Introduction My homelab first started in 2018 when I got my first server. Since then, it has expanded with a couple more servers and some more networking hardware. Now, though, the chips in the servers are coming up to 14 years old with DDR3 RAM, and their SAS drives are showing their age. Whilst my knowledge of running servers and infrastructure has grown over the years, it hasn’t been reflected in the architecture of my homelab. ...
Right now this project is still being worked on, I’ll update this page with a full walk through but in the meantime here are some pictures.
Land Rover Gearbox Rebuild Part 1 This article is in progress but have a flick through the images to see where I am up to It all started on a trip from Chester to Criccieth. We were driving down the A55 when I started to hear a clinking noise, though I thought nothing of it as there was a high chance it was a bolt that’d been left by one of the previous owners. It wasn’t till we got to Criccieth and decided to go to Portmeirion that it started to jump out of 2nd gear, but we were almost there, so I carried on in 3rd. As we were coming down the hill into the car park, I downshifted into 3rd and then it let out a final THUNK! ...
My Homelab Backstory My homelab started off quite well, during year 9 (2018) I was sat in my Dad’s office and they had this big long computer sat on a desk which a later found out was a server. They were throwing it out as they’d gotten new servers to upgrade their infrastructure. Me being the curious person I was I asked if I could have it to take home and pull apart to see what’s inside. Somehow I managed to go home with my first rack-mounted server that day. ...
House Stats: Real-Time UK Housing Market Analysis For my Computer Science NEA, I set out to tackle a problem that frustrated me: despite the UK housing market being one of the most-analysed sectors in the economy, the public data is practically unusable for anyone who isn’t a data scientist or an investment firm. The Land Registry releases monthly CSVs with millions of transactions—but they’re difficult to visualise, painfully slow to process, and impossible to explore interactively. ...
EPQ Crypto Currency EPQ Project – Building a Cryptocurrency from Scratch in Python For my EPQ, I built a working cryptocurrency system completely from scratch using Python. I wanted to understand how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin actually work underneath, so I implemented everything myself from the blockchain and mining system to the peer-to-peer networking between nodes. Writeup GitHub Project Overview The goal was to create a decentralised network where each computer could store and verify transactions without needing a central authority. I broke the project down into several modules: ...