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Table of Contents In the Beginning … The Problem Where I am Today My Equipment Revisiting my OS choices Unraid Thoughts My thoughts on Proxmox The Changes Why Truenas And Proxmox? At the End of the Day … In the Beginning … Like most homelabbers/self-hosters my setup has morphed over the years. I started, as most do, with a single machine that was built and rebuilt multiple times as I experimented with different technologies, software stacks, and so on. I started back before the advent of Docker so I was literally building Apache from source or, if I was lucky, installing a .deb version. Most of the early work required a lot of setup, futzing around with config files and so on. (If you’ve never installed Oracle from source you haven’t lived!) The result was something of a Frankenstein setup. ...

Back in November or December of 2025 I became aware of the “Indieweb” and the Fediverse. In reading through the material I could find on those topics I ran across the idea known as “POSSE”: Post (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere". The idea is that you post your content on a site that you fully control, then syndicate that posting out to other sites e.g. Mastodon, Bluesky, etc in order to let folks know that you’ve posted something new. This does several things: ...

Table of Contents the Problem The Solution Browser extensions How Do you Get Hister? Final Thoughts the Problem I don’t know about you but one of my biggest frustrations in reading something on the web then, when I want to refer back to it, being unable to locate it again. For example, suppose you were trying to solve a problem in setting up a piece of software. You did your search and found what you think might be a solution. But, to be sure, you wandered off in search of more information. And you closed that tab. “No worries,” you say, “I’ll just look in my browser history.” Except that your browser history doesn’t actually store the history from all of your tabs. Well, crap! Now what. So you spend the next hour trying in vain to remember the search term that got you that specific page. ...

Table of Contents Limits to Hugo’s Native Org Support Enter Ox-Hugo Why Did I Change? The Experience So Far The Final Question For the past year I’ve written almost all of my posts here in Emacs. My workflow has typically been to create a new file in my content/posts directory with the command ```hugo new posts/filename.md```. Notice that the file has a “.md” extension. I prefer writing in markdown which is one of the reasons I settled on Hugo to start with. It made sense, then, to create a markdown file to write my posts. ...

Introduces Emacs for Neophytes

I first started looking at emacs as my writing software a number of months ago and wrote about my initial thoughts back in August of 2025. At that time I noted that I was starting with vanilla Emacs. That is the base version that has no (or at least very few) additional packages added. This minimized the complexity. Emacs is complex enough without adding more to the challenge. And, since then every post I’ve made on this blog and essentially all of the writing I’ve done since then has been on vanilla Emacs. ...

When I last posted, I was discussing preparing to pursue the “Extra” class license as a ham operator. That eventuality is now reality. I tested and passed my exam last night with flying colors! So, what does that mean? In truth, not a lot. In terms of privileges, the extra class designation gives me access to little bit of extra bandwidth on the 15, 20, 40, and 80 meter bands. That’s a bit of a mixed bag, though, since that extra bandwidth, being available to only a subset of ham operators, also limits the number of potential contacts in those frequencies. That can be both a blessing and a curse, I suspect. That is, while there are fewer users in those frequencies, that also means that there’s less congestion. So, it’s really a mixed bag. Truth be told, though, access to those extra frequencies is not why I pursued the upgrade. ...

In an earlier post I noted that have renewed my interest in amateur radio. Several years back I had given great thought to pursuing my Extra Class certificate. If you’re not familiar with amateur radio, Extra Class is the highest level of certification in amateur radio. This give you the greatest privileges and signifies, sort of, that you have a fairly decent understanding of radio theory, electronics, and so on. It doesn’t mean that you know everything there is to know or that you’re and “expert”. But it does mean that you’ve dug a little deeper, learned a little more, and that you’re likely to keep on learning. ...

Back in the early aughts, when this phenomenon called “social media” first appeared, with MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and the like first coming into the public consciousness, I was a bit flummoxed. I couldn’t quite understand why these sites drew the kind of attention they did. Still, wanting to stay abreast of the latest trends, I tried them. Well, at least some of them. Most of my efforts revolved around the classes I was teaching at the time. ...

I joined Bluesky a month or so ago and one of the things that has caught my attention is that it seems a lot of folks who post there are posting the books they’ve read, are reading, or plan to read. Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I have been known to do that myself. What caught my eye, though, was the number of people who boast about the number of books they’ve read or, as the new year begins, have set goals for how many books they will read this year. Can I just say I think that’s the stupidest thing you can possibly do? ...