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:

  • 2x Dell Optiplex 5070s in a Proxmox HA cluster with Debian VMs for self-hosted services, NAS, lab monitoring, and development/testing environments.
  • RPi4 running UptimeKuma and functioning as a Qdevice to balance voting in the Proxmox cluster.
  • Lenovo M720q as an OPNsense firewall.

  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 VictoriaLogs 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.
  • Build an automated remote weather satellite station with a dish and rotator.
  • Build an RPi4 AllStar node to get more use out of my VHF handheld.
  • Weatherproof my portable HF station setup.
  • Experiment more with FT8 and try out some HF packet radio modes.