I should probably add some distinction between dev and prod mode for next time, oops.

Here follows a short overview of the current state of the Kubernetes cluster that constitutes my infrastructure. I link to the Flux bits and pieces that install and configure them. It’s more personal documentation than anything useful for others.

$ k gns
NAME              STATUS   AGE
cert-manager      Active   105d
chog              Active   105d
default           Active   105d
enbi              Active   105d
external-dns      Active   105d
flux-system       Active   105d
furpoll           Active   105d
ingress-nginx     Active   105d
kube-node-lease   Active   105d
kube-public       Active   105d
kube-system       Active   105d
kv                Active   105d
linkding          Active   105d
miniflux          Active   105d
minio-kala        Active   105d
minio-operator    Active   105d
nossa             Active   105d
outline           Active   105d
postgres-cassax   Active   105d
shynet            Active   105d
static            Active   105d

Read more

ok

yay hehe

e

In no particular order:

• Finally learned Elixir/Phoenix.
  • Wrote this blog engine, nóssa (which I’m slowly giving some love again), chog, and Pipa!
• Finally learned Kubernetes.
  • Went through about 3½ cluster topologies before settling on the current thing. etcd really is a temperamental baby, huh.
  • Wrote enbi, which ties up the [anything]–Nix→OCI–k8s trifecta in an unholy and altogether beautiful way. 5 months later and updating anything I run in my cloud is still just a matter of bumping a SHA and pushing to git; no manual messing around with a registry, building images, pushing images, any of it. It just keeps on running without a care in the world. k8s is the SharePoint you can really love.
• Learned to do simple CAD; designed and printed a bunch of things to improve our home.
• Authored 460 commits on Comrak and shepherded 107 commits from 25 contributors — thank you!!
• Played a lot of games! Long COVID means I have so much less thinking time in a day.
  • 100%’d a few games: Nova Drift, Hades, and Hades Ⅱ. I really recommend them. Hades Ⅱ was such an incredible follow-up.
  • Also got to 5BSC in Dead Cells and collected every outfit (except for Dracula’s because fuck him). Turns out it has an adorable live-action adaptation!?
  • Replayed Cave Story.
  • Started a new Stardew Valley save and actually reached the “end game”. (Year 3 day 1, all candles!) Previous attempts never made it past the first season.
  • Counts as gaming: did Advent of Code for the first time in many years. It was fun and stretched my brain a few times (except for the disappointment that was Day 12), and I topped the work leaderboard. :)
  • Got myself back into Silver in LoL in the first half of the year, largely pivoting into ADC! (16–7 on Ashe in S2025 :3 But also 43–36 on Nami.)
  • As so many others have discovered — the year of Linux on the desktop is finally here, and a lot of it is thanks to Valve! You can’t imagine my shock at some games running better on Linux on chipset graphics than an M3 Max. That which isn’t thanks to Valve is largely thanks to the two corporate competitors being determined to turn their flagship products into complete and utter shit as rapidly as possible. We can only rely on ourselves.
• Saved 512 bookmarks.
• Filed three police reports for theft u_u
• Visited Canberra for the first time.
• Quit medicinal cannabis — cost/benefit crossed the line — and spent months in medication hell figuring out a new way to make sleep possible. Made it, though (guanfacine).
• 25 doctor/specialist/test appointments. No improvements to overall pain incidence.
• Finished up at Radiopaedia. Did a pen-testing contract. Decided to try full-time work again, after nearly 6 years.
• Got a pushbike and used it a bunch!
• Watched quite a bit of 非诚勿扰, lots of LoL, and (new for me) a couple CS2 tournaments.
• Watched consensus reality go to hell.
• Loved my wife.

What’d I intend?

• Keep up Duolingo: did that! I got every monthly badge, meaning I did at least 600 “quests” in the year. I found that was a nice way to ensure I spend actual decent time learning.
• Daily meditation: I saw that through to day 280 or so, averaging 15 minutes a day.
• Home-cooked meals: whew. Mid-year was a bit heck for that, but we’ve been doing so much better lately!
• Deliver the Ava MVP: called that spike in February.
• Secondary project: ended up fielding a lot of those!
• Keep learning: really well done! (Not much from that list, though I did end up using Quint at work to elucidate problems with an existing design and prove a better one, and out of luck encountered a problem where I knew both (a) that an SMT solver would solve it generally, and (b) how to instrument one to do that!)

1. covid¹
2. the climate (we’re fucked)
3. societies’ attitudes to trans people
4. llms

Maybe one or more of these can let up in 2026 🤞

1. Still extremely a thing[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][20][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], but let’s face it, if you’ve given into peer pressure by this stage (and it was probably years ago that you did, given how extreme it’s been!), there is no turning that ship around now. ↩

From Abhinav Sarkar, with additional inspiration from Ruben.

• App launcher: Alfred, KRunner, both default to Comenzar
• Backups: Time Machine, borg
• Bookmarks: Linkding
• Books: Kindle
• Browser: Librewolf
• Build system: Nix
• Calendar: iCal
• Cloud storage: iCloud, Minio-on-k8s
• Code editor: Emacs, Helix
• Contact management: Contacts.app
• Default language for one-liners: Ruby
• Default language for ten-liners: Rust
• Email: FastMail (Mail.app on Darwin, webmail otherwise)
• Git client: jj
• Kubernetes: k3s
• Linux distribution: NixOS
• Music: Music.app/mpd
• News: abc.net.au
• Notes: A4 notebook, Apple Notes
• Password management: 1Password
• Photo editing: Pixelmator
• Photo management: Photos.app
• Photo shooting: iOS default, Canon EOS R5
• Read later: Linkding
• RSS: Miniflux
• Shell: fish
• Shopping list: Paprika
• Smart home: Home Assistant (HAOS as suggested by Mislav) with TubesZB Zigbee coordinator
• Terminal: Ghostty
• To-do: Things
• Video: VLC
• VPN: Mullvad
• Window management: Darwin default, KDE Plasma, tmux
• Word processing: CommonMark