MIND'S
EYE
A look into some of my projects and creations. From being a backyard blacksmith and ceramicist to building hyper-converged hybrid cloud IT infrastructure, I dabble in a bit of everything. You’ll see projects from my Product Design BSc, tinkerings in the garage, and my 8,000W custom sound system – among other things.
Featured Projects
Everything Else
PSA: Running a Tor Middle Relay Can Cause Blacklisting
This is just a quick note to reassure anyone else who thought they were losing their mind because they thought there was something wrong with their firewall or DNS. In the end, it actually wasn’t DNS for once. This is not a particularly ground breaking or surprising observation, but good
Cortical Archival System
sounds way cooler than “AI note taker” CLICK TO WATCH MY INSTAGRAM AND UNDERSTAND THIS! The following was transcribed and corrected by my program – I have not changed it at all. Copy and pasted straight from my brain! So as much as it should be pristine. It’s not. I
HOMELAB ’24
My collection of servers is still going strong and has evolved massively since my last post about my homelab in 2021. It’s now less of a homelab and more of a production ready, hyper-converged, high availability powerhouse. watch this space, I’m gunna make a video, just haven’t got around to
EM1 Prototyping Vlog
A playlist of every update, frustration and breakthrough I had during the prototyping process of my main university project: The EM1. I recommend checking out my other post about the EM1 to find out more about it. View the Full playlist Or watch it here…
Automated Aeropress Coffee Machine
This was the main project of the Mechanics & Electronics module at Loughborugh University in my final year. Despite being a piss poor module which came under fire from our entire cohort, the outcome was rather fun. The brief was to design a device that would automagically plunge an Aeropress
CNC Isogrids
In October 2022 I got a small CNC router. To test it out and push it’s limits I decided to try out Winston Moy’s isogrid coasters. I designed the coasters in Solidworks – very similar to Winston’s but adapted to the stock I had. I then used Solidwork’s built in
Troubleshooting Very Average Wireguard Performance on IONOS
I’ve been obsessing over this on and off for about a month, and I just can’t seem to figure it out. The situation is as follows: public internet ———-> VPS <====WG Tunnel====> pfSense ———-> LAN/Server I have a Wireguard tunnel set up to route all traffic between my pfSense LAN
Tom Dick & Harry Website
Project Goal: Replatform an e-commerce shop from the current cloud hosting solution to an on-prem WordPress deployment. I would be taking control of every aspect – essentially assuming the role of a full stack developer. Taking months of planning, testing, migrating, designing and tweaking, this was one of the most
Flint & Steel V3.0 Build Photos
All the photos I took while I was building a Paraflex 15 C2-D kick and a 2×18″ type O.
Homelab ’23
A whistle stop tour of my new server and homelab environment. I’ve migrated from XCP-NG to Proxmox and explain a little bit about my rationale. Apologies it’s in crap video form.
Weird Network Problems in XCP-NG
I have no idea what is going on. I’m getting consistently inconsistent throughput and latency issues. This is a post to collect my findings so far… Not very interesting to anyone else but me. Ping via PIFs: No problems there. Pings between VMs, using VIFs: Not terrible, but not amazing.
MySQL Benchmarks – NFS vs Local Storage
Recently, I migrated my containers from a standalone Docker node to Docker Swarm. On the standalone node I used a local VHD for persistent storage, but now I’m using NFS Docker volumes defined in the compose file. I knew I’d take a slight performance hit serving the files over NFS,
3D Printable Beolab 6000 Wall Mounts
Do you have a pair of Bang & Olufsen Beolab 6000 speakers? Do you have a 3D printer? Do you want to avoid paying £400 for a set of wall mounts for your pair of Beolab 6000s? Well look no further! That pretty much explains this post… I designed some
Optimising VM Performance on XCP-NG – domU Clock Source
My 11G Dell R610 is over a decade old – and it’s beginning to show it’s age. The price to performance ratio is pitiful, so it’s vital that I squeeze every last drop of FLOPS from this computational dinosaur.
The ULTIMATE HAProxy Configuration
Need an all in one, do everything, all singing, all dancing reverse proxy? Look no further! I’ve been building an ultra dense HAProxy system which will take care of SSL passthrough, SSL termination, Let’s Encrypt certificate generation, conversion and autorenewal and the other benefits that come with HAProxy, like caching and load balancing.
GPT-J-6B Chatbot Experiments
GPT-J is a 6 billion parameter model and does a shockingly good job at writing stories, answering questions, and generally giving people existential crises regarding their job security.
Custom V12 Intake Bells
Add 1.5K RPM to your Jaguar V12 XJ-S! Sounds too good to be true, right? In less than 10 hours I redesigned, manufactured and installed new trumpet intakes for our 1990 Jaguar XJS which increased airflow and made a quantifiable difference to the usable rev range. Before, the mighty V12
Deploy a Local Kubernetes Cluster on Debian 11
From someone who has no idea how to deploy a Local Kubernetes Cluster on Debian 11. Kubernetes is an amazingly powerful tool… yada yada yada. Chances are you’re here because you’ve already heard how great it is. So, if you’ve had the same idea as me and want to set
Homelab Part 1: ORIGINS
During the first COVID lockdown, I found a new way to occupy myself and my wallet; I was going to learn how the internet works or go broke trying. That was definitely not my original plan, but it’s definitely what ended up happening and led to the rise and fall
Injection Moulding
The brief was to design an injection moldable widget as a promotional item for a company. It had to use under a certain volume of plastic and be a specific size, and that was it. Each student designed their own widget individually, then grouped together with eight others to choose
sh1tpixels
sh1tpixels is yet another sub-brand of Errant Minds. I created the Instagram account in 2018 as a place to show off the renders and animations I was making at the time. During School, one of my main pastimes outside of the classroom was playing with software like Cinema 4D, Maya,
Tuning VM Performance on XCP-NG for Dell 11G Servers
There’s a great white paper by Dell on BIOS settings for optimal performance on 11G servers (definitely worth a read if this post is relevant to you), but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The thorough testing in the paper was performed with regard to High Performance Computing applications, which
Astrophotography
Whenever I go somewhere with low light pollution, I try and take some photos of the stars…
Raku Fired Ceramics
In 2019 I had the unique opportunity to throw my own pots, and fire them in a Raku kiln. Raku firing is a traditional Japanese pottery firing technique, typically involving removing the pottery from the kiln while it’s red-hot and placing it into a container filled with combustible materials, which