Alex Kretzschmar

Replacing Google with SearXNG as the default in Chrome

No tracking. No ads. Search as it was. Now when you enter a search query in the Chrome address bar it will route through your SearXNG instance automatically.

technical

4Kn sector disk passthrough in Proxmox

Solving an issue with 4Kn sector disks and passthrough in Proxmox with direct KVM arg injection.

technical

Everyone should have a PiKVM in their desk area

What do you do when you want to tinker with a bare metal system? For years, I'd go drag an old monitor, keyboard, and mouse out of a cupboard. Then,

technical

Reading obfuscated Seagate SMART stats with smartctl

Reading a SMART report from a Seagate drive with smartctl can be bit tricky sometimes. Values that should be human readable are obfuscated. This can lead to issues in all

perfect-media-server

The Best Media Server CPU... in the world.

After a solid 8 months of testing, I think we have a big enough sample size to draw some conclusions. The best media server CPU is...

technical

Set a static IP address in Home Assistant OS

Full credit goes to this forum post. I found myself in need of dropping to the CLI for a fresh Home Assistant OS install on top of Proxmox after using

linux

Fixing "kernel EDID has corrupt header" in Proxmox 8 and NixOS

Since fairly recently my Proxmox install has shown an almost barf inducing amount of errors along the lines of edid block 0 is all zeroes or kernel EDID has corrupt

nix

Packaging a go app for NixOS

The imposter syndrome around almost anything to do with NixOS is as strong as the pull to use it in the first place.

travel

Exploring Arizona

My travels got off to a good start this year. I had a work thing in Phoenix this week and as I usually try to do, I managed to take

year-in-review

2023: My Year in Review

As is annual tradition, here are my 2023 highlights. It's been a big year! A new job, lots of time at Virginia International Raceway (VIR), Ella started at a new

golf r

My 2019 MK7.5 Golf R - A HPDE weapon!

Inspired by @DerHase I wanted to get a journal thread going. This is my 6th Golf and my 4th MK7! This post is reconstitution of a thread on golfmk7.com

golf r

2019 Golf R MK7.5 Intercooler Upgrade

3 months ago I'd never even done a brake job. I just finished replacing my intercooler on the R and so far everything seems so good! It wasn't hard per-say,

technical

A Cheap No-Frills OPNsense box

If you're looking to build a small, quiet and cheap box to run OPNsense on then I have a build you might be interested in. This box has been happily

technical

I need your help with Intel Quick Sync benchmarking!

Please help me benchmark as many Intel CPUs Quick Sync transcoding performance as possible!

electronics

X32 Rack Mixer PSU Replacement

I bought a used unit off of Reverb and after about 75 days the unit began exhibiting these symptoms in the video. Neither Reverb nor the seller cared any so I began the hunt for a fix.

tailscale

SplitDNS magic with Tailscale

Today, we're going to take a deep dive into the world of DNS. Specifically looking at Tailscale's magicDNS feature which allows us to do neat things like refer to our Tailnet devices by name or configure splitDNS to query remote DNS servers.

technical

I have a YouTube channel now.

This week I launched a YouTube channel. After many years of saying I would and not, I finally have. So here goes nothing! I'll be covering topics ranging such as

technical

Mapping sensors output to physical drives in Linux

Whilst building out some new Grafana dashboards over the weekend I made the switch from InfluxDB to Promtheus node exporters for scraping metrics from Linux servers. But how do you marry up the drivetemp-scsi-0-10 value output from sensors to a physical disk?

technical

Use 1 PiKVM instance to control 4 systems

And there we have it. One PiKVM able to control and view up to 4 systems at once. And with the addition of a USB thumb drive to the KVM we can even boot any ISO we want!

technical

Restricting ASRock Rack BMC to dedicated IPMI_LAN port only

During this process I came across a frustrating "bug" in the Asrock Rack BMC implementation. No matter the settings I gave the BMC it was getting two IP addresses. One on the IPMI_LAN port as expected in my management VLAN, and another on eth0 which is undesirable.

Fully automated DNS and DHCP with Ansible, Dnsmasq and Pihole

You do like declarative configurations don't you? Good! For the longest time I've made do with clicking through the Opnsense UI to add static IP reservations via MAC address mapping.

ansible

Check for duplicate items in a list with Ansible using a custom filter

I expected writing a custom filter was going to be difficult and cumbersome but it was very simple and in the end, much faster than trying to turn YAML into a programming language!

year-in-review

2022: My year in review

A wedding. Lots of travel. And lots of friends.

photography

Death Valley

These desert vistas absolutely boggle my little mind. Most people come to Las Vegas for the brash, expensive and over the top spectacle. Indeed, it is fun for a night or two. But given the choice between a night in Vegas or another night on those dunes, there's simply no contest.

technical

Dump Disqus for Giscus

This is an easy project. Sure it will probably take an hour or two to get your head around but don't put it off. The end result is great and means no ads or tracking are insidiously injected into your content anymore.