Mike Bell

Happy new year homelabbers! I’m cheating a bit and rolling some of the work I got done in December 2025 into this update. I want to say my homelab is pretty boring now it just works which is awesome, only minor tinkering is required these days so I’ve decided to focus on observability for a bit. Knowing when and what things have gone wrong was sorely missing so I’ve finally gotten round to sorting a lot of that out which I’ll detail in a section below.

Spurred on by this great article from Jessica Journals I’ve decided to document how I handle my music collection in 2025/26. I’ve split the post up into what seem like logical sections.

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. So this will be an attempt to summarise 2025 into something that makes sense.

I’ve changed site generators and cms more times than I can remember (my git repo has the entire history of this site!) the one thing I try to keep the same is my CV. It changes roughly every few years with either a new job or update in skills. I want a way that regardless of however my site is built my CV is just there ready to go.

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. At the moment work and my mental health suck so I’ve just not been able to put as much effort into blogging. I currently have the following posts that are in some state or another (in no particular order):