This is a test. And also my first blog post on this platform.

Hello, this is just a test for me to try out my new installation of Ghost, a CMS that I am planning to use as my personal notebook so to speak.

For the time being, this installation will be living on my local network and my local network only. Maybe at some point I will decide to replace my wordpress website with this installation of Ghost and at that point in time, what I post here will then be publicly available at my personal domain.

However, right now, what I really need is somewhere where I can organize my thoughts and take things out of my brain and dump them somewhere else.

For the moment, I'd like to talk a little bit about what I have been working on lately:

I've started a homelab.

This is exciting becuase, while I've tinkered around with various VPS services before installing various websites such as NextCloud, etc., this is the first time that I've actually hosted anything on my own server, in my own home. Who knows, maybe this website itself, even if I made it live on the internet may be getting served directly from a previously abandoned desktop computer that I built in 2013 to function as a 'hackintosh' (the forbidden Apple, so to speak).

Here are the deployments that I've started my homelab with, in case you're curious:

Immich

Immich is a modern, yet still in early-ish devleopment, self-hosted replacement for your Google Photos and iCloud Photos of the world. Having this deployed on your local server or a cloud server should theoretically allow you to cut another dependency you have on a megacorporation wanting to use your data to sell you products and train it's AI.

Getting this up and running wasn't quite as simple of an install as I thought it would be. Well, to be more clear: installing it was easy. Migrating all of my photos to it was a bit of a challenge.

1. placeholder for describing the challenge of connecting my google drive as a network attached storage and using immich-go, as well as the subsequent troubleshooting that happened after the import resulted in some strange behavior.

Calibre Web

Calibre Web is a self-hosted ebook library, essentially, and oooh, man this was awesome to finally get set up in my life. In fact, this was such a fun deployment and more importantly subsequent configuration of my Kobo Clara that I will end up having to dedicate an entirely separte blog post just to go over exactly what I did here. Stay tuned, I guess.

For the time being I'll just say that finally, finally, FINALLY, I have gotten myself in a situation where I can have my personal ebook collection on a server that will then syncronize to my ebook reader. I did have to trick my ebook reader into thinking that my server's ip address was the Kobo bookstore's IP address, but it was totally worth the roughly 8 hours of tinkering that it took.

Now, when I want to read a book on my ereader, I don't have to bust out a cable and start transferring things over. I can just hit the sync button my kobo and move on with my life.

Index TTS

Index Text-to-Speech is basically exactly what it sounds like. You enter text, and it create speech out of it. However, the engines that it uses are cutting edge, and the results that you can get from it are out of this world.

I initially installed this simply to play around with it and because I was curious how it compared to commercial TTS synthesizers that I've tried, chiefly amongst them Eleven Labs. However, it turned out to be fruitless, basically. I did generate a test audio that sounded incredible honestly. However, the audio clip was about 1 second long and took my dinosaur of a home-server about 5 whole minutes to generate.

Maybe if I decide to get a juicy GPU of some kind, I will give this another shot. I could see it being useful if I ever get back into audio projects.

Ghost:

This is actually a really cool deployment so far. I've been looking for a self-hosted notes solution since basically about the time that I decided to start a home lab in the first place, and while this is not really meant for that, maybe it can serve that emotional purpose for me and motivate me to actually post things to my blog.

So far, I get why people are so into Ghost. Coming from using Wordpress as a CMS and website solution starting in my days of web design, the lightness and speed feels really refreshing. Ghost is built on a modern technology stack that feels zippy in addition to fluid.

Most importantly, what I'm finding is that writing on here is actually inspiring. It feels nice. It feels natural. It feels like something I could create a ritual around. So, for that, I'm grateful.

My Homelab Strategy: How I chose to setup my homelab.

Obviously, planning to use my self-hosted apps for things as sensitive as my personal photo collection, I wanted to make sure that I would not be opening myself up to either a 1. security incident or 2. a data-loss situation. I also wanted to end up with a homelab that was geared towards longevity. I didn't want my foray into homelabbing to be building a mess of a system that couldn't be easily untangled or deconstructed as needed, and most importantly, couldn't be managed. I didn't want to create a structure that would require me to pour endless hours of troubleshooting into should anything go wrong. More on that later on.

So with all of this said, I made sure to do my due diligence and learn about what is the best structure for running a homelab. After a couple of weeks of getting familiar with exactly how I could set everything up to make sure that I would always have multiple backups of my data, easily restorable, and that would limit exposure to any would-be hackers, I decided to go with the following structure:

Using Proxmox as the base for everything else.

Although I had never heard of Proxmox before starting this project, the moment I began to learn about it and what it offers to both homelabbers and enterprise clients alike, I was sure that if it wasn't the best solution, it had to be up there.

Proxmox, for those that are unaware, is a distribution of Linux that is has been developed specifically to cater towards servers and hosting applications in a way that limits any administation-related downtime, contain any security breaches, and ensure that backups of your data are easy to automate and restore.

The way it works is by serving as a base-level operating system that you can then install virtual machines (or virtual containers if it's preferable to you) that will then act as your web servers. This allows you to do things like virtually restart the operating system your app is running on, easily backup the entire server, keep each server separate from the others to ensure that if a security breach ever were to a happen, the attackers won't be able to access anything else (most likely at least, there is always a risk of course).

A solo VM with Debian as it's OS, and Docker as the container system.

While maybe peek level of homelabbing is keeping each app installed on its own VM (to be honest, I wouldn't be the one to say for sure), I decided to go with this approach because 1. it uses much less system resources to have everything installed on the same VM, 2. it keeps things simplier and easier to maintain (assuming the entire OS doesn't suffer some kind of critical failure) and 3. it allows me to have a

While it would have been more secure to have a separate LXC for each app, I decided that I wanted to do it this way because it's just easier to conceptualize and in turn for me to maintain.

Other stuff I've been working on

Well, I intended on creating roughly an entire list of everything I've been working on recently, as detailed for the next things as I was on the homelab section above, but, I'm getting tired and I'd rather not spend the rest of the night writing, so...

I'll just put out a little summary for my reference:

1. Homelab, as mentioned above
2. Mockups for app designs — it's been fun getting back into designing things. I missed it, and it was nice to work that muscle. I'll post some designs soon.
3. Kitchen re-org and deep cleaning:
   1. I spent an entire day reorganizing my kitchen with my partner. We threw out old kitchen items that we're not longer using to make the things we use easier to find. We also did a super deep clean. It wasn't super dirty in the first place, but honestly, getting up close, you notice things you wouldn't otherwise. Our kitchen is now spotless. Literally spotless. and oh so beautiful. Also, I just want to give a shoutout to my lovely partner for being amazing and chipping in even though it was an unplanned, ADHD-fueled deep dive of mine. I'll be going into a deep reorg of my room and continuing with house stuff as the season progresses.
4. Beta reading for an acquaintance I met on Tik Tok.
   1. This has honestly been a super fun project for me. The author's name is Maria Perez, and I was a beta reader for her last novel as well. I'm excited that she's writing another book and so far enjoying the process of beta reading. What I like the most is it challenges me to consider what good writing is, and how can I help give her feedback that allows her to take her writing up to the next level. So far I'm about a fourth of the way through the book and look forward to completing it and seeing what the final product looks like.
5. Traveling: We just made a quick trip down to New Mexico and then Mexico. That ended up being a fiasco, I'll write about it later.
6. Other miscellaneous stuff: With ADHD, the music's always changing.

If you're not me and you're reading this, thanks for sticking around til the end. If you are me and you're reading this, go do something, you already know what's here! Have a good day.