Deltics (original) (raw)

[Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes] In commenting on my previous post about the extravagant cost of the new Mac Studio (as compared to the 27″ iMac SKU it has seemingly replaced), Thomas Speck quite reasonably pointed out that the reduced power consumption of the M1 silicon would result in savings over the lifetime of the device. I was sceptical, and have now done some rough and ready calculations to see just how much those savings would add up to.

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] After my first foray into video content production with the Keychron K10 Unboxing, a fairly natural follow up was always going to be a more in-depth look at the keyboard. It has taken a lot longer to put together than I anticipated, but I’ve learned a LOT in the process and, at last, it’s finally up. Enjoy and please let me know what you think (not just of the keyboard).

[Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes] Back in December I pulled the trigger on upgrading my Intel 27″ iMac and pondered whether I’d made the right decision… With the recent reveal of the Apple Studio product line and the attendant withdrawal of the Intel iMacs, I am hugely relieved that I did.

[Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minutes] This is a brief post to announce a companion YouTube channel to this blog and the inaugural “unboxing” video, of a Keychron K10 mechanical keyboard on that channel.

[Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes] In the previous post we installed the Kubernetes Dashboard and saw how we could access the dashboard service which itself runs in the Kubernetes cluster. We also saw how clunky that was and I promised a better way, which we turn to now.

[Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes] At the end of the previous post in this series, we reached the point where I had my Kubernetes cluster up and running, including a Dashboard service. As I mentioned, this Dashboard is not part of a default installation. Taking a look at how I got this up and running provides a handy introduction to some further Kubernetes concepts. So let’s get into it.

[Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes] Following the Vagrant experiment (reminding me of a Bill Bailey metaphor… “a long walk down a windy beach to a cafe that was closed“) I next set about automating my VM creation using PowerShell, with greater success. Though still not perfect, the final gap to full automation is something I could close, if I wished. And we get to install kubernetes itself!

[Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes] The first significant practical step in establishing my Bare Metal Kubernetes cluster was to provision 4 VM’s. At this point it is worth mentioning that actually installing Kubernetes is almost trivial once you have the necessary hardware in place. Since my ‘hardware’ was going to be virtual, this meant that provisioning the VM’s was by far the biggest job so after an initial manual install, so I set about automating as much of this process as I could.

[Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes] I set myself a new challenge for the New Year: Stand Up a Kubernetes cluster of my own. At home. I have reasons (long term costs being [potentially] lower than cloud-hosted alternatives being just one of them) but honestly since Kubernetes is a dominant presence in my day-to-day work these days, the main reason was that I was curious to learn more about it, and this seemed like a good way to do that.

[Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes] With all the attention that the new M1 based Mac’s are getting these days, and with the stated intention of phasing out Intel in the Apple hardware, someone would have to be mad to buy an Intel Mac at the moment. Wouldn’t they? Well I did, and here’s why…