Capt Jack Aubrey

Say hello to Captain Jack Aubrey! Probably most people have seen Master and Commander with Russel Crowe and Paul Bethany. It follows Aubrey and his crew as they fight a superior French vessel off the coast of South America. The source novel(s) were written by Patrik O’Brian and the good news is that after Master and Commander, there are 20 more! The Jack Aubrey miniature was a promotional item offered by Warlord Games and I got it with an order of Napoleonics, I believe.

Getting Started With Collective Access

Background There comes a point when just having a shoebox under your bed with all your important documents and files is no longer viable.1 This is especially true if you have some kind of hobby, like genealogy, which tends to explode in the amount papers you need to keep track of. At this point, I’ve filled two folders with about 100 documents worth of family history research and I don’t expect that to stop anytime soon.

From One Butz to Many

My great-grandfather was Karl Butz and there was very little I knew about his father, Karl Heinrich Butz other than that he lived with his son in Böhmen and died there. All my mother could tell me is that he was apparently from Krefeld in north-west Germany. I found a clipping from a newspaper in the town that he died, which confirmed this and gave me a rough birth date.

Introducing Grant

It's only version 0.1! There haven’t been any posts about genealogy yet and that’s not because I’ve just picked this up, but because it’s a hobby that tends to be more sporadic for me. There will be a separate post to introduce my research and what my focus is at the moment, but in summary, I have a fairly good family tree already and currently my work is mainly around documenting individuals with hard evidence1.

Backup as a Service Using Restic

Making backups of your work is one of those things that we all know we should do, but get lazy about actually setting up1. Things are easier these days, particularly on Windows, where you can have your Documents folder automatically backed up to the cloud. You can also install GoogleDrive, DropBox, NextCloud as drives in Windows and have them sync automatically as well. When it comes to backing up configuration data on my Linux servers, things are a bit more complicated for me.

Those Damn Cultists

Adam, Rasputin, Borden, Sister Beth, The Kid If you’ve been following my twitter feed for the past couple of weeks, you’ll have seen these minis already in isolation. Now they’re toegether for the first time and what a solid start to the year! With fully half of the investigators that came in the Cthulhu: Death May Die boxset already painted! They are of course lovely little miniatures. Just the right amount of detail to be fun painting, but not so much that you feel like you’re never making any progress.

Adding a Schema to LDAP

I’ve had an LDAP setup for a quite a while1, but I’ve never really used it. Sure, I could set up my Dokuwiki to get the logins and groups from LDAP and that’s kind of what it’s for, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted to use LDAP as a central configuration/setup/inventory management system. Configure my mail server to lookup email addresses there, assign port numbers and hosts for my services from there, etc.

Stark Sworn Swords

Finally done! I have to admit, these took me far longer than I would have liked. They sat on my painting table all through and since I painted the Cherusci Warrior through October and November. It was a bit of a slog to get back into painting and to actually finish them, but now that they’re done, I’m actually very happy with them. The snow bases I’ve wanted to do for a while now.

Healthchecks for the Network

Over the Christmas holidays, we spent a couple of weeks abroad with family. During this time, I still like to have access to my network, both for the self-hosted services I have but also so I can play around with new ideas during the downtime. Unfortunately, about halfway through our holiday, I lost access. I couldn’t tell whether this was because my DNS Updater script failed to set the correct dynamic WAN IP on my DNS record, or whether the router had locked up, or my servers were down.

Automating This Blog

The most annoying thing about having a website or blog for me has always been in writing content for it. Getting stuff published is a close second though. So when I wanted to revive this blog and actually have a proper web presence for once, I resolved that it should be as easy as possible to do it. So first thing I did was to put this blog up as a Github repo so that I could access it from anywhere.