Pete Keen

Kiddo is taking a class wherein they learn how to program in a visual block language that spits out #Arduino flavored c++. They load it onto their Arduino nano and then, eg, make a rainbow on some RGB LEDs.

I had the distinct privilege tonight of walking kiddo through the #esphome config that controls the LED annunciator in our kitchen and watching them draw parallels to their code from class. They even started talking, unprompted, about how they debugged their program in class.

I am extremely proud of my little nerd.

*holds flashlight up to chin*

It was DNS the WHOLE TIME!

#jumpscare #dns #homelab #selfhosted

Power outage popped another old GE/Jasco zwave+ outlet. The relay started flipping on and off repeatedly. I thought we had a roof leak for a bit until we found the culprit. They're just so fragile!

Had a replacement in the drawer so back in business in less than 10 minutes, which is honestly a nice feeling.

#homeassistant #diy

The problem with only having time to work on #homelab stuff in the evening is that I'd rather just read a book.

Tonight's @homelab@fedigroups.social adventure has been converting one weird bespoke thing to another weird bespoke thing.

I have a handful of docker services that I want to be able to connect to remotely but I don't want to expose their ports to every interface. Previously, I was pushing the node's tailnet ip into a TAILNET_IP env var and then publishing the port like this:

- ${TAILNET_IP}:9100:9100

That kind of sucks, though, because it means the service is dependent on tailscale to start up, even if that port is only for metrics or whatever.

Tonight I taught my deploy harness to generate a tailscale serve raw config for the host that I set with `ssh root@host tailscale serve set-raw` after the deploy is done.

Then switched all of the instances of the above syntax to :

- 127.0.0.1:9100:9100

This exposes them to localhost, which is still as secure as before because the docker host could always access the container IP directly.

Pretty happy with the result. One less thing for containers to directly depend on.

#homelab #selfhosted

Not me significantly glancing at my #selfhosted #forgego again.

I should actually calculate the 9s on that thing so I can say with confidence that it has better uptime than GitHub.

Reminder that SeerXNG is a thing and is remarkably easy to install. The tricky part is making it the default search engine in iOS and macOS.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/

Good morning.