I’m now running pi-hole through my Raspberry Pi 2b.

It’s both amazing and depressing just how many trackers are being blocked by it. I even noticed a regular ping being made to an Amazon endpoint exactly every 10 minutes.

I will try and write up my set up soon, which is a mix of setting up the Raspberry Pi and configuring my home router.


I’ve also managed to finally get a home server running again – using Ubuntu Server LTS.

My plan on my server is to just install services I want to self-host using docker. Docker being the only program I’ve installed on the machine itself.

So far I have installed the following:

  • Home Assistant — On initial playing with this I have decided that it’s incredible. Connected to my LG TV and lets me control it from the app / laptop.
  • Portainer — A graphical way to interact with my docker containers on the server.

I have decided to get back into tinkering with my Raspberry Pi.

I will be blogging my journey as I stumble through my initial playing, through to building out my first proper homelab.

This first Raspberry Pi (model 2b) will be initially used as both a wireguard VPN server and a local DNS server.

The God Slayer by Otep

Front cover of The God Slayer album by Otep

I’ve loved Otep’s music since discovering the album “Sevas Tra” — with that insane album cover being the thing that brought me in.

Earlier today (yesterday) I listened to the recently-released The God Slayer, made up of half original songs and half covers.

Loved it, although Sevas Tra has been — and remains — my favourite of Otep’s.

My favourite songs from my first listen of the album are definitely the covers of Eminem’s “The way I Am” and the Beach Boys’ “California Girls”.

Average Semi-detached house prices in UK by county – Statistical Analysis using R

This is my first data visualization attempt and uses data from HM Land Registry to show to average cost of a semi-detached house in four counties across the past ten years.

You can see the full repository for the project on Github.

The Code

Here I have included the code at the time of writing this post. The git repository code may now differ slightly.

library("tidyverse")

regions  <- c(
  "Derbyshire",
  "Leicestershire",
  "Staffordshire",
  "Warwickshire"
)

data  <- read.csv("props.csv")

data %>%
  filter(Region_Name %in% regions) %>%
  filter(Date > "2013-01-01") %>%
  ggplot(aes(
    Date,
    Semi_Detached_Average_Price
  )) +
  geom_point(aes(color = Region_Name), size = 3) +
  theme_bw() +
  theme(axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 90, vjust = 0.5, hjust = 1)) +
  labs(
    title = "Average Semi-detached house prices per county",
    x = "Month and Year",
    y = "Average Price",
    color = "County"
  )

ggsave(
  "semi-detached-house-prices-derby-leicester-staffs-warwickshire.png",
  width = 4096,
  height = 2160,
  unit = "px"
)

The Graph

Graph to show increasing semi-detached house prices by county.

Observations

Warwickshire has been the most expensive county to buy a semi-detached house out of the four counties observed.

Derbyshire has been the least expensive county to buy a semi-detached house out of the four counties observed.

The shapes of the line formed seem consistent across the counties; the rate of price increase seems similar between them.

A lot can happen over ten years.

Using a single file neovim configuration file

When I first moved my Neovim configuration over to using lua, as opposed to the more traditional vimscript, I thought I was clever separating it up into many files and includes.

Turns out that it became annoying to edit my configuration. Not difficult; just faffy.

So I decided to just stick it all into a single init.lua file. And now its much nicer to work with in my opinion.

View my Neovim init.lua file on Github.