Dandersens Blogging Here

Very different from the previous content on this blog so far, here is a brief writeup of the process of buying and DIY installing a mini-split. You'll need to ensure you have a pre-charged split (i.e. comes with refrigerant), most you buy on Amazon / big box stores would say so (and most would be this way anyways, pre-charged is standard for places homeowners can buy from). If you're doing 220V, which is likely if you want one head for your entire basement or multiple heads, you'll need a line to be ran wherever you are putting your condenser. I was able to steal line that had been ran for a hottub and just install a shutoff switch with a 30Amp fuse. You'll definitely need to drill a whole through your wall in some capacity. Your refrigerant lineset and communication lines will need to be ran from the inside to the outside. You'll also need a vacuum pump, as you need to extract moisture from the lines + verify that your connections are good. You'll pull a vacu...

It may seem quite ironic that the first post on this blog is my thinking and setup about self hosting, and my second is a note about how it's not worth the effort, but many things in life end up this way.   You don't realize how much effort something is, why a service exists, or you must just be better than other people. Then you go to do your first software update of your server stack and your docker instances start misbehaving. Or you want to add image support that is not on disk and now you have to go pull in some random person's R2 implementation for ghost (shout out to https://github.com/egeldenhuys/ghost-cloudflare-r2 , it did indeed work).  Some things are worth letting someone else handle, and imo this is one of them. I'll be posting more often now, and about more varied topics, so that's something for all three of you to look foward.   Much love peeps,   Dayne 

There have been so many things cooking for the past year that choosing the topic for a first post is incredibly difficult. But! I think the easiest option is to describe how we arrived at today's blogpost itself, what the setup looks like for replication purposes, and what the long-term purpose of this site will be. This is a simple Ghost website, a well known opensource WordPress alternative, self hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4 sitting on my desk, running as a docker container. The domain is managed by porkbun for its registrar, and was transferred to me by the lovely friend DJ. The nameservers are pointed to some Cloudflare provided options to allow management via Cloudflare. Access to the site itself, along with TLS cert management and termination, is handled by a Cloudflare tunnel pointed at the Ghost process. The magic of these interactions are continually impressive, so much value provided for free that its turning me into a Cloudflare shill.... which leads me into some additiona...