#journal #videoGames #eldenRing #homelab #kubernetes #keyboards

I haven’t been writing much for various reasons which I will not share, but the desire to put some words on a screen has struck and here I am.

Elden Ring DLC

The Shadow of the Erdtree, the Elden Ring DLC drops next week. While I have not been playing a lot of video games lately due to other hobbies that have taken up all of my free time, I really enjoyed Elden Ring. My first play-through used a faith based char. I used summons and a lot of help to get through some of the harder bosses. I took it as a challenge to beat the game again without summons. I rolled a beefy strength toon and I did manage to get to the endgame without summons. At some point I did end up dropping the no summons part of the challenge as I was getting absolutely destroyed by Hoarah Loux and my patience ran out 😝.

Diablo 4 is Kinda Good Now

Diablo 4 is in its 4th season and has been out for a year now, which evidently was enough time for the devs to fix the game. If you didn’t play at launch, the loot system was particularly fucked. Each item had 5 stats, things like “Increased damage to close enemies but only on the 6th Tuesday of July”. This made it very hard to tell if a piece of gear was good or not, which is a core tenant of ARPGs. Knowing when to change out gear should be somewhat obvious at least for the casual crowd. Luckily Diablo fans are obnoxious and ravenous and Blizzard caved to their will. I haven’t gotten to the endgame quite yet but I was able to get a necromancer to level 60 with my own shitty build without a huge time commitment, so I’m glad they fixed the issue where it took forever to level up.

Homelab and Learning Kubernetes

This is the main reason I haven’t been gaming: the homelab. So far my homelab network consists of a Ubiquity UDM pro, a couple of access points, one switch, and a bunch of ethernet cables. I have a 2021 macmini running Asahi linux (arch btw) that runs a bunch of docker containers via podman. I have some of those exposed to the world via tailscale and some via cloudflare tunnel. I’m looking to move away from cloudflare and more to self-hosted solutions. In this quest for self-hosting stuff and making my own mini-cloud, I also am trying to learn kubernetes. K8s is probably overkill but it is used at my job and I am often mystified by it. In order for me to learn things I need to know how they work from sow to harvest, so I set out to build my own cluster and start moving some services onto it.

Right now I have a 3 node cluster built on libre-computer boards (these are raspberry pi clones and I really like them). I have two of the v1 le-potato boards and 2 altas which includes video encoding and machine learning capabilities.

Another part of setting up kubernetes is learning observability tools like Prometheus and Grafana. I have a high level understanding of these tools but any time it comes to actually instrumenting or monitoring something with them, I go to the docs and my eyes glaze over and I attempt to decode the instructions.

So at the moment I have my cluster running via k3s. I set up the Zalando Postgres operator, the Tailscale operator, the prometheus-community prom-kube stack (including Prometheus operator). And that is all in preparation for Forgejo! So I have a postgres-cluster via the operator, a redis-cluster via the bitnami helm chart, and now I’m working on getting Forgejo up. It is working with the rootful image, however I’m having issues with the SSH part of things. If you have set this up before please let me know. I was also having trouble getting the helm chart ingress to work with the tailscale class, so if you know about that let me know. Right now I set up a LoadBalancer that is using tailscale but its unclear to me what the best way to expose Forgejo using the tailscale operator.

And yes this is a lot of nonsense to do something that I could probably have done more easily with a VPS and not mucking about with containers, or just self-hosting Coolify, but I have a hole in my head or something and for some reason I find this stuff really fascinating and kind of fun.

Keyboards Update

And yes, I am still building and designing keyboards at https://sleepycraftstudios.com. To be quite honest the lack of sales has had me kind of down, but I’m going to keep at it for the foreseeable future. I know I don’t have a great product or anything but I was hoping someone would at least download the files to print but I don’t think that has happened. I’m not very good at marketing so I only have myself to blame. I have a tiktok account for the business but I haven’t used it. I’m kind of afraid of wasting time shouting into yet another void. I already do that a lot. What would tiktok make different?

Another thing about the keyboard biz is the fact that I really suck at being a community member. This is true for any community, but especially the mechanical keyboard community. It seems most activity takes place on Reddit which I refuse to contribute to. I use it read-only. This is likely a bad business decision but I guess I’m ok with it. There is a local keyboard meetup in a few months that I plan on attending and maybe I can meet some people there, but I really struggle meeting new people and making lasting connections 😞.

The firmware for the Sleepy Keeb is now upstreamed in the qmk repo which is pretty neat. The Sleepy Keeb Split firmware PR is open and has some changes requested but should be good to merge in soon. The next design I plan on implementing is the Dactyl Manuform or similar. The goal is to make a kit available that is a bit cheaper than current kits on the market. If there is something in the shop you’d like to see, I would love to hear from you. Any feedback you have is much appreciated. You can use the contact form on the site or hit me up at any of the links at contact.