@mmeier@social.mei-home.net

Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Jul 26, 2026

Replying to @waffles@masto.yttrx.com

@waffles@masto.yttrx.com That really does sound quite nice. I've always been a bit sad that I went with "fleet of many small machines" when I'm reminded that pikvm exists. I mean, I could of course connect a second Pi to each of my Pis...😅

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @waffles@masto.yttrx.com

@waffles@masto.yttrx.com That is one impressive-sized drink. And I thought our beer steins were ridiculously big. And she looks so happy. 😂

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Jun 29, 2026

Replying to @mmeier@social.mei-home.net

I'm seriously starting to be a bit frustrated by my recent computering. It seems everything I attempt almost immediately turns into an entire herd of Yaks waiting to be shaved. E.g. right now, it looks like there's only a SOCKS5 proxy into any given ebuild. Which CCache, as far as I can see, can't use directly. So I could switch off network isolation for the build of course, problem solved. But no. Decidedly no. And so out comes the shaving blade. #Gentoo

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Jun 29, 2026

Hach, FOSS is wonderful. Just took me one "git grep network" in the portage source repo to figure out that I can likely set up a SOCKS5 proxy into the build to ensure that my CCache can reach my kvrocks instance. Pretty surprised that there wasn't anything in the Gentoo Wiki. Looks like I will be writing a bit of documentation at some point this week. #Foss #Gentoo

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Jun 01, 2026

I launched my first few crawls overnight, and there's so much I want to say.

Let's start with a few numbers. First of all, YaCy is finally an application which puts some load on my Homelab. See picture 1.

It peaked at around 4GB of RAM, even though it currently has no limits, and there was still RAM to spare on the machine.

During that time, about 20h, the crawler fetched about 100GB worth of data.

1/x

#HomeLab #YaCy

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 31, 2026

Hm, just spend a few hours trying to figure out why my YaCy peer is accessible by some peers, but not accessible by others, but I just can't figure it out. For some reason, YaCy seems to be returning 404 to requests occasionally, but without anything in the logs indicating why.

#YaCy #HomeLab

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 30, 2026

Replying to @Vash@mstdn.games

@Vash@mstdn.games I feel that's the worst thing: Not only did they stop selling via their website - but also, books you've bought on their app can only ever be read in their app. So I can either buy from Amazon et al and get a downloadable book from which I can remove DRM, or I can by from Black Library, but then only be able to read on their app. Which is an absolute no-go. I just don't understand these kinds of decisions.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 29, 2026

Replying to @Vash@mstdn.games

@Vash@mstdn.games Yupp, I was thinking exactly the same thing. And Black Library was so nice. I could buy from a web browser and download the book. No DRM. I could just add it to Calibre and copy it to my reader. Not anymore.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 17, 2026

Replying to @mmeier@social.mei-home.net

Interesting. I've now gone through a number of German book shops, and it's the same pattern everywhere: I can get the English version of the books, but only in paperback. Or I can get the eBook, but only the German version.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 17, 2026

So, I've finally figured out why Black Library isn't selling books on their website anymore:

They've now got an app for that.

And you can't download newly bought ebooks anymore either.

I'm not going to start reading their books on an app.

Also hint to the business assholes: This is going to increase the ebook piracy. Massively. How are they this stupid?

#Bookstodon #BlackLibrary #WH40k

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 17, 2026

Replying to @jana@social.jsteuernagel.de

@jana@social.jsteuernagel.de Yeah, it's getting a bit ridiculous. I've now found that black library is still selling their books. Just not via their website anymore, but instead via their own app?! Seriously, what the fuck?

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 17, 2026

How the hell is buying ebooks in 2026 still this fucked up?

I'd like to buy a couple of WH40k novels. For some reason, Black Library themselves seemed to have stopped selling their books directly somewhere in the past two months?!

My German book store then leaves me two choices: I can buy the Omnibus of the novels in dead tree form in the original English.

Or I can buy an ebook, but only in the German translation.

I cannot buy an English language ebook version. 🤦

#Bookstodon

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 13, 2026

Replying to @rachel@transitory.social

@rachel@transitory.social Okay, good point. 😂

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 12, 2026

I think it is good that my private Forgejo instance is not publicly available. The things I'm doing in my Go project could single-handedly poison every coding LLM out there. 🤦

Today: I need to refactor my test helpers because I managed to introduce a package dependency cycle.

#Programming #Golang

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 12, 2026

Replying to @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place Yes, I'm not the only one who saw that. 🎉 It just fits so perfectly. I swear, we're one bad day away from getting a "Litany of Maintenance" for Windows Copilot OS (TM).

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 11, 2026

Replying to @mmeier@social.mei-home.net

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems But I also appreciate the the...continuity, I'd call it? For example, I haven't changed the wiki page describing my update process in absolute ages. On a lighter note: Gentoo also makes for an excellent excuse to regularly buy CPUs from the higher end of current offerings. 😁 2/2

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 11, 2026

Replying to @mgorny@social.treehouse.systems

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems One thing I appreciate is not so much technical, but personal: Gentoo is directly responsible for me having my current job. Because in the past, there were a lot of times I had to look at build failures and learned autotools, CMake and all the others on the way. Portage and ebuilds also inspired (or were inspired by, can never remember) Yocto's Bitbake. And knowing all of those lead me to become interested in build systems and ending up as a build and release engineer. 1/2

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 08, 2026

Replying to @rachel@transitory.social

@rachel@transitory.social Ow, do you have to rub it in? 😁 How does Talos contribute to the protection here? Does it just have a newer kernel?

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 08, 2026

Replying to @mmeier@social.mei-home.net

Okay, I don't want to brag, but: Not only did past me implement this check. Oh no. Past me even wrote documentation about how to update the certs. Perhaps past me isn't quite as much of an asshole as I thought. 😁 #HomeLab

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 08, 2026

Little happy moment: After logging into my Command and Control host, an automation I implemented a while ago fired because the k8s certs in my kubectl config will expire in a few weeks:

#HomeLab

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 08, 2026

Going to patch another LPE now, it seems. 😔

Or rather, implement the mitigations.

#HomeLab

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 08, 2026

Replying to @merlin@toot.kif.rocks

@merlin@toot.kif.rocks I had the same thought, just go back to my database course from 2009 or so. 😂 The thing is that it would be an embarrassing experience. I failed the exam for that course at the first attempt, because I was going "eh, databases, this one's easy". Dear reader, it wasn't.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 08, 2026

Replying to @rachel@transitory.social

@rachel@transitory.social Haha yeah, I think that's the only "special term" I remember from my database course. And I have zero idea what it means. 😅

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 07, 2026

Replying to @badnetmask@hachyderm.io

@badnetmask@hachyderm.io The really sad thing is: I'm rather far away from just needing some good due diligence. 🫠 I'm finally done with laying all the groundwork in my little private project, and now I want to start with the user registration and setup. And I've just realised that I don't remember a single thing about database design anymore. Only vague notions of "Normalization" and "Primary Keys". I genuine need a basic primer. 😅

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 07, 2026

Today's Google search query: database schema design basics.

🫣

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 06, 2026

Replying to @badnetmask@hachyderm.io

@badnetmask@hachyderm.io I'm not one for LoFi, but I do love the water elemental on the windowsill.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 02, 2026

Replying to @mgorny@social.treehouse.systems

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems Yupp, exactly same thing in Germany. +10 km/h is considered "normal". If you drive the prescribed 50 km/h inside cities, you might be considered a road block....😒

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 01, 2026

Replying to @domi@donotsta.re

@domi@donotsta.re @TadeusTaD@donotsta.re Ah yupp, at least up to now that's also the only thing I've gotten anyone else to use from my Homelab - file sharing. The good old 300 kB/s days. In my home village, those ended only about a year ago...

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · May 01, 2026

Replying to @domi@donotsta.re

@domi That was a really interesting one to read. And I'm impressed by your restrained. I've been writing a similar series for a while now, and it is already at four draft posts. 😅 And I know the frustration of not having proper notes about everything while writing up the history. It is surprising how much we were once able to fit into a Pi 3's 1 GB of RAM. I especially love the "a server for friends" part. How did you start that? Did you offer, or did somebody ask whether they can have an acc?

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 27, 2026

Replying to @beyondwatts@beyondwatts.social

@beyondwatts Yupp, I was also a bit surprised. The cluster is really really stable, the only hiccup was right after I declared the migration over, when I needed to replace my Pi 4 with Pi 5 for the control plane. Since then, everything has been going quite nicely. I also haven't done much in the Homelab in recent times, I was more into programming. And yeah, I also found the Homelab is really stable when I don't stick my fingers it all the time. 😁

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 27, 2026

Customary computering on the train picture. Today, the goal is to get some blog post drafts spruced up a bit and ready to publish. One about my database setup for my little Golang project including CI setup, and the second is a reflection on one year of k8s in the Homelab.

#trains #DeutscheBahn

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 26, 2026

Replying to @rachel@transitory.social

@rachel@transitory.social For the security updates I rely on the GitHub release page's RSS feed. But when I do my regular updates, I've just got a page in my Wiki with a list of everything I'm running with links to the release pages/release notes. @zak@infosec.exchange

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 26, 2026

Replying to @zak@infosec.exchange

@zak@infosec.exchange I've got a two-pronged approach. I'm subscribed to release feeds for most apps running in my Homelab. If something is a security update, it gets updated immediately. Otherwise, I've got a regular task to update all apps running in my cluster. I then sit down, go through my list of apps, look at new releases' notes and do the update manually. I quite enjoy that as a Friday evening activity. Infrastructure, like k8s itself or Ceph, get updated less regularly.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @waffles@masto.yttrx.com

@waffles@masto.yttrx.com This was so cool to read! Thank you for the write-up and the pictures. And also for yet again reminding me that I should read up on networking topics at some point. I'm using BGP as part of the LoadBalancer in my k8s cluster, but I don't really know how it works. 😅

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @rachel@transitory.social

@rachel That's not too bad, I'd have thought that 8GB is hard on the border of being useful these days. I'm mostly hovering around 7GB on my current machine. But with an NVMe, using larger amounts of swap isn't as painful as it once was.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @rachel@transitory.social

@rachel That's also what has stopped me from just hitting the "buy" button. The Asus is still perfectly fine in all regards, so even though it's now six years old, it's still very usable, and will likely stay so for quite a while. But I also definitely want to support an open hardware project like MNT.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 25, 2026

This good boy would like you to know two things:

1) He is the goodest of boys and definitely doesn't need to be on a leash.

2) He definitely wouldn't have run after that bunny even if he wasn't leashed. That's baseless slander. See point 1)

#DogsOfMastodon #dogs

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 25, 2026

I've reached two new milestones in failing to talk myself out of buying an MNT Reform Next: https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/mnt-reform-next. One, the website now lives in a constantly open tab.

Two, I just looked up how old my current Asus Zephyrus is, and found out that it is already six years old.

I find the machine interesting due to the Open HW, but especially due to the upgradability.

I'm really not a HW guy whatsoever, so the open hardware is mostly interesting from an ideological standpoint.

#MNT

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 23, 2026

Replying to @pat_dev@social.linux.pizza

@pat_dev@social.linux.pizza No, the issue isn't in the disk perf with the DB service. I haven't gotten to the point where I could even use said service in my workflow. I did extensive testing to arrive at the fact that image builds are slower on CephFS volumes than RBD volumes. If you're interested in the full enchilada, have a look at this post: https://blog.mei-home.net/posts/improving-container-image-build-perf-with-buildah/ I'm still not 100% sure what went wrong there, but using an RBD for the image build was way faster than using CephFS.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 23, 2026

Replying to @pat_dev@social.linux.pizza

@pat_dev@social.linux.pizza My issue isn't so much that I don't have RWX volumes. I do, based on CephFS. The issue here is two-fold, and has to do with OCI image builds. CephFS is slower than using an RWO RBD as the basis for the workflow volumes. Plus, OverlayFS does not work on CephFS, so I'd have to use the slower VFS driver. Both would result in far longer image builds. And Woodpecker doesn't allow configuring the StorageClass to be used per workflow, only for the entire instance. @louis@social.louis-vallat.dev

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 23, 2026

Replying to on social.mei-home.net

@louis@social.louis-vallat.dev Alright, that worked quite nicely! You were entirely correct, and I learned something about how access modes actually work. Thank you very much for the tip. That saved me from having to switch over to another CI system before continuing with my actual project. 🙂

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 23, 2026

Replying to @rabbit@cathode.church

@rabbit @frederic Oh yeah, that's another whole bag of weird I might just be too "left behind" to fully grasp.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 23, 2026

Boosted by

waffles @wafflesies@infosec.exchange

Replying to @frederic@chaos.social

@frederic@chaos.social Yes. People who couldn't be arsed to write a single word of documentation for their human colleagues suddenly don't have any issue at all with writing miles and miles of instructions for their AI colleagues. Same for people who previously couldn't find time to mentor a student or new junior colleague because "it's too much work to describe the task in enough detail". For their LLM? No problem at all. 🤷 That's the one that really gets under my skin.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 22, 2026

Replying to @badnetmask@hachyderm.io

@badnetmask 😂 I bet there's also a version with WiFi coming. So one day I might be able to say that my cigarettes are part of a botnet. 😂

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 21, 2026

I have just switched from normal cigarettes to an Iqos heater. This has had two consequences. First, I'm not familiar with all of the tastes available and just bought a couple random ones. And of course one of those was of the menthol kind. Blegh. It seems menthol smoke technology has not improved one bit since the days when my beard wasn't gray yet.

Second: My cigarettes now have a USB-C charging port. 🤦

#Smoking

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 20, 2026

A friendly note to the weeds on my balcony I've been trying to remove for the past two hours: I know a guy at BASF.

It would behove you to not continue growing with quite this level of enthusiasm.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 20, 2026

Replying to @notthebee@tilde.zone

@notthebee@tilde.zone Wait until you find out that they're also trying to measure productivity in LLM tokens spend...

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 20, 2026

Replying to @waffles@masto.yttrx.com

@waffles And it's working nicely, thank you for adding it. 🙂 I'm always so happy when I can add another entry into my feed reader's "Personal Blogs" category.

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 20, 2026

Replying to @waffles@masto.yttrx.com

@waffles Yeah. I'm 100% with you on the blogs. I would really like to have that massive amount of blogs from the 2000s back as well. Sitting there with an RSS reader and reading the day's new post was nice. It's still nice today, for all the pages which still have RSS feeds. Sadly, even some pages with interesting posts about nostalgia for the Internet of yesteryear don't have an RSS feed...*hint hint*. 😉

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Michael @mmeier@social.mei-home.net · Apr 19, 2026

And finally done. At the end, the decision was between a Thule Paramount and a GotBag Pro Pack. I ended up ordering a Thule Paramount: https://www.thule.com/en-us/backpacks/laptop-backpacks/thule-paramount-backpack-27l-_-3205014

Main reason was that Thule also offered a rain protection cover, while GotBag didn't, and I tend to get rather wet during my commute in sad regularity.

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