Another Slice of Dutch Internet History There has been a long list of failed internet technologies over the past few decades. Much like the current AI rush, the early internet was a bit of a Wild West. People had many ideas and tried almost anything to see what would stick. One of those failed technologies was WebTV. For a short time, it looked as though this piece of technology might also find its way into Dutch homes. Except it didn’t. This is the story of how WebTV was killed before it even launched in the Netherlands, including what I consider […]
Pucker factor 10
My commutes are always an adventure I’ve been commuting between Almere and Amsterdam for over 28 years now, and some stretches of road just never seem to get safer. The speed limits are clear, the lanes are marked, and yet people still drive too fast, follow too closely, or simply don’t pay attention. Over time, I’ve learned where the “hot spots” are – places where something stupid is almost guaranteed to happen at least once a week. Since I drive a leased car, the financial side doesn’t worry me too much – any damage is handled automatically. I’ve had a […]
The more you tinker, the more you learn
I fixed another issue that popped up with my homelab. Recently my main Proxmox node (Node 1, a Lenovo M70q running Proxmox VE 9.x) started randomly dropping off the network. When it happened I experienced: Web UI dead SSH unreachable All LXC’s went offline But my VM kept running and stayed reachable from the LAN and outside Only a hard reboot via the physical console would bring the node back. Not good! So tonight I was set on getting to the root cause of these hangups and fix it. Root Cause: Intel e1000e Offload Bug As it turns out […]
Homelab shenanigans
Some more homelab shenanigans After setting up my to Proxmox nodes (not a cluster yet: I am still exploring how to set this up) and messing around a bit with it, I went full-out. After all; if you have the hardware why not use it? So what have I set up so far? So, what did we accomplish so far? Well a bit of a list actually. It cost me a couple of weekends working on this, but the result is kind of satisfying so far. All in all I: Setup Immich which has been great as a Google Photos […]
Nostalgia is not about how things were
Nostalgia is not about how things were: It’s about how we remember them. I think we like to believe nostalgia is a faithful archive – a clean backup of the past we can mount and browse at will. But it isn’t. It’s more like a compressed snapshot: lossy, selective, and quietly edited over time. What we remember is rarely the full system state. The frustration, delays, the things that didn’t work out – they all get filtered out. What remains are the highlights: the warmth of a familiar routine, the excitement of discovery, the comfort of things that felt simpler […]
“Homelabbing” (not what you think)
Most of us have several hobbies and I am no exception. It is probably no surprise that – given my job – one of my hobbies is IT related. I am, what one would call, an avid “Homelabber”. Now, before you start thinking about a “Walter White” and Jesse Pinkman-like “home lab” this kind of homelabbing is probably not what you might think it is. What is “homelabbing”? Homelabbing is the practice of setting up personal servers, networking gear, and storage devices in your house to act as a private IT laboratory. It allows enthusiasts – like myself – to […]
When documentation fails aka: How to Enable Last.fm Scrobbling Natively in AzuraCast
The official AzuraCast documentation provides the raw Liquidsoap code block and notes that the platform supports native Last.fm scrobbling right before add_skip_command(radio). However, it doesn’t elaborate on the specific UI layout, where to bypass global security restrictions, or how to safely initialize the backend processing. If you attempt to add this by directly editing your station’s liquidsoap.liq file via terminal, it will be completely wiped out and reset whenever your station restarts or updates. This is because AzuraCast treats that file as temporary generated output, not the source of truth. To set up Last.fm scrobbling so that it permanently survives […]
State of the Blog
With so much going on in the world and in life, it’s a good thing to pick up blogging again. The last year I have spend a lot of time on my homelab and I think it’s cool to start writing about that (and other things). So I figured out I should get my site up and going again. So first order of business was to finally install a valid SSL again, which I did using Certkit.io. Which proved easier than I thought. So here we are: SSL up and running again. Well that’s all the exiting stuff for now. […]
Life Happens
Been too long again. It’s time to let the creative blogging juices flow again. But first I need to figure out the technical status of the Blog. SSL and such is a pain in the but, so maybe it’s time for a radical change! Move away from Site5. We’ll see! To be continued!