Hi & welcome to another patch of mine on the internet!

I’m Dom. All of my life I’ve done nerdy tech stuff and I get a huge amount of joy from tech, elegant systems, and what most would probably consider over-thinking.

This incarnation of my personal web stuff is an experiment inspired by the concept of a digital garden

The goal of the experiment is to integrate a portion of my daily note taking into this site to share them with minimal extra thought or effort. I don’t know if this will work, as a portion of my notes are useless transient task management, and another portion is probably too personal to be comfortably shared. I feel there should be something valuable in there occasionally, but who knows - that’s what makes it an experiment :)

Now and next up §

Getting this site setup, messing around with workflows, as is tradition. To make it as easy as possible for me to keep this up, I want it tightly integrated into my existing note taking and homelab infrastructure.

If/when done, I still have the ambition of getting into the habit of committing changes every 1 - 5 days. I’ve come close this year at times, and I have made good progress on moving and creating notes under the public folder - I just get hampered breaking Quartz so don’t end up pushing commits. Going to fix this over April 2024 though: recently decided to go back to 11ty, to make this site somewhere between Quartz and a previous blog, which is my current excuse for slow content.

Aside from that, my daytime also includes:

• building a drystone wall in preparation for…
• getting the driveway tarmacked and cobbled
• rebuilding the remaining walls and beds out front.
• trying to be the sort of person who just casually grows vegetables :|
  • prepped garden & built & planted some beds
  • eaten a bunch of veg and learned from a bunch of failures
  • 2x more planted beds & veg success 2024
• installing, repairing and rebuilding fences in preparation for…
• planning and threatening to build some decking (hopefully by the end of May 2023 2024!😬)
  • frame materials have are on their way!
• “big energy plan” to make our house more efficient:
  • solar thermal and fires into a thermal store for heat
  • reduce heat lost with insulation & decent curtains & blinds
• lots of chores and general old-house upkeep

And nerdy stuff:

• continuously rebuilding homelab and core-infrastructure
  • homogenising home automation with homeassistant
  • redesigning network in to replace old routers, improve wireless and prepare for gigabit internet.
  • messing with creating an XP VM for dads-compute
• side project: front end for LLMs, as an excuse to play with Open AI and Pulumi
  • originally started this with AWS (Lambda, APIGateway, DynamoDB, Cognito), Pulumi and React, with a bunch of considerations for collaboration and business environments, like multiuser, multitenant, and tight AWS integration. I then remembered I don’t need AWS. 2024 I wanted to create something similar, but instead with a focus on single or few-user usage in a selfhosted environment with Svelte.
  • Stumbled across open-webui does a lot of what I would want, and interacts with ollama for local LLMs, and is created in svelte! Looking to do some small contributions here to avoid reinventing the wheel.
• side project: blockchain version of a game I created about 20 years ago, as an excuse to play with Solidity and Polygon.
  • had lots of fun experiments on this, still struggling to get the balance of keeping original features, against utilising blockchain tech in the way I really want it to work. I think I can selfhost a version of this in the first half of 2024, but I’ve thought that many times. I haven’t done anything on this since mid/late 2023.
• tinkering with remote desktop in VR, as it presents a host of interesting challenges relating to networking, VR, programming, hardware and feels like the future.