Like many other folks, over holidays I like to read books, watch movies and tv shows, visit family, bake and eat too much food, drink too many good beers and ciders and meads, and catch up some on around the house projects.

Also, of course I like to catch up on my hacking on things. Often during the normal times I am busy at work and don't have the time or energy to play around with things, or just improve my home infrastructure ( queue up joke about the cobblers children never having new shoes).

So, I thought I would put together a recap of things I looked at/setup in case they inspire others.

There may well be a part two of this, but we will see how much more I get done before the holidays end.

• Got sound working again on my media PC via HDMI. Sadly, I didn't actually fix it so much as swapped a usbc doc with HDMI in for the frame.work HDMI module that was not working. I'm really not fully sure why it no longer lets me have sound, but I am suspecting a kernel/firmware issue. Might play with it again someday, but it all works fine now.

• Unpacked and setup the OpenWrt One (see previous blog post for a review). So far it's quite fast and working great.

• Installed a SNO (Single Node Openshift) in a vm to play with. Found that it's not covered under the Developer subscription (gives you a 60day trial). So decided to ponder more on what k8s thing I want to play with at home. Contenders: k3s, microshift, OKD of some flavor.

• Moved this blog from wordpress to nikola. I'm sure there's still rough edges, but overall it seems working. Spent longer on trying to get apache redirects working than importing and setting up nikola. (It was a ordering issue, there was a redirect that was basically overriding all the new ones I was trying to put in place).

• Cleaned up my restic backups as the partition was starting to get full.

• Updated my Nextcloud instance to 30.0. Added some new apps. The cookbook app is brilliant! You can (usually) just point it to a url and it will scrape the recipe in with all info, media and such. Really nice. The memories app is a nice improvement over the default photos app I think. Cleaned up old trashbin and versions of files that saved a bunch of space.

• Looked at my piwigo install. I replaced an old gallery2 instance a long time ago with this, but I haven't really done much with it in recent years. It's also the last app I have that uses mysql/mariadb. So, I imported all the files into nextcloud for now and I think I will retire piwigo. Nextcloud memories still isn't great for public sharing, but you can share albums with a public link.

• Decided it was time to move my main server over to a fresh install. It's working just fine, but /boot is only 185MB, so it can only hold 2 kernels which is anoying. It's also ext3 (yes, ext3!). The / fs is ext4, and I would like to get compression at least from btrfs. This vm was installed with f32 and upgraded to f41 with almost no issues. Did a f41 install and synced data over to it: 309GB becomes 189GB on the new vm. I'm still organizing and moving things. Probibly will cut over around new years with a hopefully short downtime.

• Got a calendar app on my phone and via the magic of DAVx managed to get my nextcloud calendar, my work google calendar and my home google calendar all syncing in one place. The fossify calendar is not too bad, installable via fdroid and seems reasonably active upstream.

Back to hacking on things and trying to relax some.