Me⌗

I’m a systems engineer in the air traffic control business. I’m working towards becoming a Chartered Engineer (CEng). I studied Aeronautical Engineering at Glasgow and have experience in a range of industries including healthcare, defence technology, specialist road haulage, and aviation.

Aviation and space are my main interests - ever since my dad took me to Leuchars Airshow, or arranged visits to the cockpit on holiday flights. When I’m gaming, it will most likely involve some sort of flight simulator. I host a small ADS-B receiver, and made a brief attempt at obtaining my PPL a long time ago. I’d love to give that another go some time, when life allows.

I have a habit of hoarding ancient computers & games consoles. I like to extend the useful life of old kit and indulge in a bit of childhood nostalgia at the same time. My baseline for ‘vintage’ starts somewhere between Windows 95 and the original Xbox, but anything goes really. I keep a list of them here.

I was born in Scotland but currently live on the south coast of England with my family. I am a tech nerd but I like to get my hands dirty too, trying to do as much DIY spannering as possible on my cars and motorbikes.

Disclaimer: nothing on this site is endorsed by or necessarily reflects the views of my employer. All opinions are my own.

This Site⌗

This is mainly a sandbox for learning about web admin, testing my skills and sharing snippets of things that interest me. I hope someone finds it useful or interesting.

The blog format is very old fashioned. I’m about 25-years behind the trend for hobby websites, but it’s got a strong nostalgia factor for me and I’d rather be behind a camera than in front of one, so this suits me better than trying to broadcast or stream.

The site is mostly self-hosted. Content is generated in Markdown using Hugo CMS, and hosted on an Unraid NAS system. Everything is containerised within Docker and tunnelled to the outside world via Cloudflare.

The stack includes:

  • klakegg/hugo static site generator docker image
    • This generates HTML from my markdown source files.
  • Linuxserver.io Nginx web server docker image
    • This serves the website internally on my private network.
  • Cloudflare DDNS docker image
    • This updates the Cloudflare DNS network with my dynamic IP address, allowing me to add a second proxy layer using the Cloudflare CDN.
  • Cloudflare Tunnel docker image
    • This connects my origin server directly to the Cloudflare network without having to expose any ports on my edge firewall.

Honourable mention to Nginx Proxy Manager which I used to use for proxying my HTTP services to the outside world, but has since been replaced by tunnelling directly into the Cloudflare CDN.

It is very generously:

Protected by Cloudflare

T360