Nick Charlton

Last year, I worked on a project that sends telemetry data to Grafana Cloud.

There are plenty of these little devices around, and as of the start of 2026 they sell for £25 on Amazon unlocked for any network.

I’ve found myself working with the Raspberry Pi frequently recently.

There’s a few applications which make handling their associated secrets and configuration particularly tricky to do on Kubernetes, because the main configuration file also has many secrets in it.

I wanted a way to serve up a set of .well-known paths, as easily as I could get away with, but keep it all alongside some other Kubernetes manifests.

2024 sucked for various reasons, but when I’m not happy (over a long period of time especially), I find I start far more projects than I get close to finishing.

I’m a fan of serial consoles for out-of-band access, since having used them a lot for network equipment.

The Dell Wyse 3040 is a little thin client device that’s surprisingly powerful and also very low power.

Nearly 8 years after cutting my first release of Administrate, we’re nearly at the point of releasing v1, which has been my big open source focus all year!

Well over a year ago, we worked on a project that used barcode scanners.

Today, I cut the first release (v1.0.0) and published diff-check to GitHub Marketplace. diff-check came out of seeing a common pattern of seeing side effects when another automated process would run, creating more work which wouldn’t be seen at the time.

A couple of weeks ago, Joel asked: Starting a new rails app is fun!

I maintain a set of virtual machine templates that use Packer.

We’ve been working recently on coming together as maintainers at work, trying to share what we’ve been getting up to and seeing how we can help each other out.

I was trying to setup a quick (…foreshadowing) VM to run a VPN on a host I use for a few VMs with KVM.

Last year, I started to see a few common workflows that would create more work by those unaware or open yourself up to making annoying mistakes if you did, that I thought could be caught with just a little more automation.

I’ve been reconfiguring a router I built at the end of last year to be a transparent firewall (or filtering bridge) using Opnsense.

If you’ve worked with pull requests on GitHub for a while — especially with Actions — you’re probably used to having a long list of checks, that you find yourself scrolling every time to find the failing one: The usual view of GitHub checks when you've got

1Password has a CLI tool that’s very helpful for integrating into things like setup scripts and handling development secrets more securely.

I have a few Supermicro X10SDV-4C-TLN2F motherboards that I’ve been setting up to run VMware ESXi on.

I have a Home Lab with a couple of devices for experiments and testing.

I’m now using Mastodon: @nick@nickcharlton.net.

I haven’t been doing too much Rails recently, but I did do this and it’s worked out really well.

Back in 2020, GitHub added profile READMEs.

As I started to work from home at the beginning of the pandemic, I got an IKEA BEKANT sit/stand desk.

I needed an HTTP server to test out a software integration on Windows.

I’ve been jumping back into open source recently, plus doing a lot of technical writing for work, I released v0.17.0 of Administrate the other week, which catches up on a whole load of contributions after nearly a year, Next is going to be a big breaking…

I’ve been using Windows a lot recently and have been quite enjoying it.

A New Year always brings a new set of optimism, plans and possibilities for me and this year is no different, Last year was another rough one (who knew living through a pandemic would be extremely difficult, even if you never got sick), but we made it, A…

I’ve been using FeedWrangler and Reeder since Google Reader shutdown.

A busy couple of months or so, which so easily ends up breaking the habit of writing something regularly, It’s mostly been work, my current project — which involves building lots of different bits of software and some hardware integration — has been fairly

I’ve spent the last few weekends doing a lot of woodworking.

I’m doing a bit of spring cleaning around here, and I wanted to split the list of posts on the index into Week Notes and everything else.

A long weekend which didn’t quite go to plan: a slow (but necessary) Saturday, followed by a bad start to some wood working projects (nothing that bad though!)

Quite a gap since I last wrote one of these; I recently rotated off a tough project which was taking up all of my time.

I just finished four sessions of physio: I’d been limping everywhere since before Christmas, but now I’m all back to running which after so much pain is excellent, Plus, starting the longer rides again as I start to build up the fitness for cycling again,…

I use Drafts for capturing text (everything from quick notes to this blog post started there).

I started brewing beer about three years ago and got to the stage where I was doing full-grain brewing and was really into it.

I’ve started a new habit this year of tidying up my desk before I leave at the end of a Friday, now when I return on a Monday morning it’s nice and tidy and ready to go, it’s very nice!

I spent a couple of weekends back playing around with a Flir ONE, a thermal camera which attaches to a phone.

First Week Notes of 2021!

It’s been the end of the first part of Review Season this week, a time where I spend an unreasonable amount of time staring blankly at a text editor trying to come up with anything to say.

Back to work last week and it was a good one: started off with helping out with a database migration (DigitalOcean’s managed database solution is pretty nice!)

A second week of doing my own stuff; much of the same but a relaxing way to spend a week as I get around to some things I’ve wanted to do for months, I started off by spending a day doing some workflow improvements: I switched from Magnet to Rectangle for…

Last week was the end of a — long for me — nine-month project.

Unfortunately, as I write this, I have another — hopefully not so long lasting — running-related injury as I’ve pulled a muscle or perhaps sprained my right lower leg/ankle.

I’m now three weeks into having a standing desk and I’ve been doing a 50/50 split of sitting and standing ever since.

I made an example of using Pronto with standardrb that’ll run on GitHub Actions.

I haven’t written these for a few weeks as pretty much every week has become the same thing and then you realise it’s been quite a long time… A few weekends ago, I had my first actual pint in a pub and it was a strange experience and not quite the full ex…

Week Notes #14 Since my last post, I published Setting Jenkins Credentials with Groovy.