House renovation: Jan 2022

31 Jan 2022 (updated 1 Dec 2023)

First order of business after purchasing our fixer-upper was finding an architect.

The house has too many small rooms on ground floor. Kitchen is in a small, very poorly built extension and it's clear it'll have to be demolished - it had holes you can see through to the outside. First floor was better, although too very dated.

So it was clear there is some work for architect. Besides, we weren't really sure where to start and several people told us architects can act as a guide / overall project manager.

House renovation: December 2021

24 Dec 2021

Starting today, we are the owners of a "fixer-upper" house in nice area of South Dublin.

The plan is to renovate it to our liking and turn it into our "forever home". There's a lot of work but we are excited.

Currently we live in an apartment, not too far from Dublin city center. It's a small two-bedroom place. We like it, however it's just too small.

Why a fixer-upper?

Competition for houses in good condition was just too high. There's a lot of people who (like me) sold their RSUs at crazy COVID prices, and (like us) didn't fancy being stuck in apartments during COVID.
We could not find a house in good condition that we really liked. There was always something wrong - layout, not insulated enough, extension roof right in front of bedroom window, no driveway, etc. So we'd end up re-doing a lot even in a house in good condition.

So here we are.

House

Odyssey X86 Single-Board Computer

11 Aug 2021

Shortly after setting-up single-node Kubernetes cluster, single-node Ceph cluster I wanted an actual cluster. I've also noticed that Ceph doesn't actually work all that well: Besides obvious lack of failure tolerance, it didn't seemed to like working on top of just two storage devices of a very different sizes (internal ~300G HDD and 1T USB-HDD). So I've decided to get some more hardware.

I live in a small apartment and I don't really have a lot of space. All I have is a small shelf in storage area. Normal desktops and especially rack servers won't fit. They are also noisy, eat a lot of power and produce a lot of heat. Another thing is that I already had two old SATA HDDs lying idle, which I wanted to use, so the new hardware needed SATA support.

I found the solution in Odyssey X86 board.

Docker image for Tsunami security scanner

11 Jun 2021

I've built unofficial image for the Tsunami security scanner.

Pull it from Docker Hub.

Royal Canal Deep Sinking SUP

1 Jun 2021

The weather was great this Monday - it was the hottest day of this year in Ireland (so far). Also, thanks to Memorial Day in USA, it was going to be a quiet day at work. So, I decided to take a day off and go paddle-boarding in Royal Canal in west Dublin. I did not find a lot of information online, so I'll write a report here.

This website has remark42 comments now

26 May 2021

Now you can tell me how wrong I am!

Comments are self-hosted using remark42, there are no ads or tracking. The privacy policy was updated nonetheless.

Remark42 does not support captcha and its anti-spam is rudimentary, so I wasn't brave enough to enable anonymous posting. You'd have to log in. Currently it is possible to log in via Google or GitHub, and I plan to add more methods later.