Robin's Scribbles

After years of neglect (i.e. no time for this) I decided to update my main site (https://www.vleij.com) and this blog site. And reading back my few scribbles here, about setting up some P1 monitor or self hosted statistics it hit me how fast we’ve moved forward from that “old thinking”.

Back when I was building this blog, or implementing small stuff at home I’d have to Google stuff. Find out if someone else in the world actually did more or less the same as I did. I’d have to use my brain and translate what I find into my own situation. Because that’s rather hard, I’d write a blog post to help others, the whole point of this site! It’d take time to figure out, remember what I did and then write it down. Plus find a stock image (or my own image) to make it a bit more interesting. That’s different with today, VERY different. And it’s only a few years back the reality was like above, not like decades.

Today I’m running a three node Proxmox cluster at home, running my containers as LXCs, with a really cool backup system (Proxmox Backup Server). It took some time, but nothing like during the “old days” of a few years back. Also, instead of reading a lot of (annoying) messages in various WhatsApp groups (you know what I mean :-), I have my OpenClaw assistant summarize them in the evening and proposing calendar entries. I’ve built a great automated e-mail / whatsapp reply assistant for the guys at my son’s motor racing club, to offload the owners so they can focus on the core business. OpenClaw was slightly steep to setup, but then again I had professional help with Grok, Gemini and Claude. And when stuff doesn’t work, or I have to figure out dependency “hell”, scripting or configuration I just type “Claude” in my shell and have Claude figure it out (including git, APIs, testing, etc etc). It took me literally 5 minutes to update my blog and main site from a really old stack to a completely new setup, including testing and verification using both the GitHub repo behind this and the Netlify MCP services to control the deployments. What a time to be alive!

It’s something that just works, so I rarely think about it in a life where 24 hours per day seem insufficient.

But suddenly I felt like checking the P1Monitor Download Page again and saw a new V1.6.0 version. While I was building that one over the weekend as a Docker image for my users I saw a v1.7.0 version as well.

Both are now tested and released. Check out the Docker Hub page.

Based on some user feedback (I’m proud of my first Github issue in a way haha) I received here I decided to figure out how this image building thing in Docker works a bit more in detail. It’s not that hard and quite fun.

Basically the source for building the Docker image you’ll find in my repo. In there is the Dockerfile which “builds” the image, which I build cross platform with Docker Buildx. My build command line is

P1Monitor

Lately I’ve been playing around with P1Monitor to connect to my smart meter at home, measuring both gas and electricity usage. Here in The Netherlands we have a standard for that communication that’s also adopted in other countries: DSMR. The P1-Monitor app, which normally is distributed as a SDCard image for RaspberryPi use, connects to the USB port (you need a cable like this one) and reads the telegrams the meter transmits on it’s serial port.

For my personal website (with virtually no visitors) I was using Google Analytics, just because it was easy. But as soon as I found out about Plausible I decided to give it a go, especially since it’s possible to self-host Plausible. My goal was to setup Plausible in combination with Clickhouse (the click DB), Postgres (already running) behind my Traefik proxy, hosted as a service on Docker Swarm (but locked to a host since I don’t have persistent storage across hosts).

Welcome to my blog!

In my spare time I fiddle with tech stuff, self-hosting things like Nextcloud, Plausible, Bitwarden (well Vaultwarden), Synapse (Matrix).

I’m running a NUC and a Pi4 in a Docker Swarm setup, if you’re wondering. :)

Sometimes getting things to work requires some eh effort and Google Skillz(tm). I figured: let’s share what I find out for others like myself to find later on and have a bit smoother ride getting things to work.