Blog

This started out as a post on Mastodon, but I will be blogging about this more.

I have an interesting problem. Our apartment lacks adequate ventilation and our co2 levels are always high. I have monitors in multiple rooms and at night with the door closed our bedroom is around 1600-2000+ppm. The recommended levels are under 1000ppm. For adults its not great, but my wife and I are expecting our first in March. Prolonged co2 levels above 1500ppm increased risk potential cognitive effects and 2000ppm is unhealthy for infants. There aren't any laws or regulations around residential indoor air quality, so the apartment complex doesn't have to remedy the situation.

There are a few ways to deal with high levels of co2. The simplest is to open a window. But its winter in Carson City with the temperatures at night dipping into the low 20s, and an infant is far more susceptible to temperature than co2. It would require us to open a window across the apartment while using the HVAC to heat and circulate the air. Heating an open window means significant increase to our heating bill.

They do make specialized ventilators to solve this exact HVAC problem. A Heat Recovery Ventilator (HRV) and Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV). A HRVs heats the incoming air using a heat exchanger. They are efficient with some units hitting 80-90% heat recovery. With the big draw back being outside humidity. ERVs on the other hand handle both heat and humidity. The issue is that no one makes an apartment friendly HRV or ERV. They required outside vents to installed though the walls and hooked up to indoor ducts.

If I want to go with a ventilator I have two options. Buy a residential unit and run ducts to a window with a DIY adapter. The units aren't cheap around $1500, and with the unit and ducts would take up a bit of room, not to mention ugly. It would take up a quarter of my home office.

The second option is a DIY HRV. An ERV would be the ideal, but it isn't feasible. I would have to go with a pre-made ERV core ($600-$1000) and the unit would be bulky. But a DIY HRV with custom core is do able. In order to eliminate most of co2 I need about 100CFM. I am thinking two small HRV cores vented to the window. HRV cores are two air streams that cannot mix going through heat conductive material.

I should also add that any solution is temporary. We are going to be moving to a house in 4 months.

My first audiobook review! I recently finished Unmapped (The Completionist Chronicles, Book 13) by Dakota Krout. As with the rest of the books in the series it's narrated by Luke Daniels. The story continues the adventures of Joe the Ritualist in the realms of Eternium. Joe is trying to find a path forward in the wake of soul damage and shattered skills. Along the way he commits to helping one of the towers from Vanaheim to obtain a mystic core.

Overall it was a great addition to the series. One issue with LitRPG series (and any long running series) is they tend to slow down after the first few books and become formulaic. The Completionist Chronicles is no exception. With Unmapped the overall story is starting to progress again, but the book itself is still on the slow side.

The writing is what I have come to expect from Krout. Lots of puns and is generally pretty fun. He does a great job of diving into details instead of glossing over elements because its magic. Although the system and magic are starting to get more and more complex. Luke Daniels is a fantastic narrator. He does a great job of making the characters feel alive and distinct.

If you haven't given the series a try and enjoy puns and LitRPGs, then I highly recommend it. I will say the start of the story is a bit rough with the writing and dated. Some readers might not make it past how Joe ends up in Eternium, but the story gets better and the whole Elon Musk part is a small blip. I am excited for the next book in the series and see where the story goes. I give the book 7 out of 10 wheels of cheese.

I've done a bit of work on the site over the long weekend. Got around to a basic theme instead of plain text styles. It support both light and dark styles. It's still simple, but improves the readability. The front-end now supports markdown. Markdown has been on my list of things to-do for awhile. It make formatting easy, and also takes care of links, code blocks and an common way to do image embeds.

Along with markdown I have built out an actual back-end with a post editor. The back-end is also nextjs but it runs locally and talks to the laravel api that also runs locally. The front-end is nextjs but statically exported and pulls posts and pages from the api when building. Another item is media uploads (and embeds thanks to markdown). It gets uploaded to the api from the back-end and then the front-end copies them at build time.

I wanted a way to do comments without switching from a static site. There are a few ways to do that using javascript and 3rd party services, but I had the idea to use Mastodon instead. The way it works is if comments are enabled for a post, at build time it will trigger my @blog bot to share a post. From there I can either boost or quote it to share it with the people that follow @bhhaskin. People can then comment/reply to the post and the next time I build the site it will be pulled down by the api. It does mean there is a lag between commenting on the Mastodon post and when they show up on the blog post, but it is a good trade off.

It's been a while since I've posted anything, and a lot has changed since 2023. I don't have much to report from 2024, but 2025 has been pretty eventful. I got married, we're expecting our first in March, and we're buying a house.

This year I want to get back into the habit of writing. I'm setting a loose goal of 52 blog posts, one per week, though not necessarily posted weekly. Some will be short updates, others longer deep dives into projects.

On the project side, I built an 8-node Raspberry Pi cluster that's currently running Docker Swarm and Portainer. I've also been building out anchordns.io and sitery.io. AnchorDNS is a DNS management platform that also handles front-end proxying. Sitery is a container-based managed hosting platform for WordPress, and I'm in the middle of migrating all of my legacy hosting clients over to it.

Outside of software, I have a long list of boat projects planned for Suddenly. The biggest one is moving her to Nevada for a multi-year refit up on the hard. I also have plans for both bryanhaskin.com and this site.

Over the last two years, I've listened to quite a few audiobooks. Sixty-three in 2025 and seventy-seven in 2024. I've been reading more ebooks as well, but nowhere near the same volume as audiobooks. It's been a healthy mix of science fiction and LitRPG.

I've spend a lot of time the last two weeks doing some major updates to the infrastructure and backend of this site. The site is no longer hosted using virualmin, but running in docker. It required me to spin up a few supporting services like Coredns and a registry. I am working on setting up some custom container orchestration. My goal is to phase out all my virualmin instances and migrate everything to docker with a custom management panel.

More than 13 years ago I hosted a teamspeak3 server for a group of friends that I used to play Eve Online with. And although I myself had moved on from the group, I continued to host the server. My intention was to keep hosting it as long as people kept using it. They used it pretty much every day. I would drop in every now and then to make sure things still worked. It was an extremely out of date version of team speak that you had to ignore updates to the client in-order to keep accessing it. Years ago I had asked if they wanted me to update it, but told them it was possible that we could loose some data since it was so old. They had declined; stating that it was nice to keep it locked behind a particular version.

Today I logged in to check in on things. I found the server deserted, and a message pointing people to a new ts3 server. It looked like they had changed server sometime at the end of 2022. I checked out the new server, and sure enough, they where still there.

For me it's a little bitter sweet. Lots of great memories. Its great to see the same group of people getting together to play games, more than a decade later.

Just in-case anyone is still looking for the Void Teamspeak server and finds this blog post. The server used to be at knightzero.ws:9988 (72.14.184.125:9988) from 2010-09-10 to 2023-10-06. The new server is void.teamspeak3.com.

I am selling my car and ran into an interesting craigslist scam. Someone will contact you pretending to be a potential buyer. They will ask a few questions and then ask to setup a time to see the vehicle. After you agree on the time they will then ask you to send them a vehicle history report via text or email. I have seen this scam twice and both times it was a different report from a different site. The first time it was from "VehicleFactschecker.com" and second was from "revealhistoryinfo.com". The reports seem to cost a small amount of money. Presumably if you buy and send them the report they will ghost you. But if you tell them no, they then try and argue that you are selling the vehicle for thousands of dollars and they just want to be transparent.

Its a clever scam. It preys on the fact people want to sell their used vehicle quickly and for a good price. Its for a small amount and is easy to write off as someone who decided to not buy in the end. I wonder how many people fall for this scam yearly.

I went down the checked on the boat two weeks ago. The drive down 395 is spectacular. By far my favorite stretch of road. It hugs the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains and has some of the most majestic and rugged views. I took a small detour and drove the June lake loop. It was phenomenal and recommend it if you are ever down that way. Next camping trip will be in that area.

The boat had no issues from Hurricane Hilary. Talking to my neighbor at the marina the storm was mild and lost a lot of power coming in over Baja. The rear cockpit was full of rain water. I need to flush the drain lines next time I have the boat out of the water.

I reinstalled the diesel return line from the injectors in the fuel system. Bled the fuel system. The engine still wasn't starting. My neighbor came over and helped me with troubleshooting the issue. It was interesting seeing the parallels between diesel engine troubleshooting and debugging software.

The diesel engine in Suddenly is very simple. Based on an Isuzu DL201. Manufactured in the 1960s by Starrlet; A company out of Tampa FL, which closed down in the 1980s. Parts are difficult to find. We figured out that the issue was with cylinder number 4's glow plug. Unfortunately it failed in such a way that it shorted directly to the engine block. So the wire that runs from the cockpit control panel to the glow plugs also needs to be replaced. Now I need to find a replacement glow plug, which is proving to be difficult.

The plug has some markings on it: JKC, 5G, 10.5v. So far no luck in finding a match based off that. I will likely replace all 4 once I find a proper replacement.

With summer coming to a close; I finally have more time on my hands, and getting motivated to work on this site more. It's been a pretty busy few months.

Jess moved in; which was a bit of a process. Since her lease was ending soon; we took our time moving starting in June and wrapping up in August. It wasn't too bad as far as moves go. I hired some people off of taskrabbit to help and it went pretty smooth.

Went down to Morro Bay for my cousin's wedding at the begging of August. It was a fun trip. Drove with my mom and had to make a pit stop in Santa Cruz to pickup my grandmother. The ceremony was great. They had it in a small wedding chapel in the back court yard of a small book store. It was great seeing and catching up with family.

Hurricane Hilary hit southern California. Which meant I had to drive down and do some hurricane prep for my boat Suddenly. It was a quick trip. I drove down Friday-Saturday; did the prep work; drove back Saturday-Sunday. I haven't been back since, so not 100% sure how well the boat weathered the storm, but in this case no news is good news. I am planning on heading back down this weekend for a week.

I bought a car. A 2023 Ford Escape hybrid. I ordered it back in November 2022, and arrived mid August. It took forever to arrive. Ordering it from Ford is the way to go if you can wait. The process was simple and didn't need to deal with pushy sales people, dealer markups or haggling. Now I need to sell my Dodge Journey.

I've started walking a lot more. I am trying to walk at least 3-5 miles a day. Hoping to get into a good cadence and keep it up.

For work I've been working on Nginx caching, Rails stability tuning, and Nextjs performance tuning. It has been an interesting experience dealing with Nginx cache at scale. Also leaning into Bash more. I used to write it off in favor of Python, but lately seeing the value and power of Bash scripts.

That's all for now.

One of my goals for 2023 is to be more organization in both work and life. To achieve that goal I have adopted a daily notes system. It's adapted from a blog post by Chris Krycho that I found on hacker news. It uses Obsidian a powerful notes and organization tool. Along with Obsidian I am using the Periodic Notes and the Templater plugins. Periodic Notes makes it easy to create new daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly notes based off predefined templates. Templater makes it easy to create new meeting or project notes based off predefined templates.

Everything gets summarized and filtered up to the next level making it easy to track outcomes. In addition to the daily note I am using taskwarrior and timewarrior for a more traditional to TO-DO and time tracking. Taskwarrior is a free and open source command line TO-DO list. I use taskwarrior-tui which is a fantastic Terminal User Interface for taskwarrior. Timewarrior is a free and open source command line tool for tracking time. Timewarrior has hooks for taskwarrior which means any time I start or stop a task in taskwarrior it automaticaly creates time entries. I can run reports to see where I am spending my time. I am enjoying the morning routine of setting up my work day.

I've added new tag listing pages along with single post pages. I have also decided to keep things staticly generated for right now.

2022 was an interesting year, but like most people I am glad it's over. I did a lot of driving, more than usual. I stayed on my boat a bit which was great. Got into a car accident (that wasn't fun), and also had my fuel tank drilled out and gas stolen. Not a great year for my car. Got some boat projects done. Watched a lot of great sunsets.

I have a few goals for 2023 that I will be writing about in more detail in the coming months. Some of the highlights are better organization in both work and life, weight loss, switching to Linux on my desktop. In the short term I need to find an apartment, and waiting on a new fuel tank.

I said I was going to blog more, then I didn't. But I've finally found a little bit of time to do some work on this site. I added published dates, tags, and split the minimal styles into SCSS modules. Next I am going to make everything database driven and split posts out into their own pages. I will need to spin up a REST API for the Next.js front-end to consume. The REST API will come from Laravel. I need to figure out how to host a Node App on my existing infrastructure. Right now everything is statically deployed.

That is kinda it for now.

I'm back! I've decided to give blogging another go. As such I am going to be making a new personal web site. The new site is going to use NextJS for the frontend and Laravel for the backend. I am using NextJS at work and it seems like a good fit. I am still deciding on what aesthetic the site will be using. Right now I am leaning towards doing something fun and base it off a Fantasy User Interface. FUIs are the often flashy user interfaces you see in movies and TV shows. To start with though this post is going to be markdown file, and I am going to build from there. I've already created an archive of the old posts. I plan on importing them to the new site once things are a little more put together.