Monitoring Water Usage With Radio, Prometheus, and Grafana

A few months ago I got a water bill that was suspiciously high. I assumed I had a leak so I went to my water meter to check the low flow indicator (the small dial on most water meters) to see if it was moving. It didn’t move at all, but while I was there I noticed my water meter had a small gray box with an FCC ID on top....

May 31, 2024

Chinese Gravel Bike

Gravel biking seems to be having a bit of a renaissance right now, and living in Iowa, we have a ton of gravel roads, upwards of 67,000 miles worth, most of which I can’t ride using my road bikes. After hearing how much everyone, including my brother, seems to like gravel biking, I decided to start looking for one. After having a decent experience building my last Chinese road bike, I decided to do it again....

April 23, 2024

Chinese Road Bike Update

This summer my brother and I did a chunk of RAGBRAI (Registers Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa). I only ended up going about halfway across, to Des Moines, since I had a wedding in Colorado to attend. I’ve already put a decent number of miles on the Chinese bike so I was feeling pretty good about taking it on a ride like RAGBRAI. On day one we had a quick 27-mile ride in before the first town of the day from Sioux City....

September 12, 2023

Budget Chinese Road Bike Build

I recently started getting back into cycling and was poking around the bike market to see how things were looking, potentially to replace my old 2013 Cannondale Synapse. It’s still a very nice bike but bike tech has come a long way in the last 10 years, especially with carbon fiber. Carbon bikes have come down a huge amount in price, however, the pandemic seems to have spiked them back up....

March 20, 2023

State of the Homelab - October 2022

I started writing this sometime back in August but never got around to finishing this post until a few coworkers started asking about my homelab to build their own. So I figured I could kill a couple birds with a few stones, help them out and finally start putting something interesting on this site. I’ve been a homelabber since middle school, initially using old laptops and netbooks that people were throwing out....

October 6, 2022