Sadly, failing to update the HTPC machine as new NixOS versions became available left my machine’s OS version too far back and now no longer compatible with the current version of my NixOS config. I was left with many errors when attempting to upgrade and some may not have been resolvable due to some packages requiring newer compilers that were not available on the system. After a couple hours of debugging I realized this was not worth the effort and decided to simply scrap the system and reinstall. This new install will be just about the simplest install possible, so it is a good starting point.