Bentasker

About 4 years ago, I looked into how effective my SSH tarpits were. Since then, I've also deployed an AI crawler tarpit ( technically a maze - it generates an endless number of pages) to serve "content" up to crawlers who ignore my "No Entry" signs. I tho

Short post describing creating a padded bench for our campervan

Over the years, I've come to use project management systems quite heavily even for things with no code involved. I maintain projects to track things that need doing round the house, maintaining cars, the LAN and even financial planning. The ability to add

About five years ago, I migrated my project management from JIRA to Gitlab. There were some initial teething problems but, over the last half decade, Gitlab has served my needs pretty well. The urge to replace it, though, has been growi...

Short post describing how to replace the blower fan resistor on a Citroen Relay van. Also apparently applicable to Nemo, Ducato and Boxer.

Although most of my time-series data still lives in InfluxDB, I also have VictoriaMetrics running and playing host to daily todo list stats along with a few other things. However, I recently realised that I screwed up when deploying it: I'd assumed that d

Our main solar install has now been active for three years. Although the beginning of this year under performed compared to the same time in 2025, we're currently in the middle of a heatwave and the pounding sun has driven yields up at the last minute. Th

My Saab recently started to throw a warning when first starting the car: To clear the warning, I had to turn the ignition off and on again - the warning didn't fire the second time. The warning itself is triggered by the battery's voltage dipping too low

Over the last few years, I've put quite a bit of work into our solar generation stats, tracking generated electricity value and calculating when the install will break even. The calculations marry each kWh generated with the Octopus Agile import cost at t

This week, engineering attended an on-site in Virginia, USA. The schedule has been extremely meeting heavy - there is, after all, a lot that we need to get done. But, before things got started, I took a small group of the team to a gun range in the town.