With the outside trenching mostly wrapped up, it was time to start the part of this build I was actually looking forward to — mounting gear on the garage wall. Strut channel, the EG4 GridBoss and FlexBoss21, a properly-sized feeder to the shop, and a side-quest to fix the water line I cut up last weekend.
Day 1 left off with about 300 ft of ditches dug in the front yard. This post documents the next couple of days — digging the remaining ~300 ft, running cable, and tunneling under the sidewalk (round 2).
Now that I've collected most of the hardware for Project Offgrid, it's time to start the actual work — gathering materials, planning the panel rack, and digging a lot of trench.
About 6 months ago, I moved to a new house. The original solar project was never intended to be the end-all, be-all solution — we had already been planning on moving for a few years when it was installed. But I did want to get something going to gain hands-on experience and a feel for what my future needs would be.
And that future time has come.
Continuation (and conclusion) of the home solar project. As the house was sold in Q4 2025, the system had to come down. This post walks through the removal — roof, garage, and exterior — and what's happening to the hardware next.
Using Kubernetes as the reverse proxy of choice, for non-kubernetes services.
Manifest driven. Source controlled. Redundant. And, DNS records get provisioned automatically as you add or remove services.
Example configuration:
I was recently greeted with backup failures, from what appeared to be a full disk.
102: 2026-01-22 06:00:08 ERROR: Backup of VM 102 failed - VM 102 qmp command 'backup' failed - backup connect failed: command error: mkstemp "/var/log/proxmox-backup/tasks/AF/UPID:pbs:000002CC:000004AF:00000396:69721148:backup:Unraid\\x2dMain\\x3avm-102:root@pbs:.tmp_XXXXXX" failed: ENOSPC: No space left on device
As, it turns out, this is an inode issue and not a full mount point.
This post provides a home assistant script, which will automatically discover Acrite tower sensors.
This works with 06002M and 592TX. Other devices may function with minor changes and modifications, but, are not tested.
Tonight's project was to install a POE doorbell.
This post goes through pulling cable, terminating cable, installing a patch panel, and finally adopting a new POE doorbell.
Wondering where all of the posts have been? Well...
As of the end of 2025, I have moved to a new house.
So, I will be starting new projects, for many areas of the new house.
New home network, new lab. New electrical projects. New shop projects.
And, a massive new solar project.
So, December of 2025, I moved to a new home.
And, of course, that means moving my entire network, lab, everything.
So, for Project Ram, I am starting to dive into more electrical related projects. As connectors are an essential part to making something maintainable- I really felt I needed to upgrade the connectors I was using.
For my last major automotive project, Because, Racecar, you may, or may not have noticed the molex connectors I used in my Dash Fabrication Project.
While- they did work, they are not at all suitable, not to mention.... lack of water resistance, vibration resistance, etc...
So- this week, I decided to pick up a relatively cheap kit for Deutsch DT connectors and give them a try. These are a commonly used automotive connector, with locking pins, vibration resistance, and water resistance.
Problem: I have a handful of Mikrotik RouterOS based devices, and I would like a source-controlled versioning solution.
Solution: A simple bash script, with a cron job.
This post, provides a script, which allows automated backups of mikrotik configuration over ssh, from a linux host.
So, recently I decided to acquire a new Lenovo P520, which will be for running Unraid. Before, My unraid ran as a VM on my r730XD.
Now- it is bare metal on the P520, with a MD1200 disk shelf for its 3.5" HDDs.
One of my goals, I wanted to transition some of my VMs to leverage ZFS storage, hosted on this box.
This post goes through the steps of configuring Proxmox to leverage ZFS over iSCSI, hosted on Unraid.
This, is a short post containing knowledge I gathered on the various generations of Dodge Ram trucks w/Cummins Turbo Diesels.
This is part 4 of the Project Ram Series
For about a week straight, I have been hammering out various projects for this truck to improve reliability, performance, etc.
Two days ago, I finished my modifications for the AFC and fueling, which should drastically boost the horsepower.
Today's project is to advance the timing about 4 degrees from stock, fix the killer dowel pin, and ensure all of the timing case bolts are properly torqued with loc-tite.
This is part 3 of the Project Ram Series
Not even a week after bringing this truck home, I had already started the process of upgrading it.
Immediately after installing gauges to monitor the vitals, I started modifying the P-Pump to boost the horsepower up quite a bit.
This is the 2nd part of the Project Ram Series
If you plan on modifying a diesel, the single most important modification you can do... is to have proper gauges.
If you add adding fuel, your EGTs will increase. If your EGTs go too high, your engine dies.
If your lift pump cannot keep up, you will have a ton of issues dialing in your pump. A fuel pressure gauge monitors this.
If your turbo is not working, You will either make no power, or you will have EGTs through the roof.
For me- the three metrics I need to know are Boost, EGTs, and Fuel Pressure.
This, post introduces my newest automotive project.
Project Ram.
No... we aren't building a truck to shamelessly roll coal. Rather....
This, will be a truck, intended to be used as a truck. It will be beefed up a bit, and won't be slow. And, it will be able to haul a 15,000 gooseneck as well.
I am not building a show truck. Just a dead simple, reliable, multi-purpose truck.
I use git for source control when writing these posts. Eventually- my local editor ends up with 50 branches which have already been merged into origin/main, and I end up needing to manually go through and remove the old branches.
This, is a VERY short post, detailing how to create a git alias to automatically prune branches, which have been merged, or deleted on your remote.
If- you don't need steps on how to create the alias, then here is the command:
!git fetch -p && git branch -vv | awk '/: gone]/{print $1}' | xargs git branch -D
Otherwise, keep reading.