Music & Guitar
As a volunteer musician at our home church, I’ve worked to refine my guitar rig to a reasonably portable setup without sacrificing too much tone. The geometry and size of our worship center prevents me from achieving face-melting tone with a wall of Marshall amps, so I’ve settled for a Line6 POD HD-500.
You can download a moderately up-to-date copy of my patches HERE.
Smart Home
Some time back, my wife mentioned to me that she’d love to have a ‘smart home’ someday. So…I decided to see if there was a budget-friendly way to make that happen. Our current setup is a mixture of TP-Link ‘Kasa’ switches and dimmers, Google Home Mini speakers, Chromecasts, Iris door sensors (Zigbee), generic Z-Wave flood sensors, and a Toshiba Wifi-controlled Air Conditioner…all glued together by an instance of Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi.
OpenSprinkler
Kawika and I are just putting the final touches on a DIY implementation of OpenSprinkler. Check out our notes here!
3D Printing
I’ve begun my foray into the world of 3D printing with a Creality Ender 3 Pro. You can check out some of my builds and designs here.
Coding
I use GitHub to host my main code repositories, such as they are…
HomeLab
Through the course of my IT/Telecommunications work, and also Smart Home projects, I’ve gradually refined my homelab/server setup over the years. What started off as a Raspberry Pi running Samba shares and DHCP, has gown slightly. Today, it resembles something like the following:
Primary Server
(old ThinkPad laptop, running as a headless Ubuntu server)
- PiHole – DNS-based ad blocking for our entire LAN
- Samba – LAN file shares
- Plex – Streaming media server for our TV’s and mobile devices
- PiVPN – OpenVPN server for secure remote connections to all the toys
- Radio Scanner – RTL-SDR/OP25/LiquidSoap/IceCast2 mashup, providing a private real-time audio feed of local EMS/PD radio channels
Pi3B
- HomeAssistant – Home automation scripts/notifications/etc.
PiZero
- NordVPN – VPN channel for a couple of local devices/services that need a secure outbound connection