No Rest For The Weary

Here I sat, thinking that I’ve just undergone a couple of weeks of homelabbing, having upgraded a fair number of software versions. Surely I could let my homelab bake for awhile without intervention. Surely… Surely I was wrong.

I came home a week ago from work, intending to take a short break before picking up my oldest from her summer camp. Upon arriving at my garage, I used Home Assistant via CarPlay (a reason I won’t get a Rivian, as they won’t support CarPlay and do not have Home Assistant support) to run an “open home” scene to open the garage door, disable the alarm, and such. The door did not open.

Almost-Annual Upgrades

Every 10 months I run upgrades on my Kubernetes cluster. I haven’t blogged about my cluster setup or hardware before; I set it all up pretty shortly after I wrapped up my home lab blog posts, part 5. Maybe in the future I’ll document my initial setup, but that’s out of scope for this post.

In this upgrade I needed to upgrade from 1.33 all the way to 1.36 - hitting 1.34 and 1.35 along the way. So I read through the upgrade documentation for 1.34 to 1.36… 1.34 itself was no concern, and neither was 1.36. But 1.35? It deprecated support for containerd versions less than 2.0. And I was running 1.7 at the time.

I Created A Firefox Extension

That header really says it all. I published my first Firefox extension, YATS, and today it was approved. Go read about it and use it! If you think it’ll be useful.

A Reminder

As a quick reminder, I’ve been running Bitwarden since 2021 in a self-hosted solution.

Historical Tidbit

My Bitwarden installation is currently version 2026.2.1. I had previously attempted to upgrade to 2026.3.x, but ran into an issue with the MSSQL container described here. So I pinned my version to 2026.2.1, per the instructions you find in that thread.

The Power Interruption

Late last night while I was inadvertently drifting to sleep while watching some The Traitors NZ with my wife, the stream halted and I came to. I thought it was a temporary Internet service outage, but still went into the office to check the server rack. To my horror, I found my NAS offline. This means that at least some devices lost power. Which ones, you ask? Well, I knew exactly which ones - all of the devices connected to my APC 2200VA Smart-UPS.

Playing “Video Games”

If you know me, you know that I’ve been playing video games my entire life. So it should come as no surprise that video games holds the key to how I started to create my own music in the first place. In my sophomore year of high school, a friend of mine by the name of Jenner got this “game” for his PS1 - MTV Music Generator. We quickly started to really enjoy playing this “game” on his PS1. I’d go over often and we’d mess around creating all sorts of music and beats. I really started to dig making music on it though. This was my first introduction to producing music.

Unisite Begins

So much for my pledge back in 2021 that I would post more often, ’ey? Ah well. I’ll post when I can!

Anyhow, welcome to my softly-relaunched website, now available at robert.ludwick.us. I have merged websites into one - my previous “Linktree”-like site, and my old GitHub Pages site. They both now live here, merged together into what ought to be just one place to access information about me.

It’s Been Awhile

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about how some folks do a great job at keeping in touch with others, while most everybody else just simply don’t. I’m in the latter camp. I’ve known for pretty much my entire adult life that I’m piss-poor at keeping in touch with others. I’m not sure how many friendships I’ve had wither on the vine where all they needed was a little bit more of my TLC. It’s not that I don’t want to keep in touch with folks… It’s that I’m busy! I have a lot going on. Heck, it’s not that I don’t care about your anniversary or birthday, I’m just shitty at remembering when it is!

First, We Start At The End

This morning I had the distinct displeasure of taking my 14yr cat, Samantha, to the vet for a “quality of life” discussion. At 10:22am PT, she breathed her last breath; she reached the finish line of a lifelong marathon. She was such a good, sweet cat.

Sam had a pretty healthy life for 13 years. The only concern we ever had for her was her allergy to fish (seriously, that’s a crap allergy for a cat to have, given its ubiquitous use in cat food, etc). Then about a year ago, she had a one-off seizure. She didn’t lose any control of her bodily functions, and at the time we were pretty concerned about it. She never had another one, but I should have realized then that we were starting a countdown clock for her.

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Home Programming

With the exception of the AWS DDNS client I had previously worked on, I didn’t have any substantial custom-written software for my home technology. That broke in a big way starting in the second half of 2020. I built a custom script to clear out what I termed to be “phantom” clients from my UniFi Controller. You can read a bit more about that project at the link.

As Seen Previously On This Blog

Make sure to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Hello, Home Assistant

In early 2018 I intentionally acquired another Raspberry Pi, despite the fact that I had a Raspberry Pi 2B laying around which I wasn’t using. I got a Raspberry Pi 3B because I wanted something with more horsepower than the 2B to run Home Assistant. I had a few reasons to give Home Assistant (HA) a try: