Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Homelab Update March 2024

This is a replacement for my Kubernetes Homelab Pt0. I figured that it was best to write about my homelab in general since I’m not running k8s at the moment. Temporary 2nd homelab I temporarily have 2 servers, ones provisioned and ready for installation at my parents place to replace their aging Raspberry Pi Home Assistant setup. Here are the specs: FIREBAT T8 Pro Plus Mini PC Intel N100 16GB ram 512gb hd It came to around £123 after shipping from AliExpress....

March 16, 2024 · 3 min · Mike Bell

Moving Away from Spotify

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. It’s a lot easier than it sounds! How do I get my data? Replacing each and every album I have saved on Spotify is no mean feat, I have hundreds saved on there. My first problem was getting all that data out of Spotify into something easy to understand, you can request all your data from Spotify here....

March 7, 2024 · 3 min · Mike Bell

VS Code Frontmatter FTW!

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: At the back-end I effectively have a custom-built CMS that has been designed, from the ground-up, to work exactly how I want it to. Emphasis on the “to work exactly how I want”. This blog is built using Hugo, posts are committed to git and then a github action pushes the compiled html to an S3 bucket....

February 29, 2024 · 2 min · Mike Bell

Kubernetes Homelab Journey Pt0

I’m going to attempt to document my journey migrating from my current homelab setup to kubernetes. I can’t promise when these posts will come as I’m finding I have less time and energy outside of work to do these things but here goes! Where are we now? Currently I have two main setups: Ubuntu Server - this serves as my docker-compose vm k8s server and 3 agents The Ubuntu Server contains all my docker-compose files and mounts to my NAS....

January 23, 2024 · 2 min · Mike Bell
Abstract picture of waves

Terraforming AWS

TLDR; template code can be found here. I’ve had my personal AWS setup for 10 years now and it’s time that it got organised. I’ve made previous attempts at this using Terraformer but it’s output wasn’t structure enough for my liking. This time round I’ve decided to split it up into two components: Base Applications Terraform style guide I have a few rules that my TF repos need to follow:...

January 16, 2024 · 3 min · Mike Bell