Living in the beautiful city of Sydney, I go by Ruuen on the internet. I've been obsessed with computers & technology since I was a kid, but some other interests are spaceflight, motorsport, music, history and photography.

Here's a few of my hobbies:

• I run a homelab for self-hosting software and experimentation.

  At the moment I'm using some of the below hardware:

  • Dell Optiplex 5070 running Proxmox with Debian VMs for self-hosted services and lab monitoring.
  • RPi4 hosting AdGuard, preparing to host WebSDR
  • Intel N100 OPNsense firewall (to be upgraded to a Lenovo M720q)

  I'm currently stocking up on hard drives to convert my Ryzen 1700x system into a ZFS NAS and backup server from used parts.

  These environments are fully automated using Ansible and Terraform. Metrics and logging are handled by Prometheus, Grafana, and Graylog with rsyslog.

• I'm a licensed Australian amateur radio operator.

  Currently holding the callsign VK2MBR, I passed my foundation exam in February 2023. I'm active on VHF/UHF in Sydney and along the NSW coast, and I hope to catch you on a repeater or simplex!

  I love working orbital targets such as the NOAA APT and Meteor LRPT weather satellites.

  A few of my current goals are:

  • Work higher band weather satellites and some other orbital targets like the ISS with voice modes.
  • Assemble a portable HF station to try some FT8, with the goal of upgrading that setup to run a voice mode in the future.
  • Build an RPi4 AllStar node to get more use out of my VHF handheld.