The things I use

Inspired by others (uglyduck.ca, kevq.uk) this page will list (some) of the things I use in my everyday (tech) life.

Hardware

Laptop

My current main machine, bought used in late 2021. I ran Asahi Fedora Linux on it for a while in 2025, but it wasn't great so I'm back on macOS again.

Model	Apple Macbook Air M1
Memory	8 GB
Storage	256 GB
OS	macOS

Workstation

Mostly used for gaming and photo editing. Recently upgraded (due to reasons) using a quirky and cheap motherboard I found via forums.servethehome.com. This new build is 3 times faster than my old 6700k based build, and motherboard + cpu + memory costed me less than my old CPU alone.

Motherboard	Gigabyte MC12-LE0
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
Memory	32 GB ECC UDIMM
Storage	2 TB
GPU	Sapphire Pulse 9070 XT
OS	Windows 11

atomic

I accidentally the whole FreeBSD installation when swapping the boot drives, so now we are back on Linux again! Podman is nice.

Motherboard	SuperMicro X11SSL-F
CPUs	Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1245 v5
Memory	32 GB ECC UDIMM
Storage	~1 TB SSD, ~16 TB HDD
OS	Ubuntu 24.04
Networking	1×1 Gbps, 2×10 Gbps

Some things running on this machine:

SMB/NFS shares
PostgreSQL
restic for backups
A bunch of containers (as of April 2024, 37!)
A few incus/lxd containers

initial

The replacement for atomic, it's just taking a long time as it's quite boring to migrate :-)

Motherboard	Gigabyte MJ11-EC1
CPU	EPYC 3151
Memory	64 GB ECC RDIMM
Storage	~1 TB NVMe, ~20 TB HDD
OS	NixOS 25.05
Networking	2×1 Gbps

I'm using Incus for most services on this machine, all provisioned using Terraform due to reasons. I'm mostly using NixOS for the Incus containers.

Some things running on this machine:

PostgreSQL
Forgejo
IdP/Auth
S3-compatible storage
SMB & NFS
Backups plus external replication

unicorn

Replaces my previous router pioneer. This is a pretty decent HP machine handling my internal routing, running DNS & DHCP and a few similar workloads. NixOS is amazing for a machine like this, I really enjoyed learning nix and setting this machine up.

Model	HP 290-p0043w
CPU	Intel Core i3 8100
Memory	16 GB
Storage	128 GB SSD + 256 GB NVMe
OS	Nixos 25.05
NICs	1×1 Gbps, 2×10 Gbps

kubernetes cluster

I got lucky and bought a few Intel NUCs for a great price, and decided to use them for a kubernetes cluster at home.

Role	#	Model	CPU	RAM	OS
Worker nodes	3	Intel NUC11TNKI3	Intel Core i3 1115G4	16 GB	Talos Linux

K8S in a homelab is a moving target/learning environment, but as of May 2025 I'm using:

ArgoCD, with app-of-apps plus application sets
Both Kustomize (for app-of-apps) and Helm (for application sets)
MetalLB in BGP mode
NGINX for Ingress

Once I started experimenting with this I've had a lot of fun learning!

SBCs

These are the SBCs currently in some kind of 'production'.

Name	Model	Use
goblin	ASUS Tinkerboard S	Internal certificate authority
colony	ASUS Tinkerboard	zigbee2mqtt
karate	NanoPi R4S	Router at a relatives appartment
morph	Raspberry Pi 3B	mqtt bridge for another 433 MHz radio
acrobat	OrangePi Zero LTS	rtlsdr, 433 MHz radio scanning

Software

This blog

Built with Hugo, running on fly.io and served by Caddy.

Blog theme

This sites theme is based upon ronv/listed, but modified to my taste/needs. You can find my fork here.

Applications

Emacs: For reading my email (mu4e + isync), for nearly all text editing, and much more. I've been an avid user of org-mode since my university days, starting approx. 2009 or so. Link to all posts on this blog tagged Emacs.
kitty: A terminal emulator
Firefox: Because reasons :)
Ansible: Anything can be done with a few hundred lines of yaml! Link to all posts on this blog tagged Ansible.

Services

Self-hosted

A lot of self-hosted services, mostly hosted on my home network. These are (mostly) running in containers, except for Home assistant which is running on it's own virtual machine.

Miniflux: Great RSS reader, I use it literally every day!
Home assistant: Used it since 2017, great from day one but has only improved since.
Mosquitto: I'm using MQTT for a lot of use cases at home.
Grafana: Used both for sensor data and to analyze system performance
InfluxDB: Time series database, both systems and sensor data
PostgreSQL: For Miniflux, Home assistant and others
Syncthing: For syncing files between computers
Navidrome: Great way to access my music collection in a browser!
step-ca: Great piece of software! Manages my internal certificates, and the ACME backend makes sure that everything uses TLS internally.
grocy: A proper ERP system for my fridge :-)
Restic (+ restserver): Self-hosted backups, I really like restic-restserver, I'm using it at home to take backups from restic running on my machines.
matrix-synapse: My private chat server! I use the excellent spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy playbook to install and update the installation.
netbox: Keeps track of my networks, hosts and virtual machines.
authelia: Centralized authentication is nice, even for a single-user environment
linkding: Trying to replace my old pinboard.in account, due to reasons.
zigbee2mqtt: Manages my zigbee network
rtlsdr: Listens on the neighbourhood temperature sensors on 433 MHz

Managed

Stuff I'm using but not hosting myself (yet):

Bitwarden: My password manager of choice, a paying customer for a great number of years.
sr.ht: For my git repositories and their build service.
healthchecks.io: For noticing if any scheduled job fails to run as expected. Backups, internal certificate renewals…

Networking

My 'core' network is run through a Ruckus Brocade 7150-C12P, and the network is pretty heavily segmented into different VLANs (10+) for different purposes.

For WiFi I'm using two TP-Link EAP 245v3. I'm using CAT6 cables for everything I can.

I also really appreciate plain old nftables, even after 10+ years of using OpenBSD/FreeBSD PF. It's easy to write and read, and allows for some really nice rules with verdict maps, concatenations and so forth. In the past I've used Shorewall to avoid typing iptables rulesets.

monotux.tech