I’ve come to realise that my homelab setup is getting out of hand. I’m using Proxmox on a second hand Intel NUC to run a handfull of servers and services, some for learning, some for supporting things Mrs P and I use at home. I started trying to document things a few weeks ago and realised it’s just a mess. There are way too many servers and LXC / Docker containers running, each doing a single job that could likely be consolidated onto a couple of well setup virtual hosts to help simplify things.
Highlights A brithday meal with Mrs P, followed by on heck of a hangover A combined birthday house party with friends We got some work done on the garden, possible blog post to follow, maybe. New things Migrating more of our remote connections over to Wireguard. I think we’re more or less done, minus a couple of mobile phone automations to setup. Watched Continuing our re-watch of Chicago Fire (2012) Season 2 Season 3
Highlights Friday tea time drinks at our local pub Another big batch of network switch upgrades at $dayjob including at least one blood sacrifice A hot tub holiday in Tenby New things Found a way to automate Wireguard on Android using Tasker so it deactivates when we’re home but reactivates when we leave Watched Continuing rewatching Chicago Med (2015). Looks like we only got to the end of season 4 last time as season 5 all looks new.
Continuing on my quest to self host all the things, I’m testing an application called Syncthing. I’m sure you’re all already aware of Syncthing so I’m not going to provide too much detail here, just a few notes on my basic setup.
At the moment I’m testing the tool by synchronising my Logseq graph. My current process uses Google Drive to sync between my phone and my work laptop, where I find myself adding most of my daily notes as I work.
Highlights A couple of the usual random friday nights in our local pub, plus a bonus free beer that was still “in” from my from my birthday last month. Our local pub is the best :-) An afternoon tea in aid of a cancer charity, at the pub. :-) Erm, at the pub again for the third day over the bank holiday weekend. BBQ, music and a great catch-up with friends.
Highlights The usual Friday tea times in the pub with the usual suspects plus a great night for my birthday. Improved the workflow I use to create blog posts - details here A nice meal at our favourite local curry restaurant with friends New things Setup an IPv6 only server to localhost a personal task and project management server called Vikunja so we have somewhere to record all of the things we need to get done around the house.
Since I built my web server to host my blog, I’ve been using it mainly as just a blog with dated posts as I add content but I wanted to also give myself the opportunity to create some other content that doesn’t really fit the blog style.
I created a now page but I have a few other ideas I’d like to play with but the default setup of Hugo builds an RSS feed for every page and post across the site.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now but I now have a solution. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what I had before. I’m gettting ahead of myself.
When I decided to start a blog, back around April 2023 (wow, I just realised my blog is already over a year old), I wasn’t really sure how I was going to create the content and get it online. I settled on using the Hugo static site generator with one of the many themes.
Highlights A friends surprise 40th birthday party at our local pub A very relaxing week in Marrakech, Morocco. Just what the doctor ordered. The usual Friday tea times in the pub with the usual suspects. Migrated my blog to a server running at home #SelfHosted #LocalHosted Watched Star Wars (1977)
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
The Matrix Resurrections (2021)
WarGames (1983)
Today’s random “It’s always DNS” message is brought to you by the idiot that didn’t configure it properly.
On my quest to do more IPv6 stuff to learn about it, I’ve had GUA IPv6 addresses on all my home servers for a while but I’ve been using them now and then. With our new ISP and fixed addresses I’ve been using them more. In a recent post titled A Short IPv6 Guide for Home IPv4 Admins it mentions about not picking IP addresses for your devices and just let them figure one out for themselves and use DNS.
I’ve been running my little blog for around a year at this point (June of 2024 as I write this post) and I even remember to add some content from time to time. I’ve had a VPS hosting the site for a relatively modest monthly fee but with a recent change to the hosting companies terms of service (not mentioning any names, but you can possible guess) including an Intellectual Property “rights grab” I decided it was time to move it somewhere else.
Highlights Completed a network hardware replacement project that’s been in the making for the best part of a year Started work on dynamic dashbards for our Home Assistant system so they are a bit more flexible and less cluttered. Two days over in Harrogate for the Everything Electric North exhibition. We booked for the three days but we’re exhausted after two. Watched Bullet Train (2022) - a good laugh from start to finish.
Over the last 6 weeks or so, I’ve been running about like the proverbial headless chicken trying to get ready for our network infrastructure replacements at $dayjob. Last week was the big bang where we closed one floor per day to strip out all of the network cabinet patch cables (15+ years of layers on top of layers), strip out the old switches, install shiny new switches and finally patch back in the limited number of access ports we are actually using now.
Highlights A fab early evening catchup at our local pub. Always nice to catch the tea time gang. A huge amount of progress with the $dayjob big project that’s almost coming to an end Watched Good Omens (2019) - We watched season one again to remind ourseleves where it got up to and then watched through season 2. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) - Rocks. That’s all I’m saying.
Highlights Holiday abroad. One we originally planned for April 2020. A fab early evening catchup at our local pub. Always nice to catch the tea time gang. Switched home ISP’s to Andrews & Arnold. Saves money but also moves us to one that is run by nerds for nerds. Bank holiday BBQ at our local pub. Watched 2024 Six Nations Rugby Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) 3 Body Problem (2024) series one.
Highlights Holiday abroad. Postponed for 4 years thanks to you know what Watched The Creator (2023) The Marvels (2023) Dune (2021) I didn’t realise this was part one. Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) Reminiscence (2021) Oppenheimer (2023), all three hours of it. It’s not quite what I was expecting. I think I was expecting it to be more about the bomb but I guess the clue was in the name.
Highlights Not sure it counts as a highlight but spent a few days in the office in the first week of the year while we have some contractors onsite. I’ve not been in the office for this many days in years. Getting at least one massage. It’s amazing the difference it makes, more so when you have bad posture life I do. Watched Completed our binge session on
We’ve had some, best described as “odd”, network glitches at home over the last few days but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Our Google home devices would barf when asking them to set alarms and they also fail to play back any of the text to speech messages from Home Assistant. The Xbox reported only legacy IP connectivity and no IPv6. Client devices were sluggish loading websites and apps.
Highlights Company Christmas party. Dropped my phone in the Uber on the way home but fortunately the next customer was honest and the driver was awesome so I was reunited with it within an hour or so. A Christmas meal with the chosen ones at a really nice Italian restaurant - Pagliacci Restaurant in Hyde. A few random pub Friday evenings Cooked a full Christmas meal at home. I know, it’s just cooking, but I’ve not made the effort for quite some time so it was nice to get back into the routine.
When I started my blog, back in April 2023, I had the best of intentions for creating lots of content. I was creating posts for weekly solar statistics, general tech stuff and Home Assistant posts. I set myself a recurring calendar event on Monday evening to remind me to post and for a while that worked. I was full of energy and raring to go.
Fast forward 8 months and things have changed.
Highlights Meal out for dads birthday. Mmmmm, steak :-) It was really good and both dad and his other half already want too go again. Random pub Friday night. Well, we needed to pay our social club membership anyway…. Started walking again in the evenings after work. I’m getting too old for this shit but it’s nice walking when it’s cold, as long as it’s not too wet as well.
Highlights Drinks at the Astley for 4 birthdays. Yeah, I was broken the day after. Birthday for Mrs P. She loves her new TheWhyFiles talking HeckleFish plush Spent time feeding my brother’s cat, Frankie. He’s a real little monkey. Can’t believe we won the bonus ball at our local pub, 2 weeks on the run. That never happens. Watched Ad Astra - not what I expected from a Brad Pitt movie.
Highlights Catch-up with friends in London, including one all the way from Australia Environmental day up over Dovestones/Chew reservoir Improved Smarter EV Charging - Smarter EV Charging volume #2 Week away from the craziness to relax with a private hot tub Chance to work on an automation to export from the home battery when we have an upcoming cheaper rate Agile session coming up - blog post to follow Trying out Logseq add an option for a personal knowledge management tool.
As I mentioning in my previous blog post - Smarter EV charging from solar, I’ve been working on a way to make better use of our home solar generation. I’ll not bore you with all the details, you can go and have a read at my earlier post for that, but the tl;dr version is we need at least 1400W to charge the car but anything lower than that can charge the home battery so adjust charging speeds based on solar generation accordingly.
Wow, what a really slow month. It didn’t feel particularly slow, but not a lot of noteworthy things to my review.
Highlights First massage to try to help undo some of the bad posture work I’ve managed to do to my body with 30+ years of sitting in an office behind a desk. Watched Evolution again. A random idea while we were in the pub earlier and heard “play that funky music white boy”.
Having solar and a storage battery at home gives us the opportunity to reduce how much energy we import from the grid which helps minimise our overall energy usage costs. However, we also have an EV, called Eddie, and he’s a real hungry beast when it comes to energy. Where we can, we try our best to use our solar energy to feed Eddie. That reduces our costs for travel energy and also helps us use as much of the solar that we generate at source, helping with our return on investment spreadsheet numbers.
I was going to leave looking at the Home Assistant Sunsynk card until I had a few more of my outstanding jobs ticked off the list but a toot on Mastodon by Baz today reminded me it was still lurking on the list and I was distracted for 5 minutes and went to take a look.
After a bit of a false start, and one rather unfortunate click on “cancel” before I saved anything (DOH!
Like many folks with a solar and battery storage system, I have a spreadsheet (or rather, multiple spreadsheets) tracking generation, self consumption, import, export, and just about every other stat I can think of that might come in handy later either for drawing pretty graphs or figuring out if we are anywhere near where our suppliers estimate for system performance suggests we should be.
As an Octopus Energy customer, I also have access to all of our electricity and gas meter data in 30 minute segments directly from their API.
Highlights A day trip to Warwick Castle for Mrs P’s work away day. Had our first public EV charging failure Worked as the backup crew, ferrying people and supplies for the Murphy charity canoe event Switched to the Octopus Energy Agile Octopus tariff for our electricity supply. Use our referral link or the code “super-crane-314” if you switch to Octopus and we both get £50 credit. Learned to always read the Zap Map comments Finally got ourselves registered with an export energy tariff so we can get paid for any excess solar we happen to have.
Yep, that’s it basically, always read the comments. That’s the post.
No, not really, but almost.
Some of you may remember my recent post about our first failed ppublic ev charge. Well, this past weekend we happened to be travelling up and down the country again and this time we really did need to grab a charge around Stafford so we headed back to our nemesis, the Stafford Ionity charging location.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GiveEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the month I’m grabbing data from the GivEnergy cloud because it draws pretty graphs, so I don’t have to.
June feels like it was a odd month.
It felt a lot sunnier than May but we only generated about 20kWh more. I need to look at the daily numbers but I’m wondering if this means we’re starting to reach the limit of our system.
Highlights Completed my 26 mile charity walk Holiday escape to Tunisa for a week of relaxing, reading, swimming and a beer or two. Started using Street Complete to add missing data to Openstreetmap. Setup 2 new Docker based Home Assistant installs, one at home and one for my brother. Watched Contact Read I always seem to read a lot more when I’m on holiday
The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross
A little mini-rant about public charging infrastructure…
If we are to believe the reports in the mainstream media, this is something that happens every time someone tries to charge any EV, after they’ve downloaded 50 different apps and registered for a dozen different cards, but in all honesty it’s the first time it’s happened to us in 18 months of driving our EV.
We spent the day at Warwick Castle, which is right at the limit of the realistic range (at 60-70 mph on the motorway) of Eddie, our Peugeot e2008.
It’s a wrap…
The morning of the event We were up and about around 05:30. Fed the cats, grabbed some breakfast and made a move around 06:10. We knew it would be an hour drive to the start and I wanted to get there early to see if I could swap the t-shirt I had been supplied for the walk. It was a large, but a ladies large, and a little too snug.
Highlights We held a neighborhood BBQ on the green. Added a now page to my website to replace the old about page. Disabled visual edit mode in vim. This has been annoying me since I got my new Chromebook so I’m glad it’s now fixed. Switched hay fever meds trying to improve things. Felt like crap for the first week but now seeing improvements. Struggled to keep up with regular posts to my blog but getting back on top of things slowly.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the week I’m grabbing data from the GivEnergy cloud because it draws pretty graphs, so I don’t have to.
Self consumption 52.07%
5 out of 7 days with more than 25kWh generated. Thursday the 25th was the worst day for generation with 16.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the week I’m grabbing data from the GivEnergy cloud because it draws pretty graphs, so I don’t have to.
Self consumption 47.44%
Most days this week 29kWh or less. Best day Saturday 20th with 36.96kWh. Worst day Friday 19th with 10.57kWh. Sill importing from the grid based on overnight solar forecast.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the week I’m grabbing data from the GivEnergy cloud because it draws pretty graphs, so I don’t have to.
Self consumption 51.54%
Most days under 20kWh, in fact closer to 15kWh. Best day was Saturday 13th with 39.13kWh and the worst generation day was Monday the 8th with only 6.
This has been bugging me since I got my new Chromebook but I’ve been working around it by creating new Hugo posts at the CLI and then opening the new file in the Text app and pasting that way but while I was still trying to get to sleep at 02:30 this morning I suddenly remembered the problem and decided to search for it.
It took me a 5 second Google search to find this medium post from 2018 with the answer.
Inspired by a post I happened upon while I was searching the web for blog inspiration, I’ve created a new page, my now page.
The now page replaces the more popular “About” page that most personal websites have with something that’s a bit more dynamic.
The idea is to update the page as regularly as necessary (if I manage to do this it’ll be a minor miracle) so that it reflects what’s happening for you right now.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the week I’m grabbing data from the GivEnergy cloud because it draws pretty graphs, so I don’t have to.
The first week or May has netted us around 50% more power than the last week or April with around 150kWh of generation.
Highlights Another 16+ mile walk in preparation for my Cancer Research Sponsored Walk Started working on a #selfhosted Bookstack server to see if it works for us as a home user manual and documentation system Started this #selfhosted #blog and although I wasn’t sure what to write, I think I have some ideas forming with inspiration from a few other blogs. Started writing the first of hopefully many more monthly Life Notes blog posts.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the month of April Over 550kWh for the month, that’s over half a megawatt hour, in April, in Manchester. Yeah, I’m happy with that.
We still have work to do to make better use of what we’re generating as we still exported a big chunk on the days when Eddie (our EV) is not at home plus we imported a fair amount too, although that was all overnight on the lower cost GO tariff and 90% (roughly) was to charge Eddie with the remaining 10% for home battery topup that we could have done without on probably most days.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the week I’m grabbing data from the GivEnergy cloud because it draws pretty graphs, so I don’t have to.
A reasonable generation week with just over 100kWh
The start of the week was certainly better with Monday to Wednesday up around the 20kWhs of generation per day but then the weather turned much more overcast for the second half of the week with most of the remaining days below 10kWh per day.
As I mentioned in an ealier blog post we’re considering switching to a new home ISP in a cost saving exercise. That will of course mean a bit of work for yours trully and as we have IPv6 running on the home network it’s likely to be a little more work than if we just had plain old “legacy” IPv4 running.
I’m not having a dig at IPv6 by any means, it’s due to the way I’ve deployed IPv6 at home.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the week I’m grabbing data from the GivEnergy cloud because it draws pretty graphs, so I don’t have to.
A pretty reasonable week with generating a little over 142 kWh.
We had a couple of great days for generation in and around the otherwise gloomy weather week.
Another training walk for my upcoming charity walk in June in aid of Cancer Research UK.
Starting at Broadbottom Railway station at around 1PM, I made may way up the steps and turned left down the lane. How many steps??? That’s an exercise for the reader, but there are “more than some”.
I remember this, yeah this looks just like the route I walked with dad a few (maybe 6) years ago.
Mrs P just pointed out that the price of our current internet connection for home is now costing us over £70 per month. Blimey!! When we bought the new house, we already knew that the only connectivity we had was Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) and not a copper line in sight, which also meant we had the choice of exactly one ISP that was able to offer us service so that’s who we signed up with.
Inspired by a blog post about how to setup Home Assistant to send a daily update for your home solar system stats, I’ve done the same.
I kept telling myself I was just going to look at the options and not do the work because I already have dozens of other things already on my Home Assistant list of things to attack. But, I got side-tracked and “accidentally” finished the setup.
This is turning out to be a larger post than I expected, so I’m going to split it up into a couple of smaller posts.
Back in the good old days, when the Google calendar integration meant you had to create sensors in yaml for any of your events, I built a set of 4 sensors that would track the 4 waste bins (general garbage, paper and cardboard, tins and glass, garden waste) that we have collected.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the week I’m grabbing data from the GivEnergy cloud because it draws pretty graphs, so I don’t have to.
The weather didn’t do us any favours for the second full week of April. We had a lot more overcast days so a lot less generation.
System specs 16 x 390W panels (6.24kWp) facing almost due south with some shading
GivEnergy 5kW Hybrid Inverter
GivEnergy 9.5kWh battery
System Location - Manchester, UK
Generation for the week Firstly, I acknowledge this is not the first week that our system was generating power and I might back fill even more data at some point but I think this is enough history for now to prevent the blog from filling up with too many historical posts ending up out of order.
Sometimes, you just need to walk away from a problem to see what’s going wrong. Getting a TLS certificate for the blog is a good example.
I spent a few hours yesterday going round and round in circles trying to figure this out, so much in fact that I hit the bad attempts block from Lets Encrypt in 2 hours. So I walked away.
This afternoon I decided to take another crack at it.
It shouldn’t be this difficult, but I’m having one of those days where eveything seems to be more complicated than it should so I’m asking the Fediverse for some best practice advice, before I accidentally set everything on fire.
Best Practice from Mastodon
In essence, I’m looking for whatever is todays best practice for uploading the new site to my web server. Making the blog users home directory the web source directory under /var/www/htdocs seems like it should work, I did this for my old web server back in the day, but the big question is, is that the best way to handle it or am I missing something really obvious.
On the third of June this year (2023), I’m taking part in a sponsored walk for charity in aid of Cancer Research UK. It’s called the Big Hike Peak District 2023. It’s a “gentle” meander around a marathon length course (26.2 miles or around 42 km).
I’ve not walked this sort of distance if a very long time. I’ve done 23 miles before but we’re talking 30+ years ago when I was young and fit.
Yesterday I got the basics up and running for the new blog. I’ve got most of the options working, having found all of the config errors in the examples I was using that were driving me crazy yesterday.
Today I’ve been doing some work on the web server. I have a the basics also in place too with an HTTP “Hello World” page in place to test but the Acme client has been giving me the run around.
As the title says, and you can already likley see, my basic site is taking shape. There’s not a lot of content up here yet but I’m very much still learning how it all hangs together.
The site is hosted on an OpenBSD VM and created using Hugo and using the Hyde theme
I’m starting a new (as in my first) blog as a place to jot down whatever I feel like I need to jot down.
I’ve had a website in the past but we are talking about 20+ years ago when you could actually still write a website using notepad.exe and some basic HTML.
At that time, I had what you might remember as a “personal” website. There were a few pages with written content but nothing you would equate to a blog these days.