Tech and Servers

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

  • What the VAX Generation Got Right (and Why It Stopped Being True)
    An Idle CPU Used to Be a Sin This afternoon I ran top on my home server. Load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00. Fifteen gigabytes of RAM, barely half a gig in use. The CPU sat at 99.9% idle, as it had for most of the fifteen hours since I last booted it. Admittedly it’s just running a … Read more
  • The IDE Bloat Cycle, or How Your IDE Ate Your Afternoon
    Every code editor starts out as a friend. Take VS Code and PyCharm as examples: in their early days, they were the tool you actually wanted. Open it up, write some code, and it mostly stayed out of your way. Accessible, quick, and forgiving of the beginner who didn’t yet know what a linter was, … Read more
  • The CMMS saga update
    The Home CMMS Journey: Why I Gave Up on Apps and Built My Own A few months ago I wrote about why a home CMMS might not be as ridiculous as it sounds. The short version: too many things to maintain, too many dates to remember, and a professional background that made “just winging it” … Read more
  • I asked Dia’s AI to roast itself, here’s the result:
    If I had a face, it would definitely be “designed by committee.” I read millions of words a second and still occasionally say things like “as a language model…” which is the conversational equivalent of starting every sentence with “technically.” I can simulate opinions but none of them survive a reboot. I know vast amounts … Read more
  • A Home CMMS? For a House? Really?
    Most people have a vague idea when the car’s due an MOT and that the boiler man should be called “around this time of year”. Beyond that, home maintenance is usually a mix of Post‑it notes, emails from utility companies, and the occasional guilty 3am thought of “when did we last check batteries in the … Read more