Silvestri DOT Cloud

The Guardians of the Uptime

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:31:04 +0100

Howdy!

I’ve got a walking pad under my desk. Great for the step count, terrible for my homelab’s blood pressure. Every time I turn the thing on, the motor throws a tantrum through the mains and my monitor flickers, my USB peripherals disconnect and reconnect like they’re having second thoughts about our relationship, and my audio interface starts doing its best impression of a 2003 dial-up handshake. I dug out some knowledge from the good old days, back when the risk wasn’t dropping a database in production but getting lightly shocked, and the diagnosis was easy: just annoying electrical noise, dirty current bleeding off a motor. The cure? Decoupling. Funny enough, that’s also the cure for half my problems at work these days.

The Secret of Screen Island

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:31:04 +0100

Ahoy!

Trust me on the greeting. There are pirates in this one. Sort of.

Before we start, a bit of anticipation: there’s a new rack in the lab. It’s orange and grey, it’s 3D printed, and the story of how it got here deserves a post all of its own, which is coming. Today is about something much smaller that lives inside it. Something with a screen.

It started with eight wires and a stupid amount of confidence.

I never changed careers, only systems

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:31:04 +0100

What a bass guitar, a Commodore 64, and a mixing desk taught me about becoming a CTO.

A few weeks ago I was cleaning up my Google Drive, which is the digital equivalent of finally opening that one drawer everyone has at home - the one with cables for devices you no longer own, warranties for things that died years ago, and a mysterious key you will never, under any circumstances, throw away, because what if, someday, against all statistical probability, it turns out to open something important?

Getting Married with... my Homelab!

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:15:30 +0100

Howdy!

Most people rely on spreadsheets, wedding planners, or endless email chains to organize their big day. I… used my homelab.

Yes, the same rack that usually runs Docker containers, test VMs, and questionable “this will only take 5 minutes” experiments is now co-organizing my wedding. And honestly? It’s been one of the most fun and rewarding uses of my setup so far.

Here’s how my homelab ended up wearing a bow tie and helping me run the most important event of my life.

Deploying Tabby Web with Portainer: Because My Configs Must Follow Me Everywhere

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 20:31:04 +0100

Howdy!

Gather ‘round fellow homelab wranglers, because I’m about to share the saga of how I ended up deploying Tabby in Docker Compose-not because I had to, but because I’m an unrepentant configuration maximalist who wants his terminal settings to sync across every machine, every time, everywhere.

I’ve been living happily in Portainer for a while, clicking my little containers into place like a well-oiled IKEA flat-pack. As a long time Tabby user .it was just a matter of time ‘til I’d put my hands on Eugeny’s tabby-web, and everything changed.

Make Space, Not War: Resizing OMV Partitions Like a GParted Wizard

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 08:31:04 +0100

As-salamu alaykum 🇵🇸

Have you ever found yourself lacking some space around you? You’d love to buy that beautiful piece of furniture for your house, but then you think:

“Oh dude, how can it fit? I don’t have enough space!”

Well, in a similar fashion, that’s exactly what my OpenMediaVault (OMV) experienced the other day. Sure, it wasn’t about furniture-but it was me trying to squeeze yet another container into it via the Containers service.

A NAS build: part 4 - Getting new ideas and parts

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 10:31:04 +0100

Howdy!

Rejoice people, rejoice! My homelab is taking shape: with the arrival of my first 2 HDD and the components to hook them up, I was able to review and correct some of the previous steps and fix some trivial mistakes.

Using my magic skill to transform money into products, this time on my table landed 2 Seagate IronWolf and a PCIe/Sata card, together with a slim Sata cable to make a good use of the backplane of the case.

A NAS build: part 3 - Assembling everything

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 10:31:04 +0100

Howdy

After exactly a month, the Sagittarius 8-bay case was finally delivered. I don’t know what’s going on in the Netherlands, but my parcel must have been living its best life-it vacationed in Northern European customs for over two weeks.

I’ve been building PCs from spare parts since I was 8. And while this was my first mATX build, opening this case made me realize two things:

A journey on detoxing from digital services, part 1 - Retake your data (Nextcloud at Home - No Ports, No Proxy, No Problem)

Sun, 25 May 2025 10:31:04 +0100

Howdy

A wise man once said: “If something is free, it means that you are the product.” And let’s be honest - we all rely on cloud storage to sync, store, and share stuff between our devices and with other people. Most of us live on Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, or whatever flavor of the month. But what’s the trade-off?

Well, take a look at this EFF article by Joe Mullin - it’s about Google scanning private photos and wrongfully flagging people as child predators. AI gets it wrong. Lives get wrecked. Not cool.

A NAS build: part 2 - Testing the spares and waiting for the case

Tue, 13 May 2025 10:31:04 +0100

Howdy

This is just a super-quick update. As expected, the parts I ordered have started arriving in multiple shipments-everything but the case. At the time I’m writing this, it’s been stuck in the Netherlands for over two weeks!

Since some of the parts I bought are second-hand, I needed to test them while waiting. Plus, I managed to recover two extra components I had lying around:

A 32 GB Optane module I had previously installed in my workstation, now unused;
An NVIDIA 1050 Ti, which I thought was dead and had tossed into a drawer. I’m glad I didn’t throw it out-after a deep clean and a generous spray of WD-40, it came back to life!

Assembly went so smoothly that reading about it might actually be boring. I had zero issues with the hardware. Even if I wanted to invent some drama, there’s nothing to complain about.

A NAS build: part 1 - Getting ideas and parts

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 10:31:04 +0100

Howdy

I finally took some time to revamp my homelab. The original setup was pretty humble: a Raspberry Pi flashed with OpenMediaVault and two USB DAS units hanging off it. I had a few containers running, and it served me well for a while.

But then Home Assistant came into my life.

Running it in a container was limiting-especially since I didn’t want my DAS drives spinning 24/7 just because of some background logging. That was my first bottleneck. So when I got my hands on a refurbished Dell Optiplex 7050 Micro, I saw a golden opportunity to expand my capabilities and split concerns. I flashed Proxmox onto it immediately, and everything worked like a charm.

Clickety, clackety... Hello KMK!

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 12:01:04 +0100

Howdy

Lately, procrastinating on a personal project has seemed to be the leitmotif of my existence! I don’t know if it’s the new job or the recent DIY home renovation, but this project has been sitting stalled on my shelf for months-ever since I started it last summer.

While working on the Ampere Pad, I began thinking about how I could improve it. I wanted to overcome some of the limitations of the Arduino Pro Micro, such as limited space for my code-kubwa (big code), slow compile times, and toolchain quirks. After some research, I came across KMK.fw, written in CircuitPython and perfect for RP2040 boards. Since I already had a couple of those chips lying around, I jumped straight into the design phase.

Making a keyboard the hard way

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 12:01:04 +0100

Howdy

2023 was a year of joy, and there is no joy without builds! After experimenting with self-hosting, NAS, and video surveillance, I decided to revamp my tools of the trade and give a companion to my Redox Scenic, integrating all the missing features. Here I proudly present the Ampere Pad v1!

It is a feature-rich handwired 4x4 macropad, integrating 2 rotary encoders, a 0.96-inch OLED display, and a speaker (because we all love some 8-bit pleasure).

My Workflow for Taking Notes (is not only about notes anymore!) - part 2

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 06:31:04 +0200

Howdy

Serendipity: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. No better word could describe the natural unfolding of things on this side of the screen. When I was writing part 1 of this article, I started documenting my process and Notion grabbed my attention. I mean, I haven’t been living on Mars, so I’ve known about the existence of this tool, but I assumed it was a mere notepad. Minimal indeed. No thought was more wrong than this! I started looking into it in depth, and I was left speechless. Of course it was a bit difficult at first to understand the idea behind Notion, especially coming from a Trello-centric point of view. Notion allows you to take notes, create databases, organize views, having things interacting with others. Basically you can model entities and organize them, in a structure that you, and only you, decide. It can be a bit overwhelming to have an empty structure that needs to take shape according to your needs: compared to other tools, it needs a bit of planning ahead and an understanding of your needs, case by case. Of course there are a lot of templates available for free, that you can use to kick off. As far as I’m concerned, there are enough elements for me to try it out and give it a chance, but let’s go step by step.

My Workflow for Taking Notes (Rocketbook, NFC and automations) - part 1

Mon, 29 May 2023 10:31:04 +0200

Howdy

I had a dream! Taking notes in a smooth, centralized way, without accumulation and consequently losing dozens of scribbled pages. Combining those handwritten notes I take during a meeting, a debug, a study session, a tinkering process, with information from different sources: my phone, my computers, articles saved from my browsers and so on. Even notes about my weekly shopping list or admin deadlines! During all this time I oscillated back and forth on different approaches: bullet journal, lists, freestyle, kanban. For one reason or the other, after an initial period of infatuation, I’d eventually end up switching methods. For example, if I was going out for a meeting without carrying my bullet journal, I would be forced to use other pieces of paper and later on try to aggregate them. If I was writing about actionables (and in my way of taking notes, everything is an actionable), I would have to use Trello. But if for one reason or the other I could not access any of my apps, I would be screwed. What about if I had to share the note?

Mouse Macros Are So Powerful

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 09:10:06 +0100

Howdy

Thrift market, again! This time I brought home an item I’ve been looking for so long: the Elecom Huge Trackball mouse. I was so lucky to find it new at a fraction of the price. What a strike!

The mouse itself might seem a bit intimidating, because of its shape and dimension, but is so damn comfortable! Even more than a Kensington Expert or a Logitech M570. It has some flaws, like the famous bearing’s friction problem, the scroll wheel feels a bit meh and the switches aren’t clicky as I like. But all these things can be modded with less than 10 bucks and a lot ot patience. Although today we are focusing on something else: how I integrated such a mouse in my Debian to make macros and speed up my workflow. As lazy as I am, I found a very simple solution that can be replicated on any distro and, potentially, by using equivalent softwares, on Windows.

Cable management does not exist

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 17:15:30 +0100

Howdy!

The new year has already started and I must say I am really enjoying working from home and, moreover working as a freelancer. This gives more time for myself and my beautiful and ever-wonderful girlfriend, for my hobbies and to study a bit. When you save a solid 10 hours a week by slashing commuting time to and from the office, you collectively gain an extra week by the end of the month. A huge QOL improvement!

Gloxes, a handcrafted lamp controlled by Alexa

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 20:15:30 +0100

Howdy!

Recently, I’ve been busy moving stuff from one house to another, changing jobs and once again re-organizing my life. Plus, I decided to go freelance! New starts always get me thrilled, although the problem is my timing: I tend to do many things at once! One of the first things I setup was my maker’s corner, a magic place filled with 3D printers, a soldering station and all sorts of electronic utilities. Originally I was thinking about getting a couch, but I wouldn’t have been half as fun as curating a geek’s corner 😬.

Two Years of Magic - My Experience with Livewire

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 18:52:56 +0200

Howdy!

2020 will be remembered by many as the year when their life radically changed. I am also part of the many, as I had to do a hard career drift: from being a well known music producer and teacher to a wannabe web developer. I went back to school, did my bootcamp, completed my internship and allowed me to earn my daily bread with code.

Even with being a nerd in the past (considering that my first babysitter was a C64 and I started to learn Python at the age of 10), it was still a hard career switch: from being considered a guru in my field to restarting at the bottom of the food chain. Luckily my mentor and my colleagues made this transition smoother.

How I fixed a camera by walking away

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 20:33:52 +0200

Howdy!

Have you ever been in a thrift market? Those fascinating places filled with dusty trinkets, old books and all sorts of vintage oddities, where with patience and luck you get excellent deals or just a bag filled with garbage. Leaving the garbage part alone, I’ve always had an attraction for such places, and every time I visit them I feel like the comic’s character Dylan Dog, visiting this disquieting bric-à-brac called “Safarà”. And Safarà is an Arabic word that stands for discovery through exploration, which is maybe my main drive for such an experience.

Tame the Dragon - Mods and upgrades of an Ender 3 Pro

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 10:00:04 +0200

Howdy!

As many of you already know, I am a 3D printing enthusiast and a maker. I started he 3D printing activity 3 years ago, and since then I’ve acquired a lot of knowledge by designing and printing things, also making a lot of mistakes. It has been a lot fun!

Since then I’ve been using my Ender 3 Pro, which I’ve modded to the extent that the only original part remaining is just the aluminium framing. Modding it really helped me to understand how 3D printer works, what are the crucial parts and why they are so important.

How to cloudify things

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 15:18:03 +0200

Howdy

Today I want to share with you a simple and clean solution that hopefully might give you an help with the headache of bringing to the cloud what was not initially planned to be there.

Recently I had the need to streamline my financials: reconcile bank statements from different accounts, quantify the few coins I have tossed in investments, monitoring and get reports on my incomes and expenses. If you only have one data source from one bank, a simple spreadsheet can do the trick but if you have several accounts in different banks, more than one platform for investments, and even a PayPal account, reconciling all that data might be a nightmare seeing as they come organized in different formats.

My Redox build - part 3

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 11:18:03 +0200

Howdy!

With great powers come great responsibility, said a wise man once. Last time I left you with a fully assembled (and working too!) split keyboard. In these weeks I had enough time to play with QMK and keymaps, and with the huge power of customizing its firmware, I had the responsibility to do something to type better, and with the adequate practice, faster. In short, I just decided to switch layout. After wandering for days in the web, reading specifics and opinions, I opted to migrate to the Colemak layout. But I went a step further, and I’ve chosen the DH mod for this layout.

My Redox build - part 2

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 23:18:03 +0200

Howdy!

Last time I left you with all the items ready to be assembled: case, PCBs, components and electronics. Well, with enough foresight I can tell you that I bought some in excess (luckily), as I was convinced that I would surely put them to use.

Despite following the instructions slavishly , I botched a couple of steps, which shortly turned into a spiral of destruction and despair. Hopefully my experience will help you to avoid the same mistakes I made.

My Redox build - part 1

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 22:57:38 +0200

Howdy!

I must admit that I am a custom made keyboard enthusiast, and over the past year this hobby has really kept me busy. For almost a year my daily driver has been the Redox Wireless keyboard, an open source split mechanical keyboard created by Mattia Dal Ben. I’ve also contributed to this project creating my own case, that can carry 2 18650 batteries. I mean, the bigger the better!

Although, of lately, the bluetooth receiver broke down, and after a careful decision, I decided to build the cabled version of the same keyboard, still with a personal touch to it. This decision has been taken after taking in consideration few factors:

Hello World

Sun, 19 Jun 2022 20:30:52 +0200

What kind of blog could it be without an hello world post?