After a busy few months of work, renovations, and family time, I’m back to posting. Here’s a quick update on what’s been happening and what to expect next, including some upcoming Home Assistant projects.
A week at Lake Garda that mixed ferries, castles, Eurocamp pool time, and standout espresso, with a faulty hire car and a few storms that became part of the story.
After a month using a Raspberry Pi 5 as the daily machine, general work and coding are smooth, heavy CAD and slicing stay on the desktop, and the constraints noticeably improve focus and output.
A tiny workflow file adds newly opened issues and PRs from multiple repositories to one GitHub Projects board, with a PAT for permissions and no Enterprise upgrade needed.
How I added a Netgear LM1200 4G modem as a backup connection for Virgin Media outages, ensuring seamless failover and uninterrupted connectivity.
A Raspberry Pi cluster managed with Ansible and Docker Swarm, using NFS for state, Traefik for routing, and a small set of services like Home Assistant, Gitea, Portainer, Pi hole, and Uptime Kuma, plus the lessons learned while building it.
A Raspberry Pi 5 set up as a no-distraction development box, with no audio and a bit of physical friction, turned browsing time into building time.
A practical plan to fix a tiny office by changing the floor, adding texture and storage to the walls, building drawers and a printer cabinet, and finishing with lighting and small details.
Early 2025 stalled out, so the plan is simple. Clear the room, add heat, build storage, and make the desk work for typing and tinkering.
A focused plan for 2025 that builds on last year’s progress, covering Night Sky Pi upgrades, two small Python tools, a cleaner workspace, and a quieter Pi cluster.