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A list of my default hardware and software for 2025, taken from here and expanded on. Hope you enjoy! 📨 Mail Service: Gmail Fastmail 📮 Mail Client: Gmail Fastmail 📝 Notes: Joplin ✅ To-Do: Google Calendar & Vikunja 📆 Calendar: Google Calendar Fastmail, Etar 🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Google Contacts Fastmail 📖 RSS Service: Hugo 🗞️ RSS Client: FreshRSS ⌨️ Launcher: None ☁️ Cloud storage: Gdrive & Synology Nas 🌅 Photo library: Google Photos & Immich 🌐 Web Browser: Firefox & Librefox Firefox 💬 Chat: WhatsApp & Signal 🔖 Bookmarks: None 📑 Read Later: Wallabag 📚 Reading: Kindle Paperwhite 📜 Word Processing: Google Docs & Libreoffice 📈 Spreadsheets: Google Docs & Libreoffice 📊 Presentations: Google Docs & Libreoffice 🛒 Shopping Lists: Mealie 💰 Personal Finance: None 🎵 Music: Navidrome/symfonium/feishin 🎤 Podcasts: AntennaPod 🔐 Password Management: 1Password 🤦‍♂️ Social Media: Mastodon 🌤️ Weather: Weather&Radar 🔎 Search: Google & DuckDuckGo 🧮 Code Editor: VSCode & nvim & VSCodium 🖥️ Distros: Win 11, OSX, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, CachyOS (I use Arch btw) 📱Phone: Google Pixel 7 Pro 💻 Laptop: Lenovo X1 Carbon 5th Gen MacBook Air 📜 Document Management: Paperless ngx 💾 Remote servers: 1 💾 Home servers: 3 3.5 📱Tablet: Samsung Galaxy Tab 9

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):

Do you floss your teeth? # Yes, every 2 or weeks I’ll floss my teeth. I’m trying to be a lot better about teeth care. It’s cost me enough already!

I’m by no means the best at reviewing things, I don’t really do it but figured this might be a fun thing to try. So why not pick probably one of the hardest and most subjective areas to tackle - audio!

Oh wow how things change in a month! I now have 3.5 homelabs, It’s an odd number but hear me out: OG Proxmox Server Parents Proxmox Server Mediaserver (I don’t classify this as a full lab) New Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Kubernetes Cluster Migration to Kubernetes # For a while now I’ve wanted my own cluster, I’ve even built a few in Proxmox but none of them have ever stuck around long enough for me to really grow attached to them. For those that don’t know what I do for my day job I manage a k8s cluster with around a 1000 namespaces it’s quite challenging! The problem is I don’t use k8s, I can talk for hours on how our cluster is built and how all the components fit together but I can count on one hand the amount of time I’ve actually deployed any applications to it. I have a hole in my knowledge when it comes to actually using k8s as an end user. Building a physical cluster and migrating my existing apps over to it should hopefully cover that.

I learnt very quickly there is no grace period cancelling your google workspace account, you get charged for the few days into your current period and then booted out. It’s a good thing.