Brandon's Blog

🗓  Posted Sep 10, 2025

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.

🗓  Posted Oct 11, 2024

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.

🗓  Posted Mar 9, 2024   |   Last Updated Aug 24, 2024

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.

🗓  Posted Nov 18, 2022   |   Last Updated Feb 14, 2025

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

🗓  Posted Dec 14, 2021   |   Last Updated Jul 5, 2022

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

🗓  Posted Jul 13, 2020

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.

🗓  Posted Jun 29, 2020

If you’re someone just getting started with web development and you’re leveling up your learning to include PHP and other server-side languages, and you have an Apple Mac product of some kind running macOS 10.15, it’s very likely that you’ve ran into a wall trying to get your first index.php file to run. You could just open the Terminal.app and type php index.php which would run your file through the built-in php interpreter, but let’s say you want to view it in your web browser; how do you do that? Well, this is where XAMPP comes in.