I have finally reached my limit
I’m not sure yet if I will share this on LinkedIn, namely due to the slight irony in sharing it there and what the post will talk about. But in the last few weeks, I’ve finally reached my limit with regards the state of the Internet. If you’ve read my posts before, you understand that I do a certain degree of self hosting. So I would self host some services but not all. Recent events have almost pushed me into a radicalisation phase, for lack of a better phrase, with regards self hosting.
New Eden my beloved
I’ve been enjoying winning at EVE Online for a while now, so deciding to go back and play the game again does feel a bit odd. I think there’s just truly nothing like it, for what it offers. Add the heavy sci-fi going on and it can often be like heaven. Eventually I tend to peter out again, which I think is a mix of simply ‘getting my fill’ and then experiencing the effect of playing that game solo, loneliness. Playing solo is a deliberate choice because these days, I’m no longer a teenager with near infinite free time and I don’t want to commit to another corporation or alliance. There were those who I used to play with, and they don’t play anymore, therefore I didn’t play anymore.
Starting a new series and a restart of life in New Eden
Recently I’ve been having a moment with regards blogging and like, RSS? It’ll be another post, but I have been starting to collect RSS feeds and putting them in a reader, curating my own part of the internet. I don’t think a tech related thing has given me as much joy as that project has. But anyway, tangent. I think I was kinda keeping my website and by extension blog, more tech focused. Which is fine, but it’s also my personal website and while I don’t think I want to deep dive my entire daily life here, I do want to share more.
Spooky Sundays
On Sunday, March 22 2026 I woke up to some messages in a Discord server I frequent that Trivy, the popular security tool often used to scan container images, suffered a supply chain attack. That attack, among other things, affected their GitHub Action, which I happen to use in my pipelines. The window of time where it was reported that the Action was compromised, I believed to have included time where my pipelines using the Action, would have ran. So I had to assume that I was compromised. What did I do then?
Never thought I would pay for search
Besides say, the obvious point in my life of trying to minimise my exposure to Google, search is one of those things that’s rather hard to avoid. Sure, for years I’ve had DuckDuckGo (DDG) as my default, but I was just as accustomed to doing the !g bang to just send my search to Google. It always felt like I couldn’t quite have full confidence in the results for DDG. Maybe it was because I knew behind the scenes they were using Bing’s indexes. So, even if I searched something with DDG, if I did not find what I felt I was looking for, I would immediately revert to Google Search.
Taking a look back
I thought I might try my hand at an end of year review, primarily for myself as I want to be able to look back at the year to see what I’ve done. I likely won’t share this broadly on social media since it’s a bit more personal. But I’m still happy to publish something so if one manages to stumble upon it, fair enough.
etcd fail, backup fail, Claude win?
Back in September, I performed some routine updates of my infrastructure. I have this nice, Saturday morning routine where I get my coffee, play some chill music and go about running updates across all my hosts, any pending software updates on tools like Home Assistant and also update any client workloads. It’s quite nice, I could automate a lot of this with say, unattended-upgrades. But, I like the routine and I also like being around for an upgrade in case it goes south. With my Kubernetes cluster, there’s obviously the host operating system itself, then the cluster software. In my case, K3s.
Return on investment while moving to Grants in Tailscale
One of my favourite blog posts and generally, favourite thing I did, was use test driven development with my Tailscale ACL. I’m pretty much a noob when it comes to software engineering, even though it was the basis of my degree, but I read a lot about it and have great colleagues who have decades of experience in it. One thing that always came up, was test driven development. If you’re not familiar, the very very basic idea is that when writing code, you write your test first. That test, will fail and you subsequently write code that will have the test pass. You would then refactor this code as time goes on, following the pattern of red, green and refactor. Or rephrased slightly; failing test, passing test, refactor.
life always has other plans
When I wrote last, I talked about how I had some new plans after my self hosting infrastructure woes were resolved. That was back in March, so only about nine months later am I circling back to report on how, none of that really happened. Not that I need to justify to anyone why plans never quite started, but back in around April I started the process of buying my first home. That naturally, consumed quite a lot of my time and brain bandwidth. Thankfully this has culminated in now being sale agreed on a new build apartment, which naturally I’m over the moon about! I’ll be writing another sort of standalone blog on that entire process, as I find that there is not a whole lot of information on new build apartment buying in Ireland. So, maybe what I’ve experienced could be of help to someone. The process is far from being done, at the time of writing I’m still waiting on a few things before everything is formalised. But hopefully that gets sorted soon so I can start to feel a lot more excited about the process.
