Ramblings.
2026
8 posts
- Dockerfiles - redux. When I moved everything over to Forgejo, I mentioned there was still a massive reorganisation of everything to do.
- Moving to Forgejo. All the apps I run are in containers: my registry, my proxy, my automation, most of what I touch day to day, and yet I'm totally reliant on an external party for the source code driving that. Generally, I didn't see this as an issue. It was a nice external service that didn't really have any problems, didn't annoy me much, and stayed out of the way of what I needed it to do.
- The Case for Being a Generalist. There's a question that comes up now and then: "How do you know so many random things?" The honest answer is that it isn't raw intelligence, it's just relentless curiosity. If something catches my attention, I will happily fall down the rabbit hole until I understand it well enough to be dangerous.
- Keeping containers up to date. As I mentioned before, I run almost all of my infrastructure on containers. I build every image myself, from scratch. They’re minimal, and they do what I need.
- Infrastructure. I host a large number of services I use myself, there are a few however just bring me no joy, or would be a considerable amount of hassle to host myself if it came to completely bootstrapping things. Notable things I don’t self-host:
- TV Repair. The television did not go gently into that good night. It died with a bang.
- Satisfaction of Making. Whilst rebuilding my PC case, a friend commented: "Why bother? You could just buy something". This got me thinking, the same question applies to self-hosting my own infrastructure, writing my own CV in LaTeX, or even maintaining this website when I could simply exist on social media platforms. It isn't about the result, it's about what the process gives back.
- PC Cases. I've been using mITX for years, and up until a couple of years ago, I stuck with some fairly small cases. However, the recent shift in GPU sizes, from being merely large to being behemoths, meant I thought I'd need to go with a larger case. I settled on my new hardware specs and found a single case on the market that the GPU would fit in: the ASUS ROG Z11. I wasn't a fan of the glass, but it seemed acceptable on paper (and in pictures), there were no reviews at the time, so I just went for it.