MOVING My Website from Static Hosting to Caddy!

I’ve been using Linode’s object hosting for my website for ~2 years now, and it’s time for a change. I’m not unhappy with Linode, but object hosting isn’t for me any more and I’d like to move up to a virtual private server. Object hosting is a fantastic way to get started with a static website for a low cost, but I want better backend analytics and more control of the whole process, so I’m setting up my own VPS using Caddy.
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Studio Upgrade - New Mic!

Today I got my first upgrade to the studio setup: A new microphone! I chose a Rode Videomic Go II, which has USB-C and 3.5mm outputs, and they have a USB-C to Lightning cable available to connect to my phone. Since I use my iPhone for filming (often my older iPhone SE), this was important to me, but the ability to connect digitally to my desktop for recording screen capture with high quality audio was also important, so I didn’t want to get the smaller mics that clip directly on to the phone’s lightning port.
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Orders of Magnitude

When I reached 100 subscribers, I was very excited and posted about it here. But now, I’ve crossed 1000. After reaching 100, I was excited for the next hundred, but it came by so fast that within a few weeks I blew by 200,300,400… and was at 1000. The next goal becomes not a doubling, but the next order of magnitude. Exponential growth. I don’t expect to reach 100k (two more orders of magnitude), but maybe I’ll eventually reach the next order of magnitude.
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USB Pass Through for the Raspberry Pi Thin Client

As promised in my previous blog post on the topic, the SPICE protocol is capable of USB redirection. I didn’t dive into it for that post, but now the future is here and I’ve added USB redirection to my Raspberry Pi thin client. I’ve tested it with USB flash drives, webcams, and pretty much all of the USB devices I could find. And I’m here to tell you how it all works.
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My First 100 Subscribers!

As of today, my Youtube Channel has reached 100 subscribers! It’s really exciting to me, slowly starting to build a brand and produce content that I enjoy. I’ve enjoyed documenting my hobbies and projects on this website for almost a year now, and making videos is a fun way for me to expand that. Thank you to everyone who’s enjoyed and commented on my content so far, it’s great to see that others are enjoying it too.
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Buying a used Thin Client for ‘Fun’

I recently was browsing eBay for used computer parts (as one does) and I found how cheap some used thin clients are. These are mini desktops with minimal IO which are designed to act as a modern terminal for modern VDI setups, something like Citrix or Microsoft Remote Desktop based enterprise systems. The thin client itself just has to deal with the local displays, keyboard, mouse, and local USB ports, the actual computation is done on a server somewhere else.
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Can TrueNAS backup a Proxmox host using ZFS replication?

As part of my series exploring backup options, I’m exploring the options for pulling a backup of a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) host to TrueNAS SCALE server. In this case, PVE host has local ZFS storage, and the TrueNAS system is acting as the backup server. Ideally, PVE would snapshot in ZFS and we could sync those snapshots with a TrueNAS Data Replication task, but PVE doesn’t use the ZFS snapshot features by default.
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Network Mounting OctoPrint Data from a NAS

Previously, I described my ‘Ultimate’ OctoPrint setup, and part of that setup process including remounting a lot of OctoPrint folders to locations on my NAS. This setup worked well until I added OctoLapse, and wanted to backup folders not part of the folder path configuration in OctoPrint. To solve this, I used a different approach entirely, using symbolic links instead of a bunch of network mounts to cleanly and easily relocate OctoPrint data to network storage.
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Proxmox Clustering with 2 Nodes

I’m experimenting with Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE), the same hypervisor I run on my Minilab. It supports clustering and high availability, and I’d like to implement the cluster option. Clustering without HA allows multiple nodes to be managed from a single user interface, and for VMs to be offline migrated between nodes. This sounds pretty useful for me, even without the high availability features like live migration. However, any cluster relies on a node voting scheme which requires agreement (quorum) from all of the nodes, and the cluster won’t function without quorum being met.
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Backing Up TrueNAS Datasets to Proxmox Backup Server

As part of my series exploring backup options, I’d like to see if I can use Proxmox Backup Server to archive both datasets and zvols of a TrueNAS SCALE server. Why would you want to do this? In my case, I’m trying to choose the best starting point for my new backup server, and one potential option is to use Proxmox Backup Server (PBS), but I’d like to store data outside of the Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) ecosystem.
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