The gaming and technological musings of a software developer

I decided, the other day, to pull an early 2008 Macbook Pro from it’s venerated “I’m too emotionally attached” spot in my tech hoard and breathe some new life into it. This post details the saga of making that happen.

The laptop in question is an 15" A1260 Macbook Pro 4,1. It was the last model produced before Apple went all machined-one-piece with their chassis technology and it has been loved. It’s lifetime has seen a 2GB RAM upgrade (its maximum) and a hard drive replacement, it now sports a 500GB Seagate Hybrid drive¹. At some point in the recent past I even had to bake it in an oven as the on board Nvidia 8600M graphic chip had seen fit to melt it’s own connections to the motherboard.

Welcome to the first part of a multipart series that will detail getting Home Assistant running in Docker on your RaspberryPi. We’ll be installing Docker on an Ubuntu server instance running on Raspberry Pi. It will expose the services it runs through an instance of Traefik - that will automatically configure SSL certificates and it will give you a management interface called Portainer so that you can directly control the services running.

The start of 2020 has seen me pick up the pace on my “hobby” journey. With a rocky start fuelled by a subscription to Warhammer 40000: Conquest I’ve invested in some greenskins (and found some in the attic) and this post documents me getting a team up and running.

I’ve been running a RocketChat instance on my Dokku server for a while now and recently I went to upgrade it from the 0.7x release I was running to a more recent 1.2.x version. This post detail how hard that actually ended up being.