The things I use
Inspired by others (uglyduck.ca, kevq.uk) this page will list (some) of the things I use in my everyday (tech) life.
Table of Contents
Hardware
Laptop
My current main machine, bought used in late 2021.
| Model | Apple Macbook Air M1 |
| Memory | 8 GB |
| Storage | 256 GB |
| OS | macOS |
Workstation
Mostly used for gaming and photo editing. Recently upgraded (due to reasons) using a quirky and cheap motherboard I found via forums.servethehome.com. This new build is 3 times faster than my old 6700k based build, and motherboard + cpu + memory costed me less than my old CPU alone.
| Motherboard | Gigabyte MC12-LE0 |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 5800X |
| Memory | 32 GB ECC UDIMM |
| Storage | 2 TB |
| GPU | NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 |
| OS | Windows 11 |
atomic
I accidentally the whole FreeBSD installation when swapping the boot drives, so now we are back on Linux again! Podman is nice.
| Motherboard | SuperMicro X11SSL-F |
| CPUs | Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1245 v5 |
| Memory | 32 GB ECC UDIMM |
| Storage | ~1 TB SSD, ~16 TB HDD |
| OS | Ubuntu 22.04 |
| Networking | 1×1 Gbps, 2×10 Gbps |
Some things running on this machine:
- Home Assistant OS (as a VM)
- SMB/NFS shares
- PostgreSQL
- restic for backups
- A bunch of containers (as of April 2024, 37!)
- A few incus/lxd containers
unicorn
Replaces my previous router pioneer. This is a pretty decent HP machine handling my internal routing, running DNS & DHCP and a few similar workloads. NixOS is amazing for a machine like this, I really enjoyed learning nix and setting this machine up.
| Model | HP 290-p0043w |
| CPU | Intel Core i3 8100 |
| Memory | 16 GB |
| Storage | 128 GB SSD + 256 GB NVMe |
| OS | Nixos 23.11 |
| NICs | 1×1 Gbps, 2×10 Gbps |
kubernetes cluster
I got lucky and bought a few Intel NUCs for a great price, and decided to use them for a kubernetes cluster at home.
| Role | # | Model | CPU | RAM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Worker nodes | 3 | Intel NUC11TNKI3 | Intel Core i3 1115G4 | 16 GB |
It's a shame I'm not using these machines more, as they are amazing!
SBCs
These are the SBCs currently in some kind of 'production'.
| Name | Model | Use |
|---|---|---|
| goblin | ASUS Tinkerboard S | Internal certificate authority |
| colony | ASUS Tinkerboard | zigbee2mqtt |
| karate | NanoPi R4S | Router at a relatives appartment |
| morph | Raspberry Pi 3B | mqtt bridge for another 433 MHz radio |
| acrobat | OrangePi Zero LTS | rtlsdr, 433 MHz radio scanning |
Software
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Applications
| Emacs | For reading my email (mu4e + isync), for nearly all text editing, and much more. I've been an avid user of org-mode since my university days, starting approx. 2009 or so. Link to all posts on this blog tagged Emacs. |
| kitty | A terminal emulator |
| Firefox | Because reasons :) |
| Ansible | Anything can be done with a few hundred lines of yaml! Link to all posts on this blog tagged Ansible. |
Services
Self-hosted
A lot of self-hosted services, mostly hosted on my home network. These are (mostly) running in containers, except for Home assistant which is running on it's own virtual machine.
| Miniflux | Great RSS reader, I use it literally every day! |
| Home assistant | Used it since 2017, great from day one but has only improved since. |
| Mosquitto | I'm using MQTT for a lot of use cases at home. |
| Grafana | Used both for sensor data and to analyze system performance |
| InfluxDB | Time series database, both systems and sensor data |
| PostgreSQL | For Miniflux, Home assistant and others |
| Syncthing | For syncing files between computers |
| Navidrome | Great way to access my music collection in a browser! |
| step-ca | Great piece of software! Manages my internal certificates, and the ACME backend makes sure that everything uses TLS internally. |
| grocy | A proper ERP system for my fridge :-) |
| Restic (+ restserver) | Self-hosted backups, I really like restic-restserver, I'm using it at home to take backups from restic running on my machines. |
| matrix-synapse | My private chat server! I use the excellent spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy playbook to install and update the installation. |
| netbox | Keeps track of my networks, hosts and virtual machines. |
| authelia | Centralized authentication is nice, even for a single-user environment |
| linkding | Trying to replace my old pinboard.in account, due to reasons. |
| zigbee2mqtt | Manages my zigbee network |
| rtlsdr | Listens on the neighbourhood temperature sensors on 433 MHz |
Managed
Stuff I'm using but not hosting myself (yet):
| Bitwarden | My password manager of choice, a paying customer for a great number of years. |
| sr.ht | For my git repositories and their build service. |
| healthchecks.io | For noticing if any scheduled job fails to run as expected. Backups, internal certificate renewals… |
Networking
My 'core' network is run through a Ruckus Brocade 7150-C12P, and the network is pretty heavily segmented into different VLANs (10+) for different purposes.
For WiFi I'm using two TP-Link EAP 245v3. I'm using CAT6 cables for everything I can.
I also really appreciate plain old nftables, even after 10+ years of using OpenBSD/FreeBSD PF. It's easy to write and read, and allows for some really nice rules with verdict maps, concatenations and so forth. In the past I've used Shorewall to avoid typing iptables rulesets.