Blog

Expect posts about science, nonsense, brewing, and other interests.

2022-01-19   Self-hosting

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to set up my own server at home to host some services (backup, media server, etc ..). I had bought a Raspberry Pi but did not take the time to set it up and it just took dust in a cupboard for many months.

Recently, I discovered the Yunohost distribution, which is supposed to make self-hosting easy. Well, it does!. In a few hours, I had the server set up with the first services running. Things are really easy to administrate, applications are already packaged and can be installed in a click! The full catalogue is available at https://yunohost.org/en/apps

At the moment I have the following services running:

• navidrome for streaming my music collection, with compatible apps for smartphone
• Tiny Tiny RSS as a RSS reader (because RSS rocks)
• nextcloud for cloud storage
• lychee for photo gallery (google photos replacement)

2021-12-29   Post-rock rediscovery

Once an avid listener of post-rock music - particularly while working - I grew tired of it a while ago and switched to listening mostly radios (such as Radio Paradise, SomaFM digitalis, or French public service radio FIP).

I rediscovered my post-rock music folder while cleaning out my hard-drive and listened my way through it while working - most tracks being without vocals, it’s pretty good for focussing. Here are some pretty good albums suggestions for you:

• The Evpatoria Report - Maar, an unbelievably good album. Golevka is very much excellent too.

• Amiina - Kurr, 4 Icelanding women creating absolutely amazing atmospheric music. Wikipedia put them in the post-rock genre so it must be on this list. Check out the Puzzle album too!

• Red Sparowes - Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun, one of my favourite album back then and saw them play in Lyon. They definitely use the classic post-rock trope of terribly long track names ("Like the Howling Glory of the Darkest Winds, This Voice Was Thunderous and the Words Holy, Tangling Their Way Around Our Hearts and Clutching Our Innocent Awe” … really?)

• Mogwai - Rock Action, one of the classic band. This is one of the many good albums they produced, evolving their styles as their went! Lost my hearing for a day after seeing them in Stockholm 🙄

2021-12-21   Happy Solstice

The night is long, the Sun is low, but tomorrow, things start changing.

Happy solstice!

2021-10-15   Back to work

It’s back-to-work time. After two months of parental leave, I went back to work 2 weeks ago, the day Covid restrictions were entirely lifted here in Sweden. Since them, I got to get into a routine, two days taking the train and working in the office, the rest working from home.

It’s good to see the office now more lively with more colleagues, and we also got our first regular observing run with CRIRES at the VLT. I was the remote observer for the first night - the dome did not open because of clouds :-(. However, the subsequent two nights were rather good and data flowed in!

2021-08-29   The hop harvest

In the spring, I planted 4 old varieties of Swedish hops in my residence [1,2]. Last week I finally harvested the previous cones, dried them, and froze them to be used in brewing beer in the coming weeks and months. For a first year, the harvest in not bad: I got around 450 g of dried hops, which would be enough for 100-200 litres of beer.

2021-08-25   The great time machine / analog pictures

One of the first analog film I ever shot, with my dad’s old Praktica Pentor 2, just resurfaced. It is from 9 years ago, in 2012. A cheap, and great time-machine. I was in Uppsala at the time, doing my first reseach internship, with the people I have now ended up working with!