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.
I picked up a mac mini with the m4 CPU, 24 GB shared memory, and 512 GB of storage. Even with solar power, especially in the winter, my lab is using too much power. My new goal is to use less power than my plant grow lights. Fortunately, I can measure all of that power usage now and store it in prometheus to query. I run two NAS systems 24/7 and one of them is off the shelf from Synology and it uses between 15-30 watt hours.
On Kubernetes, you can run a Prometheus server by installing a Helm chart. If you are looking for information about what to do with Prometheus, check out a previous post to get an overview. This chart is maintained by the community and is available to browse on GitHub. There are a lot of options that can be configured with a values YAML file. This chart can also optionally install some other software such as Grafana, a node metrics exporter, and the kube state metrics server.
updated: 2025-03-09 After running LLMs locally using Ollama and open-webui, I realized that the project has experimental support for image generation. If you are not familiar with those, check out a previous post to learn more and get started. I have seen image generation tools online but I never bothered to look into how to do it with a GPU. Fortunately I am late to the party and there are now a lot of tools available to make leveraging the underlying technology easier.
Now that I have started to collect metrics for my APC UPS systems, I built a Grafana dashboard similar to the dashboard I used for Network UPS Tools. Check out a previous post where I got these metrics set up and into Prometheus. ups_dashboard This dashboard is based on a public Grafana dashboard for the NUT exporter that I used previously. Fortunately most metrics from Network UPS Tools are also available here in the apcupsd exporter.
As of October 2024, Fedora 41 is available. Compared to the previous release, Fedora 40, there are not a large amount of changes that a desktop user will notice. This release includes the GNOME desktop version 47 with minor updates to the UI. This release will also continue to include the latest releases of KDE desktop environment as an alternative to GNOME desktop. Another addition is the Miracle Window Manager which is a tiling window manager based on the Mir compositor library.
I have previously worked with Postgres as a database. Check out a previous post if you are not familiar with Postgres. In that post I ran Postgres as a docker container and used psql to execute commands against the database. Today I am going to look at running Postgres with Podman as an alternative container engine and another container “adminer” which provides a web UI for interacting with a database. If you are not familiar with Podman, check out a previous post about alternatives to Docker.