Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

After chatting with my wife about the holidays we’ve been on I figured I’d write up some of our less fortunate ones.

I’ve decommissioned my remotelab.uk Mastodon server in favour of social.lol, I really like what they’re doing over there and had a similar idea for what I’d like remotelab to be.

For as long as I can remember I’ve hated my body it’s a mess.

Lot’s going on in this one, not a lot fixed though!

Insert something really interesting about my homelab to make it seem like I spend loads of time on it.

If you follow me on Mastodon you know it as my home server.

For my resound app I wanted a really nice release process (it is after all part of my job!).

I took some time last night to finally tune my renovate setup.

I turned 40 in April, most people would be happy but not me.

It’s been a few months since my last update as per usual!

After using the Kobo Clara Colour for a few days here are my initial impressions.

When I was a kid me and my brother read a lot, we devoured books so much so my mum had to keep taking us to the library to get more.

A list of my default hardware and software for 2025, taken from here and expanded on.

Happy new year homelabbers!

Spurred on by this great article from Jessica Journals I’ve decided to document how I handle my music collection in 2025/26.

I think this is the first time I’ve done this although I’m not really sure, for reasons I didn’t do it last year.

I’ve changed site generators and cms more times than I can remember (my git repo has the entire history of this site!)

The frequency of blogging is directly tied into how work is going, what my physical health is like and what my mental health is like.

Do you floss your teeth?

Update 20/07/26 - I can no longer recommend Crinacle Project Metas, mine have broken.

Oh wow how things change in a month!

I learnt very quickly there is no grace period cancelling your google workspace account, you get charged for the few days into your current period and then booted out.

This is going to be a series on how I plan on de googling my life.

Bye bye Ubuntu Server 20.04 # I moved all my apps from Ubuntu Server to Debian 12 after testing it out for a few months.

It’s around 6 months since the pulmonary embolism and while recovery is going ok there’s still some things not right.

Since it’s important to practice what you preach (apparently) here’s my post incident report on a P1 homelab failure Timeline # 09:30 - Services slow, services down 10:00 - Attempt to upgrade Ubuntu and reboot VM 10:00 - CPU spiking 100% across all 8 cores

I finally have some closure on the PE that turned my life upside down at the end of October last year.

“You did it proper.”

aka how I nearly went crazy trying to figure out how to build docker images in Forgejo Actions.

This is one of those problems that now that I get it it really shouldn’t have been so hard.

This guy used to come into my local years ago on his own and talk to everyone.

A list of my default hardware and software for 2024, taken from here and expanded on.

Potentially a long one this time round.

It’s been about 2 weeks since I was in hospital and things are starting to sink in.

The title pretty much sums it up, BPEs suck.

I’m half writing this for the people mentioned at the end and my own records since when I say the past 5 days has been crazy I really mean it.

This week I had some pretty crappy news, I had a chest x-ray on Saturday because my lungs feel like I’m breathing razor blades.

After over a year I’m going to take down my personal Lemmy server.

August/September update on my Homelab Kubernetes # Finally fixed an annoying config issue on my local machine, 10.0.4.1 !

Title pretty much sums it up, when you see this post the theme will have changed.

June/July update on my Homelab June # Not much happened in june, I spent most of it on holiday and I “cleaned” up my ssh keys so locked myself out from my phone and tablet.

The aim of this post is to try and explain what it’s like living with ME/CFS.

I spend all my online life in tech (I started setting up devenv.sh while I had covid ffs) so decided to branch out and find other things to read that are interesting but NOT tech related (maybe).

Here’s a very quick update on my homelab.

Back in 2023 I had the worst 24 hours for a long time.

I’ve been collecting watches for 10 years now there’s something about them that really appeals to me.

This is a replacement for my Kubernetes Homelab Pt0.

Spotifys quality sucks, it’s UX is horrible and it pays it’s artists pretty much sod all so it’s time to move away and build my own cloud music service.

While reading Kev Quirks latest post on #100DaysToOffload (RSS ftw as well) he hits upon the exact problem I’ve been having with creating more content for the blog.

I’m going to attempt to document my journey migrating from my current homelab setup to kubernetes.