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Thinking more about backups

2025-11-01T00:00:00Z

The Backblaze logo

Almost a year ago I wrote about how I do backups with Restic and Hetzner. That system has been ticking along well ever since, but recently I had some… thoughts. These backups are all well and good if I accidentally delete a file, or a database gets corrupted, or something, but there are two glaring issues:

Firstly, I’m backing up my Hetzner server to Hetzner cloud storage. If something happens to Hetzner — or my Hetzner account — then all my eggs go down with that basket. Obviously Hetzner are a big organisation and aren’t likely to just vanish overnight, but I’m less confident about my account. Could a false abuse report get it suspended? What if the UK passes even more dumb laws and Hetzner decide it’s easier just to not do business with people here? This is the same sort of concern I have about Google accounts: if you have half of your life in Google Drive and Google Mail, what happens if you comment on a YouTube video, get flagged by an AI moderation process, and your account gets suspended? It’s probably not very likely, but these are things my brain likes to dwell on.

Secondly, the credentials to access the backups sit on each machine that is backed up. If someone malicious gained access to the machine, they’d also have access to delete or tamper with all the backups. It feels a little silly that the same attack could take down both the originals and the backups. There’s no way to avoid that with Hetzner’s S3 implementation, as far as I can tell.

Exploring options

I toyed with the idea of making local copies of the backups, but the only way to avoid the same problems would be to keep them offline and do a manual copy every now and then. I didn’t really want to do that, and was concerned that if I did a monthly offline backup then I stood to lose up to a month of data in the worst case.

I then looked around at other S3 providers. Amazon’s glacier offering is tempting due to its very low storage costs, but you pay for that if you ever want to restore anything. There are also lots of weird pricing edge cases around moving data between storage classes, minimum file sizes, and so on. A much better option is Backblaze’s B2 product. Their pricing is much more straight-forward, and they have an interesting feature that’s particularly useful in this case: lifecycle rules. Coupled with the ability to create API keys that don’t have access to delete files (just “hide” them), this allows for what’s effectively an append-only store.

This works more-or-less out of the box with Restic. Joseph Price has a guide that goes into the setup in a bit more depth. Basically, whenever Restic would delete a file (e.g. during a “forget” or “prune” operation), it instead gets hidden and is only deleted when the B2 lifecycle rules decide it should be. I’ve kept the existing Hetzner S3 backups for now, and just added an extra step to the end of my script: a simple restic copy and a restic forget. B2 actually works out cheaper than the Hetzner storage, as they don’t bill you for a minimum of 1TB storage; my current usage is around $3/month. Not a bad price for some extra peace of mind!

Home Automation Without the Megacorps

2025-05-21T00:00:00Z

I first experimented with home automation in 2016, by picking up a Samsung “SmartThings” hub. It was terrible. The UI to configure things was slow and clunky, firmware updates were applied whether you wanted them or not, and everything stopped working if their cloud services stopped. You were also locked into whatever integrations they deigned to support, of course. After that broke for the umpteenth time I scaled back and for years the closest I got to home automation was a couple of Hue bulbs.

Recently I’ve been building it out again, though. This time using off-the-shelf components that interop using Zigbee, open-source software, and some code I wrote myself. It’s great; it runs entirely locally and has had basically zero downtime. The Zigbee ecosystem lets me integrate all sorts of things without having to spend lots of money on “smart” alternatives. I think I’ve spent less on this incarnation than I did on the original SmartThings hub all those years ago (even without adjusting for inflation!).

My current setup

I run everything on a Raspberry Pi 4, with a Sonoff USB Zigbee adapter based on the CC2652P chipset¹. Interfacing with the Zigbee stack is handled by zigbee2mqtt (z2m for short), an open-source project that basically bridges your devices to an MQTT broker². When a device reports some data, it will send a new message over MQTT; when you want to make a device do something you just post a message back. It’s incredibly lightweight, but supports a huge array of devices out of the box. And as it’s just using MQTT, it’s trivial to integrate with other software or build on top of.

I know a lot of people building out this kind of home automation use Home Assistant, but I don’t get on with it terribly well. It felt incredibly sluggish, and the entire project is just a bit… much. I want a binary or package or docker image I can just run, not an entire operating system. That’s not how computers are meant to work! In contrast, z2m is simple to set up, super light weight and responsive.

Anyway. z2m exposes Zigbee devices over MQTT, so I wrote some code in Go to connect to the MQTT broker, and listen to the messages. It’s grown a bit beyond this now, and I’m skipping some boring bits like error handling and JSON parsing, but at first I had something like:

for {
    message, topic, err := c.ReadSlices()
    
    if string(topic) == "zigbee2mqtt/desk-button" {
        if strings.Contains(message, "single") {
            c.Publish(nil, []byte("{\"state\": \"TOGGLE\"}"), "zigbee2mqtt/room-lights/set")
        }
    }
}

I think I actually made this harder to read by trying to simplify it here, but hopefully you can follow that it was relatively straight forward to listen for a particular action to happen (in this case me “single”-pressing on the device called “desk-button”) and then make another device do something in response (toggling the state of the “room-lights” device).

So what actually are these devices? At present in z2m I have the following:

Some generic buttons
An air quality sensor (USB powered), and a separate temperature sensor (battery powered)
A light switch
Some 240V relay modules, that I use to turn non-smart devices on and off
Some USB relay modules, for the same purpose
Some “smart” plugs that I mostly use to monitor power usage
A motorised blind roller

I think all of these are either Tuya or Moes branded, and were all sourced from AliExpress. You can get the same things from Amazon or elsewhere, but they tend to be 3-4x more expensive for the same product.

One of the cool things about Zigbee devices is that the powered ones work together to create a mesh network, so you don’t have to worry about network repeaters or signal strength like you do with Wi-Fi networks. z2m even makes a map showing the connections:

The network map produced by z2m. You can see how all the powered devices form a mesh that the lower power ones can connect to.

Some interesting automations

A Zigbee relay spliced into the power cable for the fan

So what do I actually do with all of this? Some of it is just what I’ll call “laziness automation”: I want to be able to turn on the lights without getting up and walking to the light switch. So there’s a Zigbee button on my desk that does it. Then there are some less manual automations: my blinds are automatically closed at sunset³, for example. It feels a bit trivial, but it’s surprisingly nice just not to have to think about that at all.

Another nice quality of life automation is the light I have above my monitor. It’s USB powered, and I now have it going through a Zigbee USB relay that lets it be toggled on and off. Then I have a small agent running on my desktop that turns the light on when the computer is unlocked, and off when it locks or shuts down. I keep meaning to make a “film mode” that detects when I’m watching a film, and turning all the lights and blinds down, but I haven’t got around to it yet.

The most complex automation is probably for a window fan. It’s not smart in any way, so I cut the power cable and inserted a Zigbee relay. The whole thing is housed in a little project box to keep it secure. The relay basically acts as a switch: the live wire leading to the fan runs to the “normally open”⁴ contact, while the upstream power goes to “common”. When the relay is told to turn the fan on, the two get connected and the fan gets power. Oh, it’s also not actually a window fan, but I designed and 3D printed some adapters so that it sits right in the window.

So now we have a window fan that can be turned off and on automatically. But I don’t want to have to press a button to do that. I’m lazy, remember? Instead, I made it so that the Go code constantly monitors the temperature reported by the air quality sensor, and queries the free OpenWeatherMap API to get the rough temperature outside. It can then turn the fan on if the room is too hot, and outside is cool enough to make a difference (there’s no point in blowing hotter air in!).

A graph of room temperature, showing the effect of the fan being turned on and off

I don’t want it to do that all the time though. The room doesn’t need to be cooled if I’m not around. There are various Zigbee presence sensors you can get, but the cheaper ones seem to be of dubious quality. Instead, I wrote some code to guess whether I’m present. It uses the state of the monitor light as a proxy for “is the computer in use”, and then makes some guesses based on the last time the computer was used and the current time (if I turn the computer off at midnight it probably means I’m going to sleep; if I turn it off at 2pm it probably means I’m going out somewhere).

You can see in the graph that the fan has a decent impact on temperature. I coded it to cool the room to 19 degrees, but then not turn on again until it was above 20. This prevents it flip-flopping on and off constantly. You can clearly see the pattern in the graph, as it actively cools and then slowly the room warms back up. This arrangement is much better than being woken up at 5am because it’s painfully cold. Trust me.

Bonuses: metrics and 3D printer

One of the things my custom Go code does is collate all the various stats reported by the Zigbee devices, and inserts them into a VictoriaMetrics database. I originally hosted this on the Pi itself, and it performed fine, but I’ve since moved it onto a server so that I can use it for some other things as well.

I set up Grafana to point to VM, and can create dashboards showing power usage, what devices are turned on when, and a bunch of environmental conditions. This also makes it easy to spot how good the data coming from the devices are. For example, the air quality sensor reports a figure for the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the air, as well as the amount of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). The graphs are basically identical, but on a different scale. It turns out this particular device has no actual way of detecting CO₂, so it just “calculates” it from the VOCs figure. Useful to know if you want to actually use that data.

Recently I came across a go library for interacting with Bambu Lab printers, so I’ve also hooked that into my automation. It exports metrics about the printer, so I now have a way of seeing what’s going on when I’m not physically present⁵. I even added a HTTP endpoint (exposed over Tailscale) that shows pictures from the built-in camera.

On the automation front, I’ve made it automatically turn off the printer’s light when it finishes a print, and also added push notifications via PushOver whenever the state changes. No longer will I be sat in another room blissfully unaware it ran out of filament seconds after I walked out the door!

Was it worth it?

These days you could probably just buy some kind of ‘smart home’ hub that works well enough, and do most of what I’ve done with a lot less effort and no coding. I’m still of the opinion that for something so essentially local, it should itself be managed entirely locally. I don’t trust companies like Google or Amazon not to kill their products, or change or remove an API I rely on.

Obviously the “Not Invented Here” approach of coding everything yourself doesn’t suit everyone, but as someone who enjoys coding and enjoys having things work just so it works very well for me.

It turns out the chipset is important. I initially used a similar Sonoff dongle that used a CC2531 chipset, and its performance wasn’t great. It often failed to pair with new devices, and dropped links to existing ones. The zigbee2mqtt docs do explicitly advise against the CC2531 chips for that reason. At the time they recommended CC2652Ps, so that’s what I went with. If you’re starting new I’d go with whatever their latest recommendation was. ↩︎
MQTT is basically a network protocol for publishing and subscribing to arbitrary messages. A broker is the thing that sits in the middle and routes the messages. I use Mosquitto but any will do. ↩︎
They originally also re-opened at sunrise but that was a terrible mistake. Who knew the sun rose so early?! ↩︎
“open” meaning “there’s a gap so it doesn’t work” not “open for business”. This confusion in terminology also extends to drawbridges. ↩︎
I use the printer in LAN mode, which means there’s no way to monitor it from a phone, even if you’re connected to the same network still. ↩︎

Simple backups with Restic and Hetzner Cloud

2024-12-06T00:00:00Z

Restic’s mascot, who’s dual-wielding umbrellas to save you from a rainy day.

I have a confession: for the past few years I’ve not been backing up any of my computers. Everyone knows that you should do backups, but actually getting around to doing it is another story.

Don’t get me wrong: most of my important things are “backed up” by virtue of being committed to remote git repositories, or attached to e-mails, or re-obtainable from the original source, and so on. I don’t think any machine failing completely would be a disaster for me, but it would certainly be a pain.

This week I finally got around to doing something, and it ended up being a lot more straight forward than my previous forays into backup-land.

Restic

After soliciting a few opinions, the choice of backup software came down to either Borg or Restic. I’m pretty sure either would have done what I want, but I leaned towards Restic for a few reasons: it has a more informative website, it’s written in Go rather than Python¹, and Borg seems to be transitioning between major releases at the moment².

The way Restic works is pretty simple: you initialise a ‘repository’, and can then call restic backup /some/path and it’ll get backed up to the repository. Restic handles keeping different backups separate, and only sending data that’s changed, and deduplicating, and so on. You basically point it at a thing you don’t want to lose, and it sorts it out for you. Perfect.

There are equally straight-forward commands for removing old snapshots (restic forget) and verifying backups (restic check). One of the nice things about modern backup solutions is they support a whole range of backends. I was originally going to spin up a small VPS to host my backups, but noticed that Restic supported S3-compatible stores…

Hetzner Cloud Object Storage

I host my servers with Hetzner, and was going to use them to spin up a VPS as well. Despite the “Cloud” branding on a bunch of products, they offer reasonable prices and good service. A couple of months ago, they started offering S3-compatible object storage.

The pricing isn’t totally straight forward, but for continuous use the “free quota” amounts to 1TB of storage and 1TB of egress a month. Ingress is free, as is traffic within the eu-central region (where all my servers are). That quota is only awarded when you pay the “base price”, though, which is €4.99 a month. So basically it’s €5 a month for 1TB of storage and enough egress to fully restore every single byte. That’s better value than any VPS I can find, much cheaper than Amazon S3, and about the same as Backblaze B2.

Getting them to work together

Now you’d think making the tool that supports S3-compatible object storage work with your S3-compatible object storage would be easy, right? Well not quite. The library Restic uses to deal with S3 backends has some strange logic for figuring out the bucket name given a URL. It doesn’t quite seem to work right, though…

Hetzner buckets have URLs like s3://bucketname.hel1.your-objectstorage.com³, but just passing that to Restic gives an error that the bucket is not specified. The docs mention there’s an advanced option to make it use the virtual host for the bucket name: -o s3.bucket-lookup=dns. But that… also doesn’t work. What I ended up doing was specifying the URL as s3://hel1.your-objectstorage.com/bucketname, and also passing in the dns option. The library then seems to muddle its way back to a real, working URL. I’m not sure why it works like this: maybe it’s just a weird aspect of S3 that I’m oblivious to?

The next fun part is that you can configure Restic entirely by using environment variables, except for that -o s3.bucket-lookup=dns argument. That has to go on the command line. I ended up making a little wrapper script to invoke Restic correctly:

#!/bin/sh

# The password restic will use to encrypt your data. You should generate
# something nice and secure.
export RESTIC_PASSWORD=repo-password

# The path to the repository where restic will save the backup. In our case
# this takes the form `s3:<endpoint>/<bucket>`. Your endpoint might be different
# to mine depending on the region your bucket is in.
export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=s3:hel1.your-objectstorage.com/bucket-name

# The access and secret key generated in the 'S3 credentials' section of the
# Hetzner Cloud Console
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=hetzner-access-key-id
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=hetzner-access-key

# Pass any arguments on to the restic command, along with the magic
# `s3.bucket-lookup` option we need to resolve the S3 URL properly.
exec restic -o s3.bucket-lookup=dns "$@"

Then in the backup script I just alias restic to use the script:

#!/bin/bash

set -eu

# This means any time we use `restic` below, we'll actually execute our special
# script which supplies all the env vars and arguments needed to find the
# repository. Make sure the path matches where you saved the script!
alias restic='~/.bin/restic'

# Actually do the backup. Each directory in the list below will be backed up
# separately.
dirs=(
	"/some/path/to/backup/"
	"/some/other/path/"
)
for i in "${dirs[@]}" 
do
	echo $i
	(cd $i && restic --verbose backup .)
done

# Prune our snapshots. You can tweak the numbers here. Run with `--dry-run` to
# see what effect any changes would have before actually committing to them. 
restic forget --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 10 --keep-monthly 24 --keep-yearly 10

The only other notable thing here is that the script changes into the directory to be backed up. If you give Restic an absolute path, it will create a new snapshot if the metadata of any folder in the path changes, which is not what I want.

If it wasn’t for the S3 URL issues, the whole thing would’ve probably taken me about half an hour. That’s including setting up the object storage, installing Restic, and so on. It’s painfully easy. Why didn’t I do this three years ago?!

Addendum: a step-by-step guide

If you want to do this yourself, here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

Log in to the Hetzner Cloud Console, and create a project.
On the “Object Storage” tab, create a new bucket. Note the name and the endpoint.
On the “Security” tab, go to “S3 Credentials” and generate new credentials. Note down the access key and the secret key.
Copy the first shell script above, fill in the password (you can pick!), endpoint, bucket name, access key and secret key.
Run the script with the init argument (e.g. ~/.bin/restic init). This will create a new repository, and only needs to be done once even if you backup multiple machines.
Copy the second shell script above, making sure the restic alias points at the script you saved in step 4. Change the list of directories to whatever you want to backup.
Schedule the script to be run automatically, using crontab or systemd timers or however you prefer.

To check everything is working, you can use the snapshots subcommand to see a list of saved snapshots. You might also want to try to restore a snapshot using the restore subcommand.

I’m not trying to be a language snob, but given the choice between two otherwise equal projects one in Go and one in Python, I’ll take the Go one. I know I’m not going to have weird library issues down the line, and I’m much more comfortable rummaging around the source. ↩︎
With a “Don’t use this in production!” notice on the shiny new version. ↩︎
Aside: I really hate URLs like that. What is with the trend for completely generic domains divorced from the service they’re a part of? ↩︎

How I Get Things Done

2024-09-01T00:00:00Z

I always quite like reading about how other people do things. What software or hardware they use, or how they manage reminders, todo lists, and so on. I’ve never actually written about how I do any of that, though. So here it is!

Productivity

In the past I’ve fallen victim to the idea of there being One True Productivity System that would solve all my problems and make me amazing at getting things done. The title of this post is a nod to Getting Things Done, which I’ve read and tried to religiously follow in the past, but it’s just not for me. One thing that did actually stick from it, though, was the idea of “open loops”:

Anything that does not belong where it is, the way it is, is an “open loop,” which will be pulling on your attention if it’s not appropriately managed.

If I want to do something and it’s not recorded in a way I trust, it weighs on me a little. Those little weights all add up, and just make life uncomfortable. I deal with those in a few ways:

Inbox Zero-ish: if an e-mail needs me to do something, it sits in my inbox until it’s done. When it’s done, it gets archived.
Notes: random things I try to remember I put into my notes, so I can search for them later.
Budget: anything monetary I just adjust in my budget or create a category for.
Todo list: any other kind of task I want/need to do either now or at some point in the future goes into Todoist.

Todoist

In the past I’ve gone through a lot of different todo systems, once again hunting for one that will fix all my problems etc¹. In the end I always ended up coming back to Todoist, and have stuck with it for a decent period now.

In Todoist, I have everything split up into projects. Work projects are one colour and personal projects are another. Anything that needs more than a handful of individual tasks gets a project, which is archived when it’s done. Any one-off things that don’t neatly fall into projects go into “Random junk” project.

As I’m writing this, I have 116 items in 22 projects. A good deal of those are things that I might want to do at some point, not things that I actively need to worry about. If I want to get one of them done, I schedule it so it shows up in the “today” view. I have the Todoist desktop app open automatically when I login to my computer, and it gets positioned on the right hand side of my ultra-wide monitor, so I can see the “today” view and add/remove things immediately at any point.

I’m not precious about tasks becoming overdue, or unscheduling things I’d previously scheduled. Priorities change, ideas that sounded good a week ago might no longer sound good, and so on.

I do a few things to help me manage tasks and keep track of things:

I have a monthly recurring task to look through everything that’s not scheduled, just so I keep a rough idea of what’s there, and can update or get rid of it as needed.
I wrote todoistager and have it running on a server to automatically apply tags to tasks based on their rough age: weeks, months or years. This lets me identify things that are lingering and reconsider them².
I automate adding tasks for things that demand my attention, like incoming GitHub pull requests. The Todoist API is nice and straight forward, and hooking it up to things is trivial.

Other desktop software

For notes I use Logseq, and I just put whatever I need to write under today’s note and rely on search or tags to find it again when I need to. I note basically anything that I might like to use again in the future. One of my most common tags is #blub, a term I came across in the excellent article “In defense of blub studies”. Blub is random ultra-specific knowledge; it might not be eminently useful to know on its own, but over time it can pay dividends.

I’ve previously tried a bunch of note taking apps, and methodologies, but like with todo lists I end up just wanting something that just works and stays out of the way. Logseq stores notes in Markdown, and I have a cronjob to commit and push my changes to a private git repository.

Like Todoist, Logseq launches when I log into my computer, and sits in the same 500px-or-so region on the right of my monitor. This allows me to switch from Todoist to take or refer to notes when needed. To do this positioning, I use devilspie2. I also use this to position Discord and my IRC client side-by-side on a small portable monitor that sits underneath my ultrawide.

More mundane software: I use IntejjiJ IDEA for almost all development and complex text editing³. The only exception is Android development where Android Studio rules the roost. For lighter text editing, Sublime Text is my choice.

I spend a fair bit of the time at the command line. I use kitty as a terminal emulator, with the zsh shell and Oh My Zsh for some nice plugins and enhancements. One thing I couldn’t live without is autojump, which allows quickly jumping to any directory you’ve previously visited using a substring of the name.

Web browsing is all Firefox, with Bitwarden for password management and two pinned Fastmail tabs, one for personal e-mail and one for work. I don’t think there’s much else to note there.

Oh, I use Arch, by the way.

Infrastructure

This is the hodge-podge of things that support my computer usage but sit outside the actual computer. In no particular order…

All my DNS queries go through NextDNS using DNS-over-HTTPS. NextDNS lets you add custom responses, block certain things from resolving, and subscribe to pre-made anti-tracking or anti-advertising lists. It gives you far more control over everything than most other services I’ve looked at.

Every device I control runs Tailscale to enable remote access. I also use Tailscale’s SSH authentication feature for my servers, allowing quick and easy access from my phone where I don’t have or want normal SSH keys.

One exciting service that combines these two is golink. It was created by Tailscale, presumably based on the go service used extensively inside Google. I run a version on my tailnet, and have NextDNS configured to resolve go to the tailscale IP of the service. That lets me type “go/whatever” on any machine I set up with NextDNS and Tailscale, including mobile devices. I use go links for all sorts of things:

Shortcuts to tools I use commonly: go/board gets updated to my current client’s kanban board or similar tracker, whether it’s in Jira, GitHub, Asana or whatever; go/meet goes to Google Meet with the user parameter set so I’m logged in with my work account not my personal account.
In place of bookmarks: go/flex goes to the CSS-Tricks flexbox guide⁴, go/cad goes to the OnShape login page, go/hmrc goes to the HMRC online services page, and so on
A few dynamic things: go/github/chameth.com will go to the csmith/chameth.com project on GitHub; go/ref/pipico will go to the Pi Pico page on my electronics reference wiki.

For my servers I have a minimal Ansible setup that does some basic configuration and deploys SSH keys to the right places. Almost everything runs inside Docker, and I use my own software for HTTP proxying: Dotege uses tags I apply to containers to build a config for Centauri which handles reverse proxying, using Let’s Encrypt for TLS certs. At the minute I have two servers: a dedicated server that runs basically all my services (including this website), and a little VPS for monitoring and backups. Both are from Hetzner.

I wrote my own basic monitoring software called Goplum to make sure things that should be running on my servers actually are. If it fails checks it sends a notification to my phone using Pushover, and a message to a channel on my private IRC server (running Ergo).

Hardware

For the last two years I’ve used a laptop as my main computer⁵. It’s a Dell G15 Special Edition. After some upgrades its specs are:

Intel i7-12700H processor
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card
2x32GB DDR5 RAM
2TB Gen4 SSD

At home it sits behind my Alienware AW3423DWF monitor. This is a Quantum Dot OLED monitor, and I bought it almost immediately upon seeing someone else use it at a LAN event. As did three other people that were sat near us. It just looks so good. I wasn’t sure I’d get on with a widescreen monitor, and made sure it supported picture-by-picture before buying it, but have never actually used that. I generally run whatever I’m working on at nearly-fullscreen, then have Todoist or Logseq on the far right. Games go fullscreen over everything, of course.

Above the widescreen I have a curved lightbar that I find helps reduce eyestrain and makes it easier to focus on the monitor. And on top of that I have a Logitech Brio webcam which gives a great picture with lots of control over pan/zoom/etc for meetings. I have a little set of systemd scripts that detect when the external webcam is connected and disable the laptop’s built-in webcam, and vice-versa when it’s disconnected; that means whenever I jump into a video call in any app there’s only one input and it’s always the right one, which is nice.

Below the main monitor and its friends, I have a generic 1080p portable monitor connected to the laptop via USB-C. This comes with me when I travel, and serves as a Discord/IRC monitor when at home. It’s handy for throwing other things on as well, like if I need to reference a design while writing code, and don’t want to keep alt+tabbing.

I have two Durgod K320 keyboards: one with Cherry MX Silent Red switches for when I’m at home and don’t want to annoy people with the sounds, and one with Cherry MX Blues for when I’m travelling and can make a bit more noise in exchange for a much nicer typing experience. They’re both tenkeyless so they can handily fit in a backpack.

I use a Zowie EC1-C wired mouse, which does the job well. I got fed up with mice from more mainstream manufacturers failing: my previous mouse was a Razer Viper that lasted 7 months before it started losing clicks. All my audio goes through a HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless, which has the most insanely good battery life of any wireless headset I’ve ever owned or seen. Their claim of 300 hours is not just marketing!

In non-computer hardware, I have a Bambu P1S 3D printer that I’ve mentioned in my blog before. For printing in fewer dimensions I have an Epson EcoTank ET-1810, which is surprisingly reasonable for an inkjet printer, and the ink costs aren’t as astronomical as normal cartridges. Plus, you can’t decide to DRM ink when it’s loaded raw into the printer…

I have a small Zigbee network set up mainly to control the lights and the old 3D printer I no longer use (the P1S has a sensible standby mode so you don’t have to yank its power away to make the fans stop spinning!). That’s run through a Raspberry Pi running Zigbee2Mqtt and a custom app I wrote to monitor events on MQTT and generate the appropriate responses (or just log the data).

My daily-driver phone is an iPhone 15 Pro, but I have a bunch of Android devices kicking around for work purposes. I read nearly every day on a Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition.

Money and work

I use You Need A Budget for figuring out how much money I can spend on what, and making sure I have enough put aside for bills and taxes and so on. I use it for both business and personal accounts together, but I mark all the business categories and accounts with a 💼 emoji, and have some scripts that use the API to make sure the money split makes sense⁶.

Every recurring monthly and annual payment has a category, as do all upcoming events I plan to attend, and all the wonderful taxes I have to pay. I also have categories for hobbies and other expenditure. I think all of that is pretty typical for a normal YNAB setup.

I also use YNAB for tracking anything I might like to buy at some point: it gets a category in a “Wishlist” group, and I’ll occasionally budget to buy things from there. I try (and often fail) to use that as a way to put off impulse purchasing. As my income is often very inconsistent, I try to set aside money so that I can “spend” a bit every week on things in the wishlist group. That feels a lot nicer to me than just budgeting everything in one go as soon as I get paid, and gives me more time to consider whether I really want those things⁷.

For work, I do all the more technical accountancy and tax filing and so on through FreeAgent. For my fairly straight-forward tax situation, I can basically manage everything myself using FreeAgent without paying for an accountant. That does mean occasionally spending a bunch of time reading tax manuals, but I’d rather fully understand the rules than just follow advice anyway.

The problem with implementing productivity systems or switching todo apps or anything of that ilk is that it can feel like you’re being productive by doing so. It takes a while to realise that you’re not, and actually getting on with things is better. ↩︎
Or just accept that I’ll maybe do them at some point. I kept the labels vague to try and not make it feel judgmental. ↩︎
Including writing this blog post right now. ↩︎
One day I will get all the justify- and align- options right without looking them up, but until then… ↩︎
This is very normal for developers, but much less common for computer gamers. I’ll probably go back to a desktop next time I upgrade, as I’m travelling a lot less. ↩︎
I can’t just arbitrarily move money from the business to myself, it has to be given as salary or a divided etc, which has tax implications. If I budget “business money” for personal things, then it actually has to be properly transferred and accounted for before being spent (as I’m in effect budgeting a future paycheck). It would be cleaner to keep the accounts completely separate, but I find this way works well for me as I can be a bit more flexible. ↩︎
It feels a little like I’m giving myself pocket money, which is a bit weird, but it’s a lot better than having no “income” for several months when client invoices fall weirdly or I’m between contracts. ↩︎

Further adventures in 3D printing

2024-08-04T00:00:00Z

The Bambu Labs P1S.

Not quite a year ago, I bought a Sovol SV06 3D printer and wrote about my initial experiences. At the end I joked:

I’m sure there will be more problems, but hopefully I get at least a week or so before anything else goes wrong. Maybe I’ll print an “X days since the last SV06 problem” counter…

That turned out to be more prophetic than I expected. It became a running joke that I’d flip the imaginary “days since” sign back to 0 almost every time I printed. I still really enjoyed having a printer, though: it’s so useful to be able to be able to go from an idea to a CAD drawing to a physical object in the space of minutes or hours. So when Bambu Labs reduced the price of the P1S — a printer generally regarded as about as trouble free as you can get — to £522 including shipping, I splurged on one.

Concerns

I make it sound like that was an easy decision, but I actually ummed and ahed a lot before pulling the trigger. I had a lot of objections to a Bambu Labs printer, and wasn’t quite sure if the price made up for them.

The Bambu Labs printers are designed to be more consumer friendly than most previous 3D printers. You can start a model printing directly from their website or mobile app, which employs a cloud-based slicer that then sends the model down to your printer. This is one of those things that sounds amazing for consumers, but should terrify anyone who works with computers. There are so many ways for a “cloud-connected” printer to go wrong, and with such potentially disastrous results it gives me anxiety just thinking about it.

This is not just theoretical, either. In a blog post with the rather under-stated title of “Initial Investigation in the Bambu Cloud Temporary Outage”, Bambu describe how a server-side error caused printers to start printing unprompted. Users on Reddit reported printers starting in the middle of the night, trying to print on top of other objects that were left on the build plate, and so on. 3D printers can easily start fires; having them cloud controlled is frankly insane.

As a result of that “temporary outage”, Bambu further improved the “LAN mode” for their printers, which allows you to sever its connection from their servers and control it over the network. That’s basically how my old printer worked anyway, so I was happy enough that I could enable LAN mode and ignore all the cloud nonsense.

My other objection to Bambu was more nebulous. Almost all 3D printers are built upon open source software, and some companies like Prusa go out of their way to make their products more open to give back to the community. Bambu don’t really do any of that: I’d be very surprised if they hadn’t incorporated a bunch of open source software into their printers and just ignored the licences¹. I’d much rather give my money to a company doing good, but the only equivalent printer was the Prusa MK4 which was double the price and didn’t come with an enclosure. To add an enclosure kit would have made it £800 more expensive than the P1S, and I just can’t justify that.

Experience

The initial setup of the P1S was a breeze. While the SV06 shipped in parts, the P1S came fully assembled and just needed some packaging and retaining screws removed. These were all clearly marked with large coloured arrows. It’s very much designed so anyone can do it.

I ran through the initial calibration, firmware update, and then put it in LAN mode. Then I just started printing and it went fine. No messing around levelling a bed, or using a sheet of paper to try and set the Z-offset properly; it just worked. It was really loud though. After talking a bit with a friend who’d also bought a P1S, I realised that most of his noise was from the fans, while most of mine was from the servos. A bit of research later and I found out they added servo noise compensation in a firmware update, but I hadn’t run the calibration for it because the initial calibration happened before the update. After doing that, the printer went from sounding like it was impersonating a continental police siren to just being a bit fan-y.

The biggest difference over the SV06 is the speed. I’d swapped the nozzle on the SV06 to a 0.6mm one, and generally printed at a layer height of 0.4mm. The P1S still has its 0.4mm nozzle, and I mostly print at a layer height of 0.2mm. So it’s laying down twice the number of layers, with a nozzle that can extrude half the amount of plastic… And it’s at least twice as fast! Prints that I previously wouldn’t have even attempted on the SV06 are now 8-10 hours on the P1S, without even adjusting the speed or lowering the quality. Here’s a side-by-side comparison:

P1S vs SV06.

The P1S can print eight objects because of its slightly larger bed, while the SV06 can only manage three. The P1S is also printing at a much higher quality. Yet somehow it still ends up being faster. It’s mind blowing.

The other big difference I’ve not mentioned yet is that the P1S is a “core XY” printer rather than a “bed slinger”. That means in order to move along the Y-axis (from the front of the bed to the back), the P1S moves the extruder while the SV06 moves the bed. This makes a big difference when printing tall objects, as they’re far more likely to wobble and come loose when the bed is moving back and forth. It also presumably makes the kinematics a lot easier as the mass of the moving parts is constant, instead of gradually becoming heavier as more and more plastic gets added.

The only failures

I’ve only had a handful of failures since getting the P1S. I had one weird issue where the slicer decided to print some parts extremely slowly, and the print just didn’t work out in those parts; that’s more of a slicer issue, though: after tweaking the model to stop the weird behaviour it printed fine.

The only failure I can directly attribute to the printer was when I tried ironing. This is a process where after printing the top layer, the printer slowly goes back over it at the same height while extruding a small amount of plastic. This is meant to fill in the small gaps between extrusions and give a smooth finish. In my case, though, it just clogged the nozzle and extruder.

At first I thought it was because I was printing too hot: the profile I was using was designed for fast printing, so had to melt the filament rapidly, but there was no way to turn that temperature down just for the ironing pass. I tried another run at a lower temperature and everything clogged again. I then swore off ironing, did a normal print, and everything clogged once more.

At this point I was getting exceedingly good at disassembling the hot end, but also fairly annoyed. It felt like I was using an SV06 again²! I’d previously read some recommendations that you should leave the door or top of the enclosure open when printing PLA, but had never really had any issues so hadn’t bothered. I tried a print with the top propped open and everything worked smoothly again. In hindsight all these clogging issues happened when it was particularly hot and humid outside, which was probably a factor.

Summary

Upgrading to the P1S has made the 3D printer feel more like a tool and less like an additional ongoing project. The speed increase continues to amaze me, as does the increase in quality.

I still think it was valuable to have the SV06 to learn how printers work — you definitely don’t get as much of that from using something so consumer-focused as the P1S — and figure out if I was actually going to use it long-term or whether it was just a fad for me. So it served its purpose, but I’m rather glad to see the back of it in favour of something better in pretty much every way.

And if they did there’s nothing anyone can do about it because copyright doesn’t exist in the same way in China. ↩︎
Although taking apart the P1S (which is a proprietary machine you might not expect to be very user-servicable) was orders of magnitude easier than taking apart the SV06 (which was an open source design). Everything is just much nicer: the connectors are easier to attach and detach, the screws are all a consistent size instead of needing a whole suite of allen keys, and so on. ↩︎