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Inspired by マリウス and Tao of Mac, I’d like to share some tech staff I did and learned recently.

Home System

My Homelab is composed of a Synology NAS, a Intel NUC and a Raspberry Pi 4. The NUC runs a free version of VMware ESXi. Before this quarter, it hosts an Arch Linux box for remote development, a Windows 10 VM runs Plex Media Server and Calibre-web, a Debian server works as a network gateway, as well as 3 K3OS nodes for most self-hosted workloads.

My Raspberry Pi mostly worked as a duplication of the NUC for some workload, such as network gateway and code-server and my Synology stores everything.

While K3S is my favorite Kubernetes distribution, K3OS hasn’t received any update since SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher, it is now an abandoned project and I’ve been thinking about replacing it.

Talos is a distribution got a lot love in the home Kubernetes community. I tried creating a cluster with one control plane and one worker node and put some workload on it but it didn’t work for me. The internal DNS server (coredns) stopped responding after I randomly tweaked a few settings, started a few pods or just restarted the host several times. I failed to bring Synology CSI up following Talos’s guide, though I did set up democratic-csi successfully.

I guess the DNS issue is related to the network configuration of my home environment but couldn’t figure out what when wrong exactly. So eventually I took the clumsy way and manually set up 4 Ubuntu Server VMs and installed k3s manually. It didn’t take long and after a dozen minutes my home Kubernetes cluster is up again.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is more valuable than ever due to its skyrocketing price. Since it boots with a 500GB USB SSD, it’s actually very fast to run lots of workload. It’s now working as a network gateway for my home devices, a remote development server and a Home Assistant box.

With GPU price back to normal, I built a desktop workstation with Intel Dragon Canyon i9 NUC, WD SN750 NVMe SSD, 64GB RAM and a lucky to find 2-slot size RTX 3080 GPU. It’s dual-booting with Windows 11 and EndeavourOS i3. I’m very satisfied with its performance which can cargo install anything instantly and run any games in 4K 60fps.

52Poké

I’ve done some underlying refactoring with klinklang (a.k.a. 52Poké Wiki Utilities). It’s a small project to do automation on 52Poké Wiki. For example, it can trigger update to MediaWiki:Common.css when 52W:层叠样式表 is updated. It can also be a glossary translator and sync with various lists on the wiki.

The tech stack now includes modern JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks such as fastify, Prisma, Vite and pnpm. Particularly I like the dependency injection implementation of awilix. The refactoring is a step to something I planned many years ago: a workflow engine for MediaWiki, which let wiki editors write automation tasks with Amazon States Language.

On the infrastructure side, the LKE cluster had went through two Kubernetes upgrade smoothly. I’m planning some major updates along with MediaWiki 1.39 release, and 52Poké Wiki will have higher availability and cost much less.

52Poké Homepage and Forums is stagnated for a long time but I do wish to bring them back to life. There’s not much to say yet.

Other Side Projects

Throughout the past few years I’ve been tweaking my digital life to give myself full control over my data and host the services I rely on at home. On the other side, I‘ve been suffering from burnout and I feared losing passion for programming.

In September I figured out what I can do in a relatively short time to give myself a feeling of satisfaction, a mobile app for a self-hosted memo hub allowing me to capture ideas on the go. I spent a few nights and weekends building it with SwiftUI. It was a good experience and it’s ready after a dozen days. I put it on TestFlight and the initial feedback was positive.

However Apple took me down with a dubious message: We need additional time to evaluate your submission and Apple Developer Program account. Your submission status will appear as “Rejected” in App Store Connect while we investigate.

It gave me an opportunity to learn and try modern Android development and I took another dozens of hours to build the Android counterpart with Jetpack Compose and Material You. After 44 days Apple finally approved this app and In the end I’m grateful I had this experience.

So here’s Moe Memos. It’s open source and I had fun creating it. I wish to build features like home screen widgets and offline support in next few months.