Jack Jackson's Blog

A strange observation the other day - a disproportionate number of animal names are themselves verbs.

Whoof, it’s really been a month since my last post?

Things are a bit better than last week, thankfully.

(Disclaimer - as with previous posts, this post was originally based on output generated by an LLM which I used to investigate and resolve the problem, though every word of it has been reviewed by my actual human brain, and meaningful edits were made) I n…

Oof, it’s been a while.

I’ve been using Tailscale as the VPN for my homelab for a while now, but I’d never actually tried to access my internal services from a remote location until recently.

Apologies for the LinkedIn Posting, but I’ve had an observation rattling around in my brain for weeks that I just have to get out.

Standout articles I read this year

Remember when I set up Keycloak for SSO?

Continuing a trend started way back in the seventh post on this blog, a summary of the books that I read this year.

What I Did

A little bit later than I intended, but…still counts!

I forgot I used to have the “What I Did/What I’ll Do” format for these - that’s a nice way to structure them.

So much for consistency.

Another day, another instance of tinkering with my Magic: The Gathering MCP Server.

I just built my first MCP1 Server, and it was awesome.

Contrary to my hopes in the previous post, Vault did not magically come back up again.

A couple of days ago, the Hard Drive that I’d initially been using as my NAS (before investing in a beefy TrueNAS setup) failed.

Written from the Oakland airport, on my way to L.A. to attend a live show of Dimension 20 with my good friend Patrick.

Wow, have I really been at Vercel for three weeks?

Continuing my pattern of writing “week"notes every fortnight.

A snippet that I find myself needing more often than I’d like to admit - when you’ve opened a file for editing in vim, but when you go to save you are reminded that it needs root permissions to do so.

Depending on how you look at it, I just finished up either the worst or the best snowboarding season of my life so far.

Looks like I’m averaging about one “weeknotes” post every two weeks.

I just went to write up a new weeknotes post, and noticed that that would have meant that all three previewed posts on my main page would have been weeknotes.

I had intended to write this weeknotes on the amusing rabbit-hole of yak-shaving I’d fallen down:

Well this has already been an interesting experiment.

As I hoped in my last post, I’ve set up Gitea Actions on my homelab, with a view to completely replacing Drone which I’ve found to be pretty buggy and missing some core features1.

I’ve recently been struggling with a feeling of lack of tangible progress towards goals, or even of any idea of what those goals are or should be.

I know just enough about computer security to know that I don’t know enough about computer security, so I default to keeping my systems as closed-off from the outside world as possible.

Continuing a trend started way back in the seventh post on this blog, a summary of the books that I read this year.

In the spirit of one of my favourite books - Seven Languages In Seven Weeks - I’ve been working through this year’s Advent of Code in Zig, a “general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software”1.

A real quick blog post just to record a useful technique I just discovered that I’ll want to have a record for in the future - if inserting into a Postgres table, so long as you’re on >9.5, you can upsert-and-overwrite with the following syntax:

Just a quick one to note that, following instructions on this article, I’ve added a meta tag to posts from this blog (<meta name="fediverse:creator" content="scubbo@fosstodon.org" />1) which should, hopefully, result in attribution when articles are shared

I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging, recently, due to some personal/family stuff going down.

I just set up a step in my publication pipeline to automatically post on Mastodon when I publish a new blog post.

In my previous post, I had figured out how to inject Vault secrets into Kubernetes Secrets using the Vault Secrets Operator.

A helpful pattern in testing is to take some cleanup action only if the test passes/fails.

Continuing my recent efforts to make authentication on my homelab cluster more “joined-up” and automated, this weekend I dug into linking Vault to Kubernetes so that pods could authenticate via shared secrets without me having to manually create the secre…

Setting up regular backup for my Keycloak installation was a lot trickier than I expected!

I just configured OIDC login for the first service on my Homelab.

I’ve been annoyed sufficiently-often by the fact that there is no single kubectl command to “create a pod, and attach a PVC to it” that I threw together the following script:

In my greatest display yet of over-engineering and procrastinating-with-tooling, I’ve started self-hosting OpenProject to track the tasks I want to carry out on my homelab (and their dependencies).

This post is going to be a bit of a meander.

When working on my personal projects, I typically just push straight to main - opening a PR just to approve it seems entirely pointless, as if I had been able to find any issues in my own work, I wouldn’t wait to do it in a PR!

Inspired by this article, I’ve added (or attempted to?)

Stand-outs among articles I read this year - abandoning the table layout from last year in favour of readability.

Another End Of Year Wrap-up, focusing (as the previous installations did) initially on reading1.

Another snippet from Iain M.

“Almost All Numbers Are Normal” is a delightful sentence.