I've been tinkering with homelabbing. I have an old P500 Workstation running an Xeon E5-2699 V3 18-Core and
128GB of RAM and using it as a host
for Proxmox. Total overkill, and I've experimented with some
containers and Pi-Hole, but didn't do much else with it outside of the
initial NAS setup. I bought three clearance 8TB Seagate external hard
drives for dirt cheap, removed them from their housing, installed a file
server, and left it as is. Boy, has that changed.
Initially, I wanted to edit and push updates to this site from my laptop
in bed and keep it local. I installed Syncthing, using my NAS as the
versioning center, and shared it with my laptop and desktop. I could use
Git, but I want to try self-hosting and other tools I haven't used
before.
After setting up Syncthing and feeling motivated, I resolved some
networking issues I had previously encountered and was putting off. Now,
I have a seedbox container, a self-hosted music streamer, and a reverse
proxy to access my music library outside my network. I'm going out
of my way to find things to self-host. I can see this being a very
addictive hobby.
Kitten is doing well. She is such a sweetheart. As soon as she sees me,
she comes lumbering over to flop and get pets. We've decided on
Fyora, yes, from Neopets. But she will have to settle for Lady Fyora. We can't have her usurping PB (Princess
Buttercup).
Started working on more custom assets and icons for the site.
I want to have two themes that you can change with a button: a dark "cyber" one and a bright pastel Windows/early CGI one. I started with the Windows one. I spent hours making two sets of the icons. However, I couldn't get the chrome material to look right with the cloud reflections that were in my previous logo, and felt it would be too limiting if I decided I wanted to change the background later anyway, so I just made the plain chrome ones for now and am going to work on the dark theme first, since that should be easier.
It took me even longer to figure out how to make them dim and slide up to show the label on hover, while not dimming the label itself, but also maintaining the global dimming effect for the rest of the links. And that effect doesn't even work on phones. I at least fixed their scaling responsiveness on phones; they took up half my phone screen when I first thought I had finally finished them.
My wife and I also adopted a new kitten today. It's another stray. She has the same fur patterns and ear tuffs as Westley, but is orange, and has Princess Buttercup's (PB, my other cat) face shape. The vet thinks she is 3 months old. We're still deciding on a name. Thankfully, no ear mites this time. It took a few weeks to eliminate them with Westley. Poor boy's ears were raw from the scratching. We're excited to have a new addition to our family.
Made good progress on site customization, along with making the complete switch to Strawberry Starter.
I was reluctant, as I had just finished setting up Zonelets with local pushing through /webDAV/ and WinSCP, and had automated the updates by running a batch script with the task scheduler. I was proud of myself, too, as it was the first time I'd tried any of this. However, I'm glad I ripped the band-aid and started over. Now that I fully dived into the 11ty process, it is much smoother and you can push updates through the API.
Not needing to edit JavaScript with every new post is also a nice plus.
I also went through and caught up on logging the recent books I've read through my web app, which I've been working on. All from the Stormlight Archive series. I have read other books, just so we're clear, but I've been reading the Stormlight Archive series consecutively since I caught up on my previous reading hyperfixation. The web novel Shadow Slave by Guiltythree, and I need to kill time while waiting for another 2,500 chapters to build up. I'm just starting Rhythm of War now. You can check out the Book Log if you're interested.
I'll leave you here with a picture of one of my cats. Westley.
Take care!
I've been working on creating a reading log for this site. I started by
making a simple web app that I run local for entries, which posts the
entries to a Google Sheet using Google App Scripts.
Here is what the local entry log looks like. Extremely basic, but it works!
The book log html hosted here then calls and lists the entries.
Entries can be edited and deleted from the web app. It's very simple, but it is my first time making something like this, so I'm happy with how it came out! You can check it out in the header or here (takes a second to load).
I may look into adding extra features and improving it later, for now,
I'm just glad it's working.