Maker blog exploring self-hosting, IoT projects, 3D printing, and woodworking. Building things, tinkering with technology, and sharing hands-on projects. 2026-10-01T21:00:00Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/ IT Tinker blog@erwineverts.nl 2026-10-01T21:00:00Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/posts/2026-repairing-walky-talky/ After a weekend away with the bigger family, my kid came to me to say that one of her walkie-talkies didn't work anymore. She could still speak using the blue one, but receiving sound didn't work. Before going to school, she asked if I could take a look. 2026-02-24T10:00:00Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/posts/2026-immich-queue-low-power/ I wanted to use Immich for a long time, but for a long time my Homelab was powered by a Raspberry Pi 3b, and that was already struggling with the 15 services I was running on it. I am already storing all my photos on my NAS, but finding any memories is very difficult. So now that I moved from docker on a Raspberry Pie to a 8GB RP5 kubernetes cluster, I do have some capacity left, although not much. 2026-01-13T20:48:00Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/posts/2026-using-blocky-dns-sink/ I've been using Pi-hole for blocking ads for a long time. Well not only ads, but also other stuff I don't want on my network like phishing, malware and tracking. I had Pi-hole running on my NAS and with all the updates to several services running on it (including Pi-hole), the NAS was not keeping up. Monitoring would notify me on failed DNS attempts during backups. I was looking to move services away from the NAS, but then other stuff would also need improving. 2026-01-06T11:47:43Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/posts/2026-robotsfile-ai-cleanup/ While starting my blog in early 2024, I read posts from other bloggers about AI scraping traffic. I decided back then that I wanted indexing from search engines but no traffic from AI scrapers. 2025-07-16T00:00:00Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/posts/repairing-a-camera-lens-myself/ While I was on holiday with my in-laws, the lens mount on my mother-in-law’s camera broke. The lens costs around €400 and with only a small part of the plastic mount place broken, I assumed a simple repair was possible. 2024-06-02T21:36:00Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/posts/kite-filming/ During new year I went to Ameland, a island part of the Waddeneilanden in the north of the Netherlands. There I visited a museum about the nature of the island and there was an exposition about kite photography from the nature, made by a man called De Vlas starting thirty years ago. link (Dutch) 2024-03-23T07:42:00Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/posts/stopping-selfhosting/ I've started self-hosting quite some services over the years, stopped with a couple as well. There is something special about doing things yourself, and running your own software and not giving away your data is one part in that. I even enjoy finding new services ready to be self-hosted on pages like awesome self-hosted. There is software for everything these days and at some point I was wondering if it was the best solution. 2024-02-06T18:51:00Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/posts/blog-spell-checking/ I'm not that great with spelling and grammar... For my normal work I use LanguageTool to check my texts. LanguageTool supports both English and Dutch, and that is very important to me. With this blog I'm going to be writing quite a bit, and that needs checking. The simple part is that its only English. 2024-01-26T22:24:00Z https://blog.erwineverts.nl/posts/enviro-grow/ This year I got a Pimoroni Enviro Grow for my birthday. As a person who is structured enough to almost never forget to water the plants, my plants tend to live quite long and happy. Although, the problem is almost... I love the fact of gathering data with all kinds of sensors and apps, and most of it I throw out of the door at some point, but not this, I say to myself. Because this is useful.