Zachary Claret-Scott

#camping #offgrid #tech #solar #anker #outdoors

I love camping. There’s a unique peace that comes from trading city noise for the sound of wind in the trees, especially here in the UK. The goal is always to disconnect, to leave the endless notifications and digital clutter behind for a few days.

And yet, I am a complete hypocrite.

Because as much as I love the idea of being off-grid, the reality is I love having my phone charged. It’s my map, my weather station, my camera for capturing that perfect sunrise, and my podcast player for when it inevitably rains. For years, I played the game of “power anxiety”—draining small power banks, rationing my battery, and telling myself it was part of the authentic experience. It wasn’t. It was just annoying.

I needed a real, sustainable solution that could last a whole trip without me having to think about it. My list of requirements was simple: it had to power my phone, my camera batteries, and maybe a laptop for multiple days, and it needed a way to recharge itself from the sun.

After a lot of research, I found my answer: the Anker SOLIX C300X DC power station and a 100W portable solar panel.

This setup has completely changed my camping experience. The Anker unit itself holds a substantial charge (288Wh), which is more than enough to get me through a long weekend of charging phones, headphones, and camera gear. It has standard USB-A, high-speed USB-C, and 12V DC ports, so it handles everything I can throw at it.

But the real magic is the solar panel. On a reasonably sunny day, the 100W panel can fully recharge the power station, creating a virtually endless loop of free, clean energy. I can use my devices without guilt or anxiety, knowing the battery will be topped up by the time I'm back at camp in the evening.

So, am I still a hypocrite? Probably. I’m hauling a sophisticated piece of tech into the wilderness to escape technology. But this solution doesn't distract from the experience; it enhances it. It gives me the freedom to navigate, photograph, and relax, knowing the practicalities are taken care of. It’s the perfect, pragmatic compromise between being off-grid and being prepared.

#gitea #git #selfhosted #devops #coding #php

For years, my code has lived on GitHub. It’s the industry standard for a reason: it’s robust, collaboration is seamless, and it’s the heart of the open-source community. For my public and professional work, it's indispensable. However, for my dozens of private projects, experiments, and snippets, I've always felt a slight disconnect. I was relying on a third-party service for code that is deeply personal or in its very early, chaotic stages.

The main issue wasn't trust, but sovereignty and simplicity. I wanted a space that was entirely my own, without the public-facing pressure or the feature bloat of a massive platform. I considered self-hosting a full GitLab instance, but much like my experience with Mastodon, it felt too resource-heavy for my needs. I just wanted a fast, private, and reliable Git server.

That’s when I turned to Gitea.

Gitea is a lightweight, open-source Git server that's incredibly easy to set up. It's a community fork of Gogs and is written in Go, which means it runs as a single binary and has remarkably low resource requirements. I was able to get it running in a Docker container on my own server in under 30 minutes.

The power of having a personal Gitea instance is threefold:

• Total Privacy: All my code, commit history, and issues are on my own hardware. There's no question about data ownership or who might be scanning my repositories.

• Blazing Speed: Pushing and pulling from a server on my local network (or a close-by cloud server) is noticeably faster than going through a major commercial service.

• Simplicity & Control: The interface is clean and familiar, providing all the core features you’d expect (repos, pull requests, issue tracking, wikis) without the overwhelming complexity of larger platforms. It's everything you need and nothing you don't.

Setting up Gitea has given me the perfect private workspace. It complements my public work on GitHub while providing a secure, fast, and fully-owned home for all my personal development. For any developer who values data ownership and a streamlined workflow, it’s a self-hosting project I highly recommend.

#music #spotify #lastfm #data

I’ve been tracking my music listening habits for decades on last.fm ever since my dad introduced me to the platform – it’s great to see what music I listened to overtime.

I used to use last.fm daily to find new music by exploring radios, in a time before streaming when ripping mp3s of disk (or online) was king it was the best way to find new music. Once Spotify took over I dumped my local music collection and exclusively listened to streamed music, I had my last.fm connected and mostly ignored it while it silently collected my data.

I’m not sure when last.fm changed but it’s a far throw from its glory days now and it’s hard to see really simple stats about my listening history without signing up for a pro membership. Recently I found an alternative which is exclusive to Spotify called YourSpotify. It is self hosted and pulls recent listening data in real time from the Spotify API but requires a data export from Spotify (which takes up to 30 days) for full historic listening data.

#services #selfhosted #homelab

I have wanted to host my own fediverse/activity pub compatible server for a while – however I felt running a full on Mastodon server was to heavy for my use case. And other options seemed to take a bit too much effort to host for my liking.

I had all but given up until I came across Write Freely which is a blog focused platform that just so happens to share posts via activity pub. Setting it up was super simple as a single docker container and it supports single user mode, or multi user mode with very basic permissions.

I have put it up on a spare domain which I can use as my federated username @prra.xyz because it is generic I can also use it as a social media post engine for all my company accounts.

#services #selfhosted #jobs #career #softwaredeveloper

I am due to start a new role next week which I am very excited for, but before I confirmed I had to go through the process of trying to find roles available in my industry and area. While sites like Indeed, and LinkedIn have vast amount of job postings I found them difficult to navigate and often out of date – or companies straight up don't post to them.

I have a list of local companies or companies in my ideal sector which I would like to work for, you could call this my list of dream jobs. It includes some interesting tech startups nearby, charities I like the mission off etc.. Most of these organisations have a careers page which I can visit to see any open roles, but it's hard work checking 15 or so job pages every few days to see if anything has opened up.

Thats where some self hosted software came into play, I setup my own instance of Change Detection and loaded in all of the companies I wanted to track. Now twice a day I get an email if any of them post new job listings, even if they don't post those roles to large job sites.