The State of My Homelab 2023

It’s been almost seven years since I started self-hosting. This became a hobby of mine from the beginning and I found myself dedicating a lot of my afternoons (and whole days) to experiment with new technologies, hardware configurations, networking, automation, and many many more things. I never took the chance to talk about this in my blog, so now I want to finally open up and give you a glimpse into my homelab setup, sharing what I’ve been using, hosting and what are some of my thoughts about the future....

September 26, 2023

Create Virtual Machines in Seconds

I was tired of going through the repetitive and time-consuming process of installing a new virtual machine from scratch every time I needed to test something in an isolated environment. Sure, containers are an easy way to provide this isolation but there were some cases I wanted to have a VM in minutes. In this post, we’ll walk through the simple steps to create a reusable template using the latest Debian version (12 - Bookworm) and the Proxmox hypervisor....

July 6, 2023

Breaking Up with Ghost: My Move to Hugo

When I started this blog, I chose Ghost as the backend because it appeared to be a fresher alternative to the bloated WordPress. I didn’t need all the features offered by WordPress, and a simpler platform seemed like the obvious choice. I installed it, created a couple of posts and I was pretty happy. I made sure to keep the backend up-to-date by installing the latest security patches and reviewing the release notes to avoid any compatibility issues with newer versions....

April 22, 2023

Getting an iOS device MAC Address with Swift

Both Android and iOS don’t allow applications to get the MAC address using their published API. Here, we will see if we can avoid this restriction and get the address using a feature of IPv6. What is a MAC Address A MAC address, or physical address, is a 48-bit number that uniquely identifies a device in a network segment. This number is assigned to the device by the manufacturer and usually doesn’t change (but it can be spoofed)....

February 10, 2020

Introduction to Genetic Algorithms

“A breakthrough in machine learning would be worth ten Microsofts” Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft We live in the era of machine learning. Scientists and researchers from around the world are using it to improve our lives in ways we never imagined and advertisers to reach the most relevant people to sell their products. It’s not a recent idea but it scaled so much lately due to great breakthroughs in computer hardware....

August 27, 2017

Initial steps on your new server

It was not long ago when I received a message from my friend DaKnOb. He told me “Hey, I found that the domain spanagiot.gr is free. Why don’t you register it and set up your own server?”. In no time, I got the domain and a server running the latest Ubuntu (16.04 at this point). Here is what I learned in my short journey: First three commands Let’s say that your server has been up and running and it’s waiting for you to connect and deploy all these amazing services you have thought of....

January 27, 2017