Home-lab design pt1 - Physical Boxes

Any long-time readers of this blog will probably be sick of my Mermaid [network diagrams](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2025/07/mikrotik-automation.html), but hey, these posts are as much for me to document my own trials and tribulations as they are for you, so ... let's do another one! ```mermaid architecture-beta service internet(affinity:cloud) group home(affinity:house)[Home] service ispr(affcircle:c-firewall-green) [ISP Router] in home service gbe(affcircle:c-router-green)[Mikrotik] in home service pi(affcircle:c-server-blue)[Pi] in home service nuc(affcircle:c-server-blue)[NUC] in home service nas(affcircle:c-nas-blue)[NAS] in home internet:B --> T:ispr ispr:B --> T:gbe gbe:B -- T:pi gbe:L -- R:nas gbe:R -- L:nuc ``` Dead simple. The __NAS__, a __Synology DS209__, has been faithfully just doing its thing for 15(!) years now and aside from occasional, painless, disk size increments, just keeps keeping on. And after last year's introduction of the [__Mikrotik RouterBoard RB2011__](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2025/01/upgrading-to-mikrotik-routerboard.html) router for [DHCP](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2025/03/upgrading-to-mikrotik-routerboard.html) and [DNS](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2025/04/upgrading-to-mikrotik-routerboard.html), the __Raspberry Pi 4B__ has been freed up for more Pi-suitable tasks (light web serving, streaming, home automation tasks). Which leaves the __Intel NUC__, specifically a `NUC5PGYH` - a lucky roadside hard-waste find that has proven invaluable as a super-compact, super-efficient x86 server. This is the core of my "self-hosting" plan for 2026.

2026 - Off we go again

Happy New Year! After some refreshing time off I'm looking to refresh my "home lab" with some self-hosted projects, so this is likely to be a big focus of this year's posts. Of course, as much as possible I'm still [doing](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2023/09/frenzyjs-saga-of-flood-fill.html) [projects](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2022/06/introducing-cardle.html) "out in the open" and hosting them on [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com), whose [SvelteKit](https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/introduction) [integration](https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/adapter-netlify) is still the smoothest and easiest way to get a modern, public-facing website that I've found. But for situations where full public access isn't appropriate, I've been experimenting with [Dockerization of Svelte apps](https://khromov.se/dockerizing-your-sveltekit-applications-a-practical-guide/) and self-hosted Docker and I'm liking what I'm seeing. More to come.

2023 Kia EV6 GT-Line RWD

After several experiments and test drives, copious amounts of internet research and the fortuitous introduction of a Novated Lease scheme at my employer, earlier this month I took delivery of a two-year old, heavily depreciated *Kia EV6*.

For me, this car manages to tiptoe along a perilous path between Mr Musk's vehicles (with their [flawed dependence on the centre screen](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2024/03/tesla-model-3-2022-standard-range-rwd.html)) and the influx of Chinese vehicles (which in my experience ride like wheelbarrows) - a well-built, good-to-drive vehicle that has (roughly) the dimensions I favour with a decent range. The novated lease (ex-tax) brought the cost of the car down to close to 50% of its original sticker, and all the registration, insurance, servicing and consumables (electricity and tyres) all get paid from my pre-tax salary so it works out very nicely as a package deal. Having owned and driven it now for a couple of weeks (including a couple of decent road trips) here are my takeaways: *Pros* - Locally-tuned suspension rides really well - RWD dynamics disguise the (significant) weight - Real-world 450km road-trip range - Generally excellent cabin - Screen in front of driver *Cons* - HVAC/Media soft-keys always in wrong mode - Boot/trunk space could be bigger - Lack of Kia Connect in AU The cons probably warrant more explanation; the *HVAC/Media soft keys* are a halfway-house that means you don't always need to be interacting with the main central touchscreen à la Tesla - this is good, but the fact that they are not actual buttons and each one has a dual function (depending on the "position" of the master switch) can cause annoyance. For some reason, Kia Motors Australia have decided that the EV6 isn't supported by the Kia Connect app. That means no fancy seat pre-heating but also basics like seeing the battery charge level is simply impossible on Australia. Crazy, right? That said, it's an excellent car, and hopefully some future software/firmware updates will fix most of the cons.

Home Assistant and Zigbee

After my Google Home Mini [devices started "dying"](https://blog.themillhousegroup.com/2024/10/google-home-minis-1st-gen-bricked.html) (aka getting remotely bricked) I was looking around for something less vendor-tied to perform the same tasks and found the [Home Assistant Voice Preview](https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/) which I have taken the plunge on. More on that later. And so I had to jump to the Home Assistant world from OpenHAB. Oh wow. This has been such a nice change. Everything about setting the thing up (I'm running a `hass` VM image on my `NUC5PGYH` NUC) was trouble-free, it runs well and when the time came to add a sprinkling of Zigbee, it was *so* easy I actually audibly gasped. I plugged in one of these Sonoff USB Zigbee gateways:

... went into my VM console and granted USB passthrough to the relevant (cryptically-named) device (points off to Sonoff here - couldn't you have changed the USB device name and vendor to something a little bit more ... obvious?)

And by the time I'd logged into the Home Assistant page, it had already discovered the gateway! Pairing with the multiple (cheap!) Zigbee temperature/humidity sensors was stupidly-simple and they've been rock-solid for weeks now. Much better than the wifi-based ones I've tried in the past.

Niiiice.

shellcommand | shellcommand | pbcopy aliases FTW

This is such a simple yet powerful thing. I was writing up a slightly-tedious process at work that required using various command-line tools (like `kubectl`) to access a secret being used in a Kubernetes pod. The secret could then be copy-pasted into a web UI that needed access using the same credentials. That's when it hit me: the whole thing can be done as a one-liner that finishes with ` | pbcopy` to paste the output into the clipboard, and then aliased in your shell startup (e.g. `~/.zprofile` on the Mac); e.g.: ``` alias getdbpass="kubectl get secret db_secrets-collection -n namespace -o json | jq --raw-output '\''.data | map_values(@base64d) | .PASSWORD'\'' | pbcopy' ``` Now you just type `getdbpass` when you need to get in, flip to your browser, and Cmd-V. And you can always check/remind yourself what it does with `alias` on the command line. You can build up an awesome collection of these. saving time and typos - give it a try!

The fascinating intersection of SVG and Svelte

## The context I'm working on a new top-secret web project that had some interesting graphical requirements: - Tileable images that scale to fit the entire device viewport - Support rotation in 4 steps (N,S,E,W) - Support overlaying - Support filling in distinct steps - Support theming; i.e. be able to draw the images using (at least) a "light" and "dark" variant Pretty steep requirements, and once I realised the final two requirements were non-optional, PNGs just weren't going to cut it; the sheer number of permutations would be prohibitive. ## Evangelising Svelte - Svangelising? [Svelte](https://svelte.dev/) is definitely my "current squeeze" when it comes to building web front-ends; it's minimal, seems to avoid React's primary footguns and with [SvelteKit](https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/introduction), makes development of full-stack apps an absolute breeze. It truly feels like standing on the shoulders of giants when using these powerful tools! Svelte has an extremely interesting property in that due to the way that `.svelte` files are laid out, i.e.: ``` ``` ... you can drop an *SVG file* into a Svelte project, change its extension to `.svelte` and it **Just Works** - it's a Svelte file that just happens to not have any `script` or `style`. ## SVelteGraphics Version 1 Given that an SVG "is just" (or perhaps [`satisfies` the definition of](https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/release-notes/typescript-4-9.html#the-satisfies-operator)) a Svelte component, that means we can give it props, right? `FillableThing.svelte`: ``` ``` Which we can use like this: `Caller.svelte`: ```

``` ... although this is arguably not particularly useful; being able to set `filled` is nice, but we really want dynamic control over *which* SVG we're actually rendering in the first place. ## Snippet Like It's Hot Further messing-around with the possibilities inherent in this finally led me to this "shape", that uses a [Svelte snippet](https://svelte.dev/docs/svelte/snippet): `FillableThingSnippet.svelte` ``` {#snippet thingSnippet(filled: boolean)} {/snippet} ``` So what I've ended up with is the "guts" of the original SVG (that had the two paths `main` and `inner`) inside a Svelte `snippet` that I can put anywhere in my Svelte app, and call with: `Caller.svelte` ```

{@render thingSnippet(true)}

``` and as long as I've got my themed CSS variables (e.g. `--theme-color` and `--theme-fill-color`) defined, I've got fillable, themable SVG content. ## Bonus: The MDN SVG Tutorial MDN has a [fantastic tutorial](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Tutorials/SVG_from_scratch) that introduces the components of SVGs one-by-one, and I'm really interested in exploring programmatic manipulations of these. Stay tuned!

10k Rep on Stack Overflow; looking back

After almost 14 years on the Stack Overflow platform, I [finally crossed the 10,000 point reputation threshold](https://stackoverflow.com/users/649048/millhouse) in January 2025. My early days were dominated by Java, moving into Mockito (still by-far my [most popular answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/7682895/649048), contributing almost a quarter of my total rep!), Spring, then Scala, and into the Play Framework before moving into less-niche territory in the JavaScript/TypeScript world, where the sheer enormity of the user-base made it difficult to be either the first *or* the best at answering anything.

The little "kick-up" around 2021-or-so probably correlates to the widespread uptake of React Hooks, which provided a fairly rich environment of footguns, misunderstandings and head-scratchers as people tried to `useEffect()` their way out of the old `componentDidMount` world. As I'd immersed myself quite deeply into the documentation on "the new way" at the time, and had done a few small greenfield side-projects that used it, it was a pretty fertile period for rep-gathering. Sadly Stack Overflow in 2025 is not what it once was, with a lot of "low-hanging-fruit" (newbie questions, typos, easily-Googleable error messages) being dispensed-with by LLM agent/assistants in a role that they are (and I say this very cautiously) not terrible at. As a result I imagine 10k rep would be very tough going were one to start from scratch today. Nevertheless, as an immense collection of human knowledge and expertise (which I'm sure all the AI scrapers have trained on) it is still remarkable.