Over the past year or so, I have slowly moved more of my homelab to a more Infraastructure-As-Code/DevOps model. I'm trying to thing of my computers more as cattle than as pets. This means that I no longer care about the configuration of a single computer. Instead I try to think of a computer as hardware running jobs.

I recently had to rebuild a Raspberry PI 4, and the process was much less painful than before. Using Fedora's ARM Image Writer, I prepared the SSD with Fedora 41.

From there it was run an ansible playbook that configured the system, installed the required software for the various jobs, then finally restore each job's configuration.

A process which I used to dread, took under 2 hours, start to finish, and that included the time to download the 1.1GB Fedora Server raw image file.

Finished Old Man's War by John Scalzi on the 22nd. I started reading The Hobbit on the 23rd, and decided I wanted to read some of The Ghost Brigades last night. I read a bit longer than planned, and had read the first four chapters or about 25% of the book.

After ignoring my blog the better part of a year, one of my goals for 2025 is to write more. My other goals:

• Read at least 12 novels. My reading has dropped way off over the last couple of years, and I want to change that. I will be tracking a reading list once I have completed re-reading my first novel, "Old Man's War". Once that is done, I will re-read "The Hobbit", followed by "The Ghost Brigades".
• Document some more of my homelab environment. I will be re-visting my Kea DHCP server build, my certificate management processes, and upgrading my LAN this year.
• Track more of the New Music I am listening to I already use last.fm, and spotify so this should be easier.
• Achieve my 4th degree black belt in ITF Taekwon-Do. My plan is to test in June.
• Get my RHCSA and RHCE certifications again. I am almost ready to write my RHCSA for RHEL9.

A few weeks ago, when the iPhone 15 series was announced, I decided it was time to upgrade my old iPhone XS Max, my aging Apple Watch, and any required accessories (AC adaptors, etc). I also had the requirement of being able to run a couple of Android only apps, which meant picking up an inexpensive/used Android device for those apps.

As I watched and read about the iPhone 15, it became apparent that the Pro series would meet my requirements, because of the USB-C controller on the Pro model phones. I only use about 200GB of the 256GB on my old phone, so upgrading the on-board storage beyond 256GB seemed unnecessary. So for picking out a phone, I was between the iPhone 15 Pro and the 15 Pro Max.

For the Apple Watch, while I'd love an Ultra 2, the standard Apple Watch Series 9 meets my needs.

The next consideration was pricing. While I got my iPhone in 2018, and my Apple Watch in 2016, I'm not a fan of the pricing of today's "Premium/Pro" phones. I don't see the prestige with carrying an expensive phone. I decided to wait a couple of weeks, specifically until Black Friday to get my new iPhone.

Today was 'I Love Regina Day'. It's an event held by the city to promote the city and to help improve the cities image. The event is held in downtown Regina, combining a Fun Run, Farmer's Market, live entertainment along with various municipal exhibitors (city services, public library, local radio stations, etc) and some children's entertainment. There's also a free bbq.

Last year, my daughter asked me to join her on the 3K fun run, which was a blast, I finished the run in 20:10, which works out to 8.93km/h. This year we did the 5K, which was even better. I completed the run in 33:29, which works out to about 8.96km/h.

After the run, we went home to freshen up, and took Nova down to the I Love Regina Day festivities. Nova had a good time downtown as there were lots of dogs and people to see.

We finished out day witha quick puppy-training-trip to Cabela's, to hang out with some of our puppy training friends.

Enough Said!

The Conqueror Events are a series of virtual marathons that take place around various locations, both real and imanginary.

About a year ago, I decided to try one and see what was involved. The requirements are pretty basic, a way to track your daily exercise distance, and the app on your phone. I'm using an iPhone 10S Max, with an 2nd generation Apple watch. The Conqueror app syncs daily with Apple Health, so getting my exercise data is done automatically.

When you sign up, you get a digital race bib, and a map that tracks your progress. Sime of the events are designed for walking or running, and others include a longer distance designed for cuclists. As you walk, run, or cycle your distance is added to your progress. As you cross thresholds in the event, you are rewarded with either virtual postcards, which contain information about a specific location, or virtual spots, which have pictures and videos of the spot.

You also gain access to The Conqueror's facebook page, which is filled with people sharing their successes with the community.

Once you have completed the challenge, you receive a medal for the marathon. For the most part the medals are well done, with some having interesting features. For example, the London medal has a panel which can be removed to reveal the Eye of London.

I have completed several challenges:

• Cotswold
• Ring of Kerry
• Hadrian's Wall
• London
• Easter Island

I am currently working on the Amazon, which has 2 distances, one for walking, the other for cycling. I decided to push myself harder and have signed up for the longer distance, even though I'm just walking.

The website rebuild continues. I have spent a fair amount of my free time learning some of the ins and outs of Docusaurus. Docusaurus is primarily used for building websites for documentation. There are instructions on making it a blog only website, it took a bit of reading an guesswork to configure Docusaurus to be a blog first, and a documentation site second. Figuring out how to handle multiple sidebar menus was also a bit of a challenge. I will have documentation in the tutorial section at some point.

I have started to build out documentation pages for my Lego builds, Conqueror Virtual Challenges, Homelab documentation and Tutorials.

Over the past few years I have tried many platforms for running my website, ranging from simple HTML pages to content management systems like Wordpress, and finally using static site generators, like Pelican, or Docusaurus.