Whelp - the plan to publish more consistently on my blog lasted about a week. I’ve been keeping busy and haven’t had a ton of time to sit down and write.

I have some cool things that I’ve been working on which excited to share. Intention to write about some of these in separate articles at a later point in time.

3D Printer

Last fall I purchased a FYSETC Prusa MK3S clone from AliExpress with the intention of getting into 3D modeling and printing, and it took months to get it set up and functioning. Parts were missing from the box that were challenging to replace, I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I ended up spending a ton of money on replacement parts that weren’t necessary.

The big facepalm moment in all of this was realizing that nothing was wrong with the extruder or heating elements of my printer. I made a mistake purchasing filament on Amazon, which appears to have a few brands (Amazon Basics has had a 100% failure rate so far) with terrible manufacturing and QC practices. When filament is too thick to be pushed through the teflon tube in the extruder, this causes a jam and failed prints that I was previously associating with a fault of the printer itself. Switching to a new roll of filament solved most issues.

I have since calibrated my printer and am more or less printing 24/7 to complete a number of projects I’m working on:

It has been fun, I’m glad to get it working and I would recommend others take the plunge into 3D printing if possible.

Home Server / Homelab

In the past few months, I migrated by homelab setup off of a cluster of Raspberry Pis to a full x86 4U racked server. This has been something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and wanting to add additional storage in-house was the primary motivation for this.

Since getting this set up and having additional power at my disposal, I’ve been pushed to finally get around to setting up some VPN tunnels, reverse proxies, and getting access to my homelab from the internet. It’s been a fun projcet to experiment and play around with.

I’m currently running Unraid on this system with some mixed thoughts about it. On one hand, I like the ability to toss whatever drives and other hardware I have sitting around into it. I am concerned about security and how everything runs as root, and have been keeping a close eye on it using CrowdSec and my UDP. Using a real hypervisor like Proxmox would 100% be my recommendation if this were a business deployment. For now, it serves its purpose as a home server, running my media and backup services among other things.

I’m keeping an eye on the Coral AI chip and want to get one when it comes back in stock. I have some fun machine learning projects I want to implement when I have that available. I’m ready for these supply chain and chip shortage issues to subside!

Home improvements

A lot of projects pending this summer. Redoing the fence for one that provides a little more privacy and is not falling over, depending on what happens with wood prices and my employment status.

We made some HVAC improvements and installed a Mitsubishi heat pump (great video series on Heat Pumps from Technology Connections on YouTube), which I want to modify and get pulled into our Home Assistant smart home system. Good overview on how to do this on Chris Davis’ blog.

We’re also planning on installing smart locks on the doors this year now that the Schlage Encode Plus (supporting Apple Homekey) is out. Very excited for that and the ability to leave my keys at home!

Reducing Car Dependency

I’m in the market for a bicycle and have been taking transit instead of driving more often. Partially due to high gas prices, but also the increasing awareness of how terrible cars are for our cities (making cities less safe, dirty, loud, isolated). Even though I’m a good driver, I’m still part of the problem. Fortunate enough that my neighborhood and work environment allows for this, would recommend others do the same. I’ve been reading Strong Towns and attended a volunteer event with MoveMN to help reinforce this.

Finishing school

Finally almost done with my degree! A few more assignments to go. This has been a long and challenging journey, but I’m so happy and proud of myself for not just completing my program this time, but doing so on the Deans List and with a 3.5 GPA. Huge accomplishment for me, not having been a great student in the past.

Career goals

Thinking a lot about my career and what the next steps look like. Would love to get in touch with recruiters or interested employers. Send opporunities my way if you see them! Ideally looking for hybrid sysadmin work in the Twin Cities metro area in a company with a lot of opporunities for learning, professional development, and growth opportunities.

✌ gunnar