A Canadian with a passion for
open source, tech, web development, and amateur radio
— Continuing to self-host (almost) everything in my life with unRAID
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In my last post I talked about starting to build out a homelab for virtualization after diving into unRAID which had gotten me interested in the topic. While I’d read about Proxmox being good to start with, ultimately I started building out some infrastructure using XCP-NG and Xen Orchestra instead. I was quite pleased with the experience and decided it needed to be shared here.
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It’s been over a year and a half since I posted about my unRAID server and in that post I talked about rebuilding my aging Windows-based media server. Since then, my mind has been expanded by the ease at which I can spin up containerized self-hosted open-source services to use wherever and whenever I please.
I continue experimenting with this unRAID server and used it as a kicking off point, diving into some projects to increase my skills for both my personal and professional life. This includes planning and building out a proper backup system, as well as dipping my toes into virtualization with XCP-NG, but I’ll save that for a future post.
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On September 22, 2024 my wife, our two dogs, and I embarked on a multi-week road trip to camp at some of BC and Alberta’s National and Provincial Parks. Our planned stops were in Revelstoke, Banff, Yoho National Parks, and Mount Robson Provincial Park with our travel trailer. Along the way we planned to visit some family and friends near 100 Mile House, BC.
Since I haven’t posted much on my blog in the last few years, and have been slowly waning myself off posting my content on social media sites that are not owned by me, it was decided that I should leverage my own site to catalog our road trip journey. What follows is something of a daily journal of our trip; my wife also wants us to commemorate our trip with a “smash book” that she picked up almost a decade ago and finally has a use for it.
This is an image-heavy post, you have been warned.
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[August 2024 Update] I’ve been running this server very stable for several months. In that time I’ve explored adding more services to my self-hosted life, namely:
Nextcloud was removed entirely from my stack not long after using it because it does not play well with Apple devices and the UI is very janky which is a shame for a project as mature as it is.
I’m constantly evaluating third-party services that I can remove and bring in-house, and I’m sure more will be self-hosted as time marches forward. I will update this space every few months to catalog my changes until it gets to be it’s own post.
Maintenance is a word that can strike fear in even the most seasoned administrators; it is also the bane of my existence. Sometimes we spend countless hours maintaining something for very little return.
In this post I talk about building a new machine to replace my aging media server and how you can take back some control over the data you constantly give out to services and products on the internet by bringing some of these in-house to your own network.
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This is a follow up to my last post about getting my Amateur Radio Basic Qualification (with Honours) and being interested in APRS. Since then, I’ve made some progress in my ham radio journey and setup my own APRS tracker that I run in my truck! This allows me to go explore our back-country roads without fear that I will get lost.
What lies beyond is mostly a brain dump of notes I made over the course of putting this project together so that in the future I can refer back to it when I forget some things about the setup. I’m hoping that it helps you when setting up your own APRS tracker using some open-source software called Dire Wolf and some other relatively inexpensive hardware.
It’s worth noting that this post does not cover any of the hardware setup required with a VHF radio, antenna, power requirements, etc.; In the future I may put together a part two post outlining my setup and how I have everything configured.
📡 VE7TZB
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tldr; In November of this year I took an Amateur Radio (aka “ham” radio) course with the local Cowichan Valley Amateur Radio Society (CVARS) club, studied for 5 weeks straight every night, and passed my Basic Qualification exam on November 14 2021 with honours! I scored 91% which was the highest in the cohort 🥳
📡 VE7TZB
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I’ve been using Visual Studio Code (VSCode for short) as my editor of choice for what feels like a very long time. Ever since I first set eyes on the project the project and the community has intrigued me.
My primary use case for VSCode is web development and over the years I’ve amassed a very finely tuned environment and extensions list that comes with me to every computer I use. What follows is a list of the best VSCode extensions that I have installed and personally used, along with an explanation of the value each extension provides.
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