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

Parsing workout data from Hevy on iOS

03-30-2025

While I was writing the post about parsing data from the strong app on iOS, I stopped using this app. Now that I have this historical data there are a few approaches but as someone who is busy I ended up using another iOS app that has a native app for the apple watch. It also directly imported all my workout history so stay tuned as I will next be taking a look at any differences in that data.

Prometheus

02-09-2025

Organizations rely heavily on metrics to ensure their applications are running smoothly, efficiently, and securely. One of the leading tools in this space is Prometheus , an open-source system designed for event monitoring and alerting. This blog post will delve into what Prometheus is, how it works with metrics, and why it’s become a staple in modern infrastructure management. It may be overkill for a homelab but it is actually a simple system that scales well.

Grafana Loki v2 to v3 upgrade

02-01-2025

Just a quick post to upgrade Grafana Loki to v3. If you are not familiar with this project, it is an open-source system for aggregating application, system, and other log files for querying and potentially configuring alert notifications when something goes wrong. Check out a [previous post][] where I set up Loki in my homelab. step 1: update to latest minor release of 2.x First if you are already running a Grafana Loki deployment, upgrade to the latest minor revision of version 2.

Parsing workout data from strong app on iOS

01-26-2025

I use a mobile iOS app on my iPhone and Apple watch to record my workout sessions at the gym. I thought of this little project to encourage me to practice with some Python and SQL with data that I actually care about. This mobile app allows you to export data from previous workouts in a CSV file. You could import that file to a spreadsheet but I’m going to import it to a Postgresql database and run a few queries.

Homelab, 2025 plans

01-20-2025

A new calendar year is already underway. My plans for the next year include projects related to what I am working on at my job. I will be reviewing my observability stack and taking a look at OpenTelemetry. I will also be testing some CI/CD tools. I think I will be overhauling my kubernetes environment again. I want something more simple but also maintain the goal of combining the resources of many low-power computers such as Raspberry Pi, Mac Mini, and small form factor desktop PCs.

Homelab, 2024 recap

01-05-2025

Over the past year, I have undertaken several projects aimed at enhancing my homelab: I transitioned containerized applications to Kubernetes, ensuring scalability, reliability, and easier management of my self-hosted services. Or rather that was my goal. Here’s my previous post. I set up home assistant and started exporting data from it. This project has allowed me to collect more data about my house and visualize the data with dashboards. Additionally, I deployed systems to collect weather data from my house, enabling local monitoring and data analysis.