Jon Ellis

The musings of an "engineer"

Jon Ellis

Blog posts

As you may be able to tell, I've not been consistent with writing blog posts. ...Or maybe I have, by simply not actually writing any!

Satisfactory Viewer

Published February 2nd 2022 - a day ago

Satisfactory is a game that I have enjoyed playing recently after being introduced to it by my cousin. It is a mostly first person factory building simulator - a 3D Factorio if you will. You play by exploiting resource nodes - iron ore, copper ore… read more

Video Doorbell

Published February 1st 2022 - 2 days ago

My wife liked the idea of a video doorbell, so I had a look to see what is available. There are a lot of options! To narrow down the choice, I decided I wanted the following: To be able to use the doorbell even if the manufacturer abandons the… read more

Hive Data Gathering

Published March 17th 2021 - a year ago

New house, new opportunities Blog posts and website have been on hold for a while due to the stresses and general time consumption of moving house. I am surprised at just how much time gets consumed with the whole packing and unpacking process. Next… read more

Ansible Sudoers Module

Published August 29th 2020 - a year ago

Ansible Ansible is a configuration management tool to facilitate managing "infrastructure as code". I use it extensively to manage up my home server and other computer-based infrastructure. For example, I can take an empty Ubuntu machine, add an… read more

Home Server

Published June 25th 2020 - 2 years ago

My first home server back in 2014, was an old cast-off supermicro which had been used as a router, for many years at work. I hand-crafted into LXC containers on a 64GB SSD and a 1.5TB spinning rust drive (also rejects from work) to install various… read more

Jellyfin Electron

Published April 28th 2020 - 2 years ago

Since my last blog post about writing a simple Electron app to wrap the Emby web interface so I could use my keyboards media keys to control the Emby playback, I have started using Jellyfin instead of Emby. I was somewhat expecting to have to… read more

Emby Electron

Published April 12th 2020 - 2 years ago

Emby Emby is a self-hosted personal media platform - think Netflix and Spotify, but using your own media libraries running on your own server. It is written in C#, but will happily run on Linux under Mono. In fact, the Emby server is released for… read more

Switching from Bitwarden to Bitwarden RS

Published April 7th 2020 - 2 years ago

Password management I have been using Bitwarden - an open source, self-hosted password manager for a little over six months. Before that, I used the password manager provided by Google, with it's nice sync feature between devices, so my passwords… read more

Website Rewrite 2020

Published April 4th 2020 - 2 years ago

The old website The previous website was a simple, static, and bootstrap-based website that I quickly threw together on an aeroplane on the way to and probably from the Velocity Europe 2014 conference. I still quite like the design of the old website… read more

Velocity Europe, Barcelona 2014

Published June 28th 2014 - 8 years ago

This year iWeb were kind enough to send me and two of my colleagues to the Velocity conference in Barcelona - and what an amazing time we had. Velocity is a web performance conference to spread knowledge and expertise to make the internet faster… read more