AJ's Blog
This is a personal blog focused on computer software and hardware. Most
projects are implementing software and hardware for a homelab. What is a
homelab? I would say a homelab could be a single computer or dozens of
computers connected in a network. You can also integrate with computers
in the Cloud.
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Recent Posts
11-23-2025
Grafana Mimir is a powerful, horizontally scalable, multi-tenant long-term store for Prometheus metrics. In this post, we’ll spin up a lean, monolithic Mimir stack with Docker Compose. We’ll use local filesystem storage for quick experiments, plus Prometheus for scraping and Grafana Alloy for collecting and forwarding telemetry. I have used this project to store metrics from over 6 different Kubernetes Clusters in one central data repository (Mimir in this case).
11-18-2025
With the Elastic Stack (formerly known as ELK Stack) and Docker Compose, you can set up a powerful monitoring solution that is also equipped to scale as a backend document database for modern software applications. I am giving it another go in 2025 since I use Elastic in my current job. If you have never heard of Elasticsearch (which is fair if you do not work in software development), check out a previous post for a brief overview of how to get started.
11-03-2025
Why I Finally Switched Terminal Emulators After a Decade
It’s rare that I change the core tools in my daily workflow. For years, my terminal emulator has been as constant as my morning coffee. A terminal emulator is how developers interact with their computers using text-based commands, connect to remote servers via SSH, and navigate the depths of their operating systems. For someone like me who opens SSH sessions multiple times a day (and has for decades), the terminal is second-nature when using a computer.
11-02-2025
I have most systems using grafana alloy for logs that send to a loki server. It can also collect metrics and eliminate the prometheus node exporter as a separate install. In a previous post I migrated my systems that used Grafana Promtail -> Grafana Alloy. I have used those projects to collect log events from my Linux servers at home. They can also collect logs from Docker containers and forward log events to another server which in an older post I set up Grafana Loki to store log events from all of my servers, containers, and applications that could support this system.
10-31-2025
Today is a spooky day and Fedora 43 has been released as of October 29, 2025. This release is a bit spooky with the default desktop environment only supporting Wayland. Typically there are 2 Fedora releases per year. I upgraded to 42 earlier this year in a previous post and this process is going to be the same.
There are a few notable user visible changes in this release. When installing from the ISO installation image there is a new Anaconda WebUI. This was the default installer interface for Fedora Workstation 42, and now it’s the default installer UI for the Spins as well. If you are a GNOME desktop user, you’ll also notice that the GNOME is now Wayland-only in Fedora Linux 43. GNOME upstream has deprecated X11 support, and has disabled it as a compile time default in GNOME 49. Upstream GNOME plans to fully remove X11 support in GNOME 50.
10-29-2025
The web browser is arguably the most important application on any modern computer. For most of us, it’s the gateway to everything we do online. This includes work, entertainment, communication, and research. I do not think I have posted about web browsers before but the truth is a browser is the application I have used the most in my time on a computer for decades now. Over the past two decades, I’ve navigated through several different browsers. Each one represented a different era of the web. Here’s my journey through the evolution of web browsers. It culminates in my latest discovery: Zen Browser.