Selfhosted on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Rebuilding my digital library

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:22:24 +0000

When I was a kid me and my brother read a lot, we devoured books so much so my mum had to keep taking us to the library to get more. Eventually when we got a bit older we started buying our own books and both our rooms became full of Terry Pratchett, JRR Tolkein and other amazing authors. I love reading it transports me to a better place.

As I grew up and got older I went off to University and my books stayed behind, I fell out of love with reading. This would continue for a long time afterwards. I moved back home after uni and never really picked up a book. Eventually I moved out and started life on my own on the other side of the country and my books stayed at home. When my brother finally left home he took them all with him.

Somewhere in that move away from from home I got a Kindle, the idea of being able to take a library of books with a compact form was very appealing. The added backlight meant I could read in bed properly as well which was a major plus since that’s where I do most of my reading these days. The Kindle store also was a great way to pick up cheap books here and there, this was before I really cared about digital ownership and freedom from DRM.

If you’ve read any of my other blog posts you’ll know I’m a huge fan of self hosting and getting away from big tech. So when Amazon announced that you’d no longer be able to download the files you “rent” from them I decided it was time to ditch them and move on.

First step was grabbing all my books from Amazon, this was a tedious manual task but I eventually managed to get around 150 books of there in a unfriendly DRMd format. I won’t go into the step by step details on how I got rid of the DRM but Calibre and some duck ducking (that just sounds wrong, I mean searching!) provides a very easy way to do it and also convert them into the much nicer EPUB format.

Next up was how do I read them? I already have a kindle so it makes sense to continue using that but I need to get away from the Amazon ecosphere. Luckily I started looking at this around the time Winterbreak was released but I’d missed the boat by literal days and my kindle had automatically updated patching that vulnerability. I put it into aircraft mode and used Calibre to send any new ebooks to the kindle. A few months later a new vulnerability was released called Adbreak which finally allowed me to jailbreak my kindle and be free!

Introducing KoReader. If you can and have the time/patience to jailbreak your kindle then I highly recommend it for KoReader. It’s a one stop amazing reading experience. You dump you epubs on there and start reading simple as that. It also has some absolutely amazing configuration options, my favourite so far is inverting the screen which makes it a lot nicer to read in low light conditions while having the backlight low. It’s also faster than the native kindle experience which is really interesting.

To organise and sort the metadata I used to use Calibre but switched over to Calibre-web instead. It looks nicer and I can create multiple users so I can share my library with my wife if she wants. It’s super easy to setup and you can easily import your existing Calibre library.

Another neat feature of KoReader is that it supports OPDS feeds couple this with Calibre-web and I can sync my library from my homelab to my kindle whenever I’m on my home wifi.

Overall I feel like I have a pretty good setup for my books now. Buying books in a drm format is getting easier and easier these days as well so there’s really no reason to be locked into Amazon now. When this kindle dies I’ll be looking for another e-ink reader that isn’t Amazon.

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Homelab Update January 2026

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:41:38 +0000

Happy new year homelabbers! I’m cheating a bit and rolling some of the work I got done in December 2025 into this update. I want to say my homelab is pretty boring now it just works which is awesome, only minor tinkering is required these days so I’ve decided to focus on observability for a bit. Knowing when and what things have gone wrong was sorely missing so I’ve finally gotten round to sorting a lot of that out which I’ll detail in a section below.

Chicken/Egg Docker Woes
#

Ever since I migrated away from Ubuntu to Debian I’ve been unable to restart the VM and have all the containers come up again. Even after going through every compose file and making sure that restart: unless-stopped was set. It’s been driving me nuts that this has been happening. Well I finally figure out what was wrong. The hint was that the only container to consistently come back up was fluent-bit. When I migrated to Debian I decided to improve my logging so set up fluent-bit and OpenSearch. I also set the docker logging driver to fluent-bit. Can you spot the issue yet? When docker comes up all the other containers fail over refusing to connect to the fluent-bit socket, pretty obvious now, if docker isn’t running the fluent-bit container isn’t running so how can docker connect to the fluent-bit container? I could keep this sentence recursive. Eventually the fluent-bit container comes up but the rest of them containers have already stopped, restarting them all brings them up fine. I removed the fluent-bit container and ran it as a systemd unit instead. Docker restarts are perfectly fine now.

Uptime Kuma and Gotify
#

A while ago I did have Uptime Kuma as part of my homelab but removed it since everything was on one physical server so if there was a huge problem UK would never pick it up since it was probably down as well. I’m now hosting it on my Media Server which while still a single point of failure it’s physically separate from my main homelab. As well as this I setup Gotify to send me notifications when services go down, these go straight to my phone so I can get near realtime downtime notifications. I’ve had to tune the thresholds in UK for some of my applications since some are less reliable than others (the ones not on my infra!).

Wireguard on Android
#

For about 24 hours I lost all network connectivity on my phone (Pixel 7 Pro). It turns out that wireguard had crashed and completely nuked connectivity. After rebooting my phone it worked again. No idea why this happened but it was pretty annoying. I usually have my home wireguard VPN connected 24/7 even when on my home wifi but because my phone is silent all the time I didn’t notice, I guess I didn’t need to use my phone at all that day.

That’s it for this update, there’s still work in my todo list that I need to get around to but that can wait for a bit.

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How I build my CV from Markdown

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 11:33:49 +0000

I’ve changed site generators and cms more times than I can remember (my git repo has the entire history of this site!) the one thing I try to keep the same is my CV. It changes roughly every few years with either a new job or update in skills. I want a way that regardless of however my site is built my CV is just there ready to go.

Markdown first
#

My CV is a markdown file you can see it here. It doesn’t require anything special(ish - I’ll get onto that). The idea is that you can put it in any site generator or CMS (that supports markdown) and it’ll render something. I think it’s a great approach.

Rendering outside the box
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The box here being any CMS/Static Site generator. I want it to look decent and not like whatever is rendering it at the time. I decide to use Pandoc, it’s as simple as running pandoc extra with the following args:

content/cv.md --output=public/cv.pdf --template /.pandoc/templates/eisvogel.latex --syntax-highlighting=idiomatic -V block-headings

I used the docker image extensively to test this out and even managed to contribute some docs back on using templates with docker on Ubuntu (long story!).

Pipeline
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It’s not enough to have a way of turning my CV into a PDF I don’t want to ever think about it ever again, dealing with PDFs is a hassle at the best of times so I chucked the entire process into a FrogeJo action (there’s also a spoiler for an upcoming section). This creates my cv which is then uploaded to an S3 bucket. You can see my CV here freshly built when this blog post goes live.

Anonymising my CV
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I recently applied for a new job and one of their requirements was an anonymised CV so rather than manually edit it I decided to over engineer it because I sure as hell enjoyed that more than writing STAR answers. If you take a look at the raw version of my CV you can see the following:

## Senior DevOps Engineer<!--- start --> - Remote & Manchester UK<!--- end -->

The  and  tag don’t render in markdown/HTML so by default the content still shows up. I can then sed them out when I build the anon version of my CV:

- name: Setup Anonymous CV
run: cp content/cv.md content/cv-anon.md && sed -i 's/<!--- start -->...*<!--- end -->//g' content/cv-anon.md

It then uses pandoc again to create a PDF file and the pipeline uploads it.

So there you have it, that’s how I build my CV from a markdown file into both a standard and anonymised PDF file ready for potential employers. Just because I can it’s also available rendered through Hugo and Blowfish here.

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DeGoogling Part 2

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 20:42:00 +0000

I learnt very quickly there is no grace period cancelling your google workspace account, you get charged for the few days into your current period and then booted out. It’s a good thing.

I’m now over my 0 bytes or 15 gbs quota depending on where you look in the admin panel but I’ve managed to subscribe to the Identity Centre free option. This means I can carry on using some services but not all. An important fact is you can still use Google Takeout so I managed to grab 33gb of photos and videos from there.

Edit My Cloud Identity Free is about to be cancelled and I’m not sure how to save it. I’m under the 15gb storage cap now after deleting a lot of things but that’s not being reflected properly. Sometime in August I’ll find out whether everything is completely gone and I lose access to my account. I can re-sign up but that’s not the point I want to be done with Google once and for all. If anyone knows how to get the free Cloud Identity back I’d be really interested to know.

Email
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I’m a paid up member of Fastmail now, it works and has a good user interface so I’m happy.

Photos
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I have Synology Photos up and running (Thanks Kev!). I still have to merge my 33gb Takeout with the backup from my phone, I also have the “February 2023” problem which is when I last used Takout to move photos from another account in and they had no metadata so I have around 10k photos all with the same date.

I haven’t gotten around to figuring out what’s wrong with Immich yet but will see how I get on with Synology Photos

Edit: This is proving to be a massive pain! I grabbed all my files from google takeout and ran it through Google Takeout Fixer then re-imported them to Synology Photos and I’m left with 10000s of photos all with the same metadata even after fixing them before importing. Synology Photos can’t seem to read the metadata form the files for some reason. I’ll have to delete them all and start again. Also the app is quite frustrating to use because it won’t differentiate between what are phone photos and ones uploaded to a seperate folder.

Files
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I’m testing out Synology Drive.

Online Document Editing
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No update

Maps
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I still get access to Google Maps so happy to use that for the time being.

Phone
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My workspace account is also the account I use to sign into my phone so I was worried that I might break something there. Thankfully it all seems fine.

One issue I’ve found is that Whatsapp can no longer backup to Google Drive I need to find a way to do this now.

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DeGoogling Part 1

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 16:06:27 +0000

This is going to be a series on how I plan on de googling my life. It’s not going to be easy but it’s becoming more and more necessary to get away from Google for my online services.

I have the following components that I need to migrate and I’ll document my progress on getting away from google for each of those.

Gmail
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~~I’m looking at moving to either Fastmail or Protonmail. This should be pretty easy so, the only thing holding me back is my own insecurities on screwing something up.~~

I moved to Fastmail.

Photos
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Immich is my app of choice, I’m already self hosting this and have my photos backed up but there is a breaking issue that’s stopped me putting all my trust in it. There are issue with duplicate images where the mobile app will constantly re-upload deleted images. This is apparently fixed in the latest version but my setup isn’t working since the update.

Files
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I’m going to run Nextcloud, I was quite happy with it on another server my only issue was it used snap so I’ll set it up in docker on my new server.

Online Document Editing
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I use Docs and Sheets quite a bit, I’m not really sure what the solution is here.

Maps
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This will be the hardest to replace, the amount of information that it has is amazing and really useful, I used it to plan all our holidays.

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Selfhosted on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Rebuilding my digital library

Homelab Update January 2026

Chicken/Egg Docker Woes #

Uptime Kuma and Gotify #

Wireguard on Android #

How I build my CV from Markdown

Markdown first #

Rendering outside the box #

Pipeline #

Anonymising my CV #

DeGoogling Part 2

Email #

Photos #

Files #

Online Document Editing #

Maps #

Phone #

DeGoogling Part 1

Gmail #

Photos #

Files #

Online Document Editing #

Maps #

Chicken/Egg Docker Woes
#

Uptime Kuma and Gotify
#

Wireguard on Android
#

Markdown first
#

Rendering outside the box
#

Pipeline
#

Anonymising my CV
#

Email
#

Photos
#

Files
#

Online Document Editing
#

Maps
#

Phone
#

Gmail
#

Photos
#

Files
#

Online Document Editing
#

Maps
#