Journeys with Tech

Time-series data helps us understand not only what happened, but when it happened and what else was happening at the same time.

An account of my journey to self-hosting this blog, running Hugo, and Caddy on a Raspberry Pi

in this post we build upon the local AI chatbot from part 1, improving the responses by retrieving data to make it more knowledgeable.

Imagine if we accidentally forming a new type of computer brain, which then wreaked havoc on an unsuspecting world.

Did you know that you can run large language models (LLM) locally on your PC, free from the walled gardens of Big Tech?

In case you missed the memo, Docker has changed Compose…

After decades of next year being Year of Linux on the Desktop there is now a significant change is happening, as factors align to make switching from Windows to Linux easier and more beneficial.

How to find and follow me on Mastodon, a great open decentralised alternative to commercial social media platforms.

Microsoft released a new feature for Windows 11 called Recall.

Public Service Announcement: Visual Studio Code can kill remote machines… Read on to find out how, and what to avoid.

People fail to read documents, even when they know they should, and would benefit from doing so.

The 2023 Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year was hallucinate, chosen because of a new meaning (repurposing) in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In this second post, we build a working NiFi demo, with a couple of simplified use cases, allowing us to see it in action and learn by experimenting

Apache NiFi facilitates the movement of data between systems.

When I had a need to visualise telemetry data from a home project, the ELK stack was my go-to solution.

Beyond software architecture diagrams: using PlantUML’s diagrams-as-code approach for Gantt charts, mind maps of tasks, and free-form concept diagrams — all version-controlled and easy to update

I hadn’t heard of C4 Model before so I decided to check it out with an example architecture.

In IT Architecture, what is coupling, why is it important and what techniques/patterns can we use to optimise it?

Wouldn’t it be ironic if remediating security audit items made your organisation less secure…?

Dive into Diagrams-as-Code, the generation of visualisations from code source files that describe how to build the diagrams, with practical examples using PlantUML

This third post in series on flows investigates flow metadata, how it adds value to flow analysis, and how to record and transport it

Is cybersecurity doomed?

We build a home network lab to better understand IP fragmentation behaviour

Part 2 of the series on network traffic flows focuses on the IP layer and considerations such as IPv6 flow labels, why IP fragmentation complicates flow identification, the impact of network-layer encryption, and a brief digression into non-IP flows

Defining what a network flow is becomes a difficult problem when you add in considerations such as directionality, protocols without port numbers and flow expiration

A post for network experimenters who want to export flow records from an Ubuntu Linux host bridging multiple network segments.

This blog post is for network experimenters who want to export flow records from an Ubuntu Linux host bridging multiple network segments.

How to collect (receive) NetFlow or IPFIX flow records using the nfdump package

This blog post is for network experimenters who want to export flow records from a small network, such as a home network using an OpenWRT router.

One of my 2018 learning goals is to become more familiar with containers.

Part 2 - Install # In part 2 of this blog post, we cover off how to install the necessary components to build virtual SDN labs with Vagrant.

Part 1 - Introduction # I’ve been experimenting with Vagrant to automate the creation of virtual Software-Defined Networking (SDN) labs.

Instructions on how to build a home SDN lab that leverages a common consumer-grade TP-Link home router repurposed as an OpenFlow switch, including Wi-Fi