Practical patterns for writing commit messages and pull request descriptions that speed up reviews, preserve intent, and keep projects healthy. Includes templates you can drop into any repo.

A practical guide to backing up to AWS S3 with restic, restoring data when you need it, and managing retention so costs stay sane.

A practical walkthrough of the home-lab repository changes since 1.0.0: Immich photos stack, backup improvements, a Zigbee2MQTT migration, safer redeploys, and a tidier blog deployment, plus upgrade notes.

A look at how I stabilised the climate in my garage-office using a heater, circulation fan, extractor fan, and dehumidifier — all automated through Home Assistant.

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.