Author: Kevin Tsui

I have been playing around with my home server setup after my Pi 5 was down during my holiday.

Since then, this blog has been hosted on my NUC till now. It was good, but I still prefer my server can be run on ARM CPU instead of x86.

I’m using the M1 Mac Mini since it was released, the performance is just so good that I cant tell its an ARM CPU. One annoying thing on ARM Mac is that, there is no good free virtualization software. Parallels is great, but its just too expensive for my use case. UTM is free, but somehow it not as stable. I faced quite a few times after Mac OS update my Arch VM just unable to boot.

I will give it a go one more time and see if it is stable enough to replace my Pi as the docker server. With docker, moving my blog around servers is just so easy, so why not give it a try? 🙂

Looks like the Immich phone app has updated to keep the phone awake when its uploading. Isn’t this feature supposed to be there in the first place..?

Not sure why after I updated my Pi5 server, I no longer able to boot it back up. And I’m oversea for the last week, so my blog was down for the whole week.. Next time I should not restart it when I’m not at home..

Typhoon, raining the whole week?

I have been using Google Chrome since its just released to the wild. I wanted a Webkit based browser that can run across platforms, I jumped ship from Firefox to Chrome since the very first publicly available version.

Many years later now, it is now the number 1 browser and it also became the evil itself. It will soon disable the current Adblock plugins with the introduction of Manifest v3. Ads is the source of incomes for Google, I get it, everyone needs $$ to survive.. But I value if we have a choice too. Mozilla seems to gonna support Manifest v2 (or whatever crap you wanna call it) for the foreseeable future, I hope they are not gonna disappoint their users.

The setup was quick and I did not know the Nextcloud docker is so slow on a weak KVM VPS.. It’s really too slow to be useful for anything.. Ok, time to cancel the BuyVM VPS again..

Managed to rent a KVM from BuyVM again after I switched over to Raspberry Pi hosting at home.

As a privacy paranoid, I still prefer hosting it on a Raspberry Pi at home rather than somewhere else. But to follow a good backup practice, I need a copy of my data offsite. Since I used BuyVM for so long and they are really good and low price, I decided to try my luck and see if I can rent a KVM VPS from them again. Lucky me, there is one last slot available at NY data center.

With Docker, the setup process was really fast and straightforward. All I needed to do was uploading the docker compose from my Pi5 server to BuyVM VPS and then run docker compose up. After that, I just need to setup reverse proxy from my Pi5 server and everything just works. How can I not love open source software?

Yesterday I accidentally tripped my house’s circuit breaker and brought down my Pi server.

After the power is back, all the docker instances automatically back up as well. However, no matter what I did, I was not able to access any one of the docker instances.

I wanted to re-flash my Pi 5 from the desktop image to lite for a long time, but I did not have the time and reason to do so. Since everything is down and I don’t know how to revive it, I decided it is finally time for me to re-flash it and setup the server more properly.

After a little bit of tinkering here and there, my blog is finally back up together with a few other instances. Docker is really so convenient that I regret I realised it this late!

I’m surprised that the performance of running Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi 5 is not as bad as I thought. I need to test it more before I really put it in a good use.

I have been looking for Google Photos alternative for quite some time. I have a Synology NAS at home, it back up all my photos that is taken on my phone without any problem and it works really well. But I wanna have another self hosted solution that is similar to Google Photos, I did a quick search and found Immich. The web ui looks very similar to Google Photos and it has phone apps that supports both iOS and Android. Let’s see how well it runs on my Raspberry Pi 5. 🙂