After the very basic server setup, having some kind of simple Intrusion Detection System (IDS) seems like a good idea. While all the previous steps were designed to prevent someone taking control of your server, if someone has managed to tamper with something, short of being locked out - how would you know?

Since starting with FreeBSD for my homelab and self-hosting experiments, I've come up with a few standard first steps that I do to any new server.

As someone who's barely experienced snow, I love it. The way it makes everything look clean and white, the crunchiness underfoot, and the sunlight sparkling off it. This year we've had more snow than I've ever experienced. The first fell on January 1st, it's now mid February, and we just had another light flurry. Most years here we've had a light scattering one day, and it's melted away by the next.

A quick note for me on switching between wireless and wired networks on my FreeBSD laptops.

This year has been a pretty good year for me listening to music, but not that much of it has really been ‘new’, either to me, or in the absolute sense. There’s been a lot of re-listening to older music that I’ve bought on second hand CDs, but some new things have slipped in.

I've been buying CDs for years, and recentely getting more cheap second hand ones. But what are my 'essential' albums, and what even is 'essential'?

September is a strange month. The end of summer and the rapidly shortening days emphasise the sense of time speeding on. In recent years it was a month for off-season holidays and adventures, but with our children now in school, it's regained the traditional, slightly melancholy and reflective feeling that long hid its beauty from me.

I’m a little bored with my site’s appearance, but also couldn’t think of one look that would be better, so inspired by (maga)zine layouts and other people’s beautiful sites, I’ve tried to give myself more flexibility to try out ideas, good and bad. Perhaps it’ll inspire others to try as well.

I learnt about Tom Petty after 11 million people watched Victor Meldrew die.

A few weeks ago I set up a simple git server to run at home so I don't have to rely on Github or similar external services. That worked fine, but two things felt unfinished: The ability to create a new repository, and an easy way of listing the existing ones, without having to SSH into the host. Luckily with GitWeb, shell scripts and CGI magic we can fix that.