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):
Update 20/07/26 - I can no longer recommend Crinacle Project Metas, mine have broken. I contacted the team at hangout.audio and all they could offer was a new pair at full retail price. It took a long time for the issue to re-appear after it went away so took months to finally pin down and record it so it ended up out of warranty. I’ve gone back to my Moondrop Dusks now.
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.