weeknotes for w/c 23/09/24

the final week of September, at last! i didn't manage to get much rest. got home late on Sunday evening, so I'm posting this on Monday morning! i'm excited for what's cooking over the next few weeks, hopefully including some shiny new blog content coming soon!

• my laptop has been an absolute pain
  • the Apple Notes app on macOS broke, and freezes whenever i try to open it on desktop. that's slightly annoying, as i tend to record my weeknotes in there when i'm on mobile. i'm now forced to use safari.
  • my mouse's shortcuts have stopped working on my laptop. i'm truly suffering here. maybe i'll need to use a third-party to map the buttons on the mouse to the keybinds i want.
  • lost a bunch of notes for this week because of the broken Apple Notes shenanigans. this is probably the closest i've come to being radicalised against technology.
• continued therapy on Tuesday. it's good.
• introduced one of the lucky 10,000 to RSS on Tuesday. Told them everything I know about it, as well as why I'm embarking on a self-hosting journey
• started a proposal for a small-scale project at work on Wednesday. i'll pick it up sometime after completing this next tranche of team work.
• had a work social on Wednesday evening. went to an arcade in London and then had a meal with colleagues, i feel i had a good time.
  • a colleague regaled me with tales of his trek on the Via Francigena with his partner. it's a four month walk, but i'd totally do it.
• was feeling a little down on Wednesday evening, so I made a pretty dashboard in grafana for visualising connections to traefik.
• i was sick on Thursday, and missed my optician's appointment. I managed to reschedule for... Lord knows when.
• had a working lunch at the Natural History Museum on Friday, met with an engineer there to discuss the Museum Data Service, open data, federation and building software, and a bunch of other cool stuff! purchased a magnet in the gift shop, too.
• went to a friend's birthday party on Friday evening, and met some cool new people!
• saw a tunnel of Lego ads. this might be a sign to get into it finally?
• travelled up to Birmingham for a housewarming on Saturday. it was so good to see uni friends again. managed to nab a seat from Birmingham to London on a rather packed train on Sunday night.
• re-watched Don't Worry Darling with friends on Sunday. it's such a good film
• i got to meet two sets of amazing people back-to-back over two nights. i feel really privileged
• in homelab news...
  • i set up prometheus as a data source, to pull metrics from uptime kuma for uptime monitoring and traefik as my reverse proxy
  • set up grafana to visualise data from my prometheus instance
  • set up slash for short-links on my local machine
  • i'm thinking of ways to make my prometheus instance highly available, but i'm unsure of how to do it without keeping two copies of the data (which incurs cost)
  • considering making uptime kuma more reliable by moving it into the cloud, possibly running it on fly.io? that would mean i could use it to check whether my primary machine was down, and notify me
• when planning my next few homelab projects, stumbled across this blog, which i've now subscribed to. homelabbers are super cool!