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Backups Aren't Simple
Starting from a wiped family photo drive, a walk through everything a real backup needs: snapshots, rotation, deduplication, offsite copies and tested restores.
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Arch Linux Now Has a Bit-for-Bit Reproducible Docker Image
As a follow-up to the similar milestone reached for our WSL image a few months ago, I’m happy to share that Arch Linux now has a bit-for-bit reproducible Docker image! This bit-for-bit reproducible image is distributed under a new “repro” tag. The reason for this is due to one noticeable caveat: to ensure…
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My Homelab Setup
How I repurposed my old gaming PC to set up a home server for data storage, backups, and self-hosted apps.
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Cloud VM benchmarks 2026
NOTE June 2026: Hetzner announced over 100% increases in prices. They will honour old prices for instances built before June 15th 2026, but for new instances the performance/price ratios show below are no longer valid.
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How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.
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Bucketsquatting is finally dead
For a decade, I have been working with AWS and third-party security teams to resolve bucketsquatting / bucketsniping issues in AWS S3. Finally, I am happy to say AWS now has a solution to the problem, and it changes the way you should name your buckets.
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Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
Today marks four years since I joined AWS. My last day will be Friday.\nI have to say being fired from AWS is actually a relief. There have been a lot of changes to the company since I joined in 2022, and the company I wanted to work for is no longer the same company.\nThis past year, while I was doing my best to make…
38
Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
The technical musings of Iain Cambridge.
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Starlink Mini as a failover
I recently picked up a Starlink Mini to use as a backup connection for my home network. The underlying technology is fascinating - thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit delivering broadband almost anywhere. With the new £4.50 standby plan, it's an excellent way to keep things online.
40
I tested every IP KVM in my Homelab
Since the PiKVM came out in 2017, there's been an explosion of IP KVMs. I've tested almost every one. But what are they good for? You can use Remote Desktop, Screen Sharing, or VNC to remote control a computer from anywhere on a LAN. And if you don't have a private VPN, you could use RealVNC, Raspberry Pi Connect, or…
41
If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?
I think the title captures the idea fully but I'll dig into it because this ain't Twitter. You're working an idea, a piece of code, or a multibillion a year SaaS app which is probably saving the world. Maybe you're automating the cloning process of grabbing
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Internet Archive's Storage
Internet Archive Staff Bruce Li introduces his The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting thus: Thi...
44
Solar and batteries can power the world
Solar and batteries are cheap enough that most people can get most of their electricity from them, and save money. This equation gets better and better over time as their costs decline.
45
Fairphone 6 and PostmarketOS working main camera
Today i bring the working main camera! Building on the work nondescriptpointer did on the wide lens camera i have written the driver for the main camera and now its working alongside auto focus and color correction. The color correction still a work in progress, but you can…
46
Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
If xAI defaults on its debt, Apollo Global Management ends up in the GPU rental business.
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Alternatives to MinIO for single-node local S3
In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3…
48
What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes
So I've been job hunting lately. Reading job postings, doing interviews, talking to engineering teams at like a dozen companies. And I noticed...
49
Zeroserve: A zero-config web server you can script with eBPF
zeroserve is a small, fast, zero-config HTTPS server. You hand it a tarball of a website and it serves it - over HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, with hot reload and a tiny resident footprint. The twist is that you can drop eBPF programs into the tarball and they run on every request, in userspace, as sandboxed middleware …
50
My Home Fibre Network Disintegrated
Thanks HN folks for all the comments. To clarify a bit, the cables are pulled through PVC conduits under the flooring before being buried in cement. Currently the hypothesis for why the cable disintegrated so quickly is hydrolysis. Singapore is extremely humid after all. A second possibility is that I keep the…
51
Indoor Wi-Fi Roaming with OpenWRT
A few months after writing up the Cudy AX3000 units and moving the house over to OpenWRT, I ended up revisiting the one bit I had deliberately waved away ...
52
The future of software engineering is SRE
When code gets cheap operational excellence wins. Anyone can build a greenfield demo, but it takes engineering to run a service.
53
In praise of memcached
If you happen to find yourself in a sysadmin position, or a position where you just so happen to maintain someone’s infrastructure , chances are that at some point in time the topic “we need a cache” comes up.
54
I/O is no longer the bottleneck? (2022)
Recently Ben Hoyt published a blog post claiming that contrary to popular belief, I/O is not the bottleneck in typical programming interview problems such as counting word frequencies from a stream. Sequential read speed has come a long way, while CPU speed has stagnated.
55
What has Docker become?
Docker Inc's journey from containerization pioneer to AI-focused platform has been anything but straightforward. Here's what their strategic shifts tell us about the company's search for identity.
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Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM
My micro site, zero.btxx.org , is being served to the public internet from a Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3 running Alpine Linux.
58
GitHub Actions is the weakest link
Anne Robinson would like a word with .github/workflows
59
I just want simple S3
I just want S3. My needs are pretty basic. I don't need to scale out. I don't need replication. I just need something that can do S3 and is reliable and not slow. Minio is dead, they pulled the plug after axing the interface. They archived the repo so they …
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