Why?🔗

I only have 3D printer for about a month and people asked me that question multiple times already.. It's the question every early adopter gets. (is it really that "early"?) Back in the old days of feature phones, people were wondering why I got Symbian phone that was quite a bit more expensive than regular Nokia brick. That was years before iPhones were a thing, so the answer wasn't as obvious to non-techie people out there as it might be today. (and remember, when it was released, even iPhone wasn't all that smart, no app store, no multitasking, no Bluetooth even) Back then the simple (and real) answer was:

"Because it's cool!"

--- Me

And that's really the reason why I got my 3D printer. However I feel like the real answer is different. I no longer feel that the 3D printers are cool for the same reason the pseudo-smart mobile phones with proprietary OS were cool. And to explain that feeling, I have to go few years back.

Last time when we got our little Ansible setup to spin up Docker containers as systemd services, I suggested that we should perhaps have Drone running the syntax checks and playbook runs for us. Let's give it a try now, shall we?

Earlier on I've shown you how I run docker containers on NAS using systemd. This time, I'll show you an easy way to configure systemd with Ansible that will get you running containers in no time. (and in reproducible and automated way)

Has science gone too far? It might look so, because:

1. It feels like a huge over-engineering to implement CI at home.
2. What would you integrate anyway?
3. Just why?

Well let me explain my reasons.

As I've mentioned before, I'm using HP Microserver Gen8 as a small home NAS. There is a lot of stuff stored there, but the primary reason why I actually started using NAS (back then slow, but hackable D-link DNS-323) was to store my photo collection. With ZFS, mirrored drives and extra backup to off-site location, the data on it should be reasonably safe, right? However that's not all that useful if most of the recent photos reside on the SD card inside the camera on in the case somewhere, just because I didn't have time to copy them to the NAS yet. So what can we do about it if we have 15 minutes to spare? Let's automate it a bit!