After having used CentOS for quite some time on my home server, I finally decided I’d had enough and wanted to change over to Ubuntu 20.04 instead. There were a few reasons for this - but critically because of the support drop for CentOS 8, and how far CentOS tends to run behind fast-moving projects like containerization.

I’m a fairly keen HomeAssistant user, and I also use Splunk for log analysis and as a lab for learning about it since my work uses it. I was pretty interested in getting Home Assistant telemetry into Splunk, and in particular into the metric indexes that Splunk can store for efficiency and longer-term graphing of data from all my sensors.

I’ve got a HP Reverb G2 VR Headset, which I’m pretty happy with. It requires some pretty serious GPU power to drive it though, which can be quite challenging. While the headset as it comes out of the factory is pretty well right, there’s some additional parts one can 3d print in order to improve it.

My main home hypervisor is running Centos 8, and is headless. I have a need to have a PCIe graphics card plugged into it, and then adjust the clocks and fan control settings, but I really don’t want to be running an X server on it and/or have a monitor plugged in. So I figured out how to do exactly that.

A couple of months ago I decided to finally get around to doing my Foundation license for Amateur Radio. I was successful, got assigned my callsign, and went out and bought myself a basic radio kit. I’m mostly interested in the QRP (low power) side of things, and constructing my own equipment, antennas and that sort of stuff.

I’ve been playing DCS World a fair bit more lately, specifically the F/A-18C module. I have a HOTAS Warthog controller, which is pretty great, but unfortunately the switches can be a bit deficient when you’re playing something that is not an A-10C.