Tech & servers
When I’m not outside getting rained on, I’m usually poking at something with a command line.
I run a small flock of boxes at home – a Synology NAS, the odd Raspberry Pi pretending to be serious infrastructure, and whatever else I’ve dragged back from eBay “for parts or not working”. Most of it is there to keep files safe, run backups, stream media, and quietly justify the amount of time I spend fiddling with it.
On the software side, I’ve spent years around CMMS systems like Maximo and TRIRIGA, so I have a soft spot for anything that tries (and usually fails) to be “the single source of truth”. At home it’s a bit looser: Obsidian for notes, Time Machine and the NAS for backups, and various self‑hosted bits that I’m allegedly “testing”.
What you’ll find here:
- Synology setups, backup schemes and “how I nearly lost everything but didn’t”.
- Raspberry Pi NAS and home‑server experiments – from sensible to slightly daft.
- Occasional dives into Linux, containers and services that make life easier (or more complicated, depending).
- Notes for future‑me on things I don’t want to have to figure out twice.
This isn’t meant to be a perfect guide or a slick homelab showcase – it’s a record of what I’ve actually done, what worked, and what quietly broke at 2am.
Recent posts
- The Fences Going Up Around Everyday LifeBank branches close, high streets empty, and services move online. Digital-by-default Britain is a modern enclosure — and it’s shutting the poor, the old and the offline out of society itself.
- The Temptation of the Tidy AnswerSearch preserves disagreement; AI resolves it into one tidy answer. The good ones are seductive—here’s what we quietly lose when we stop interrogating them.
- What the VAX Generation Got Right (and Why It Stopped Being True)An idle CPU was once a sin. Now a bored home server is the point. Lessons from the VAX and DEC days on thrift, utilisation, and what “efficient” really means.
- The IDE Bloat Cycle, or How Your IDE Ate Your AfternoonVS Code and PyCharm started as the coder’s friend, then bloated into arms-race complexity. A look at feature creep in code editors and why the best tools get out of the way.
- Why I Gave Up on Apps and Built My OwnWhy I ditched SaaS maintenance apps and built a self-hosted home CMMS in Python, FastAPI and SQLite — tracking 100+ assets across the house, workshop and barn.