Hey everyone,
This is the first real post on the blog, so let me say how this place works. I’m a full-time college student who builds things in public: homelab gear, 3D printing, robotics, and a home cluster project I’ll get to below. This site is where all of it lives. I’m not a company and I’m not pretending to be one. I’m one person learning as I go and writing it down so maybe it helps someone else.
Between October 21st and 23rd I gave the whole site an overhaul. Here’s everything that changed, section by section.
Redesigned About and Projects pages
The About page used to be thin, and some of it was placeholder text. I rewrote it so it actually says who I am, what Katanyxis Labs is for, and what I’m trying to do here. There’s a mission section now, plus a page about me as the person running the site and a collaborators page with a special thanks section. Robots, sensors, and autonomy software are what the lab is about, and I’ll announce those projects when they’re ready.
The Projects page got reorganized too. Before, you had to dig a bit to see what I was working on. Now each project has a clear spot, with the date codes kept in subtitles instead of cluttering the links. I kept the retro CRT terminal look on everything, because I’m not giving that up.
ArchThinkCluster now has real documentation
ArchThinkCluster is my project to build a home cluster that regular people could run, not just people with a datacenter budget. I’ve been keeping notes on it for months, and those notes are now turning into proper long-form docs on the site. These are not short overview pages. Each piece gets its own detailed explanation of what it does and how it works, from the hardware and network layout to how machines boot, how jobs get scheduled, how storage is shared, and how backups run. I’d rather explain too much than leave you guessing.
I wrote them with the base cluster in mind. The core features work today, but some of the bigger goals, like local AI and giving each user their own virtual machine, aren’t built yet, and the docs say so plainly instead of overselling. I also cleaned out anything personal or sensitive from the notes before putting them online. The code repositories aren’t ready to share yet, so for now this is documentation only. More pages will land as I finish writing them.
Forum 81 BBS is open
The biggest addition is a forum. I called it Forum 81 BBS, a nod to the early BBS days, when people dialed into a little board run by someone in their basement and the community was the whole point. It’s built on bbPress, which keeps things simple and gives me room to customize it later.
There’s one new item in the top menu, Forum 81 BBS, with no dropdown. It opens a hub page with three columns: Forums, Blog, and Articles, so everything the community does is in one place. The boards are Announcements (posts from me only), General, 3D Printing, Homelab, Robotics, and Off Topic. Questions, show-and-tell, troubleshooting, and random tangents are all welcome. Be decent to each other and we’ll get along fine.
Sign-ups are open
Anyone can register now, and there’s a Sign Up link in the menu. You’ll need an account to post on the boards, and it only takes a minute. I picked open sign-ups on purpose, because a forum with a locked door isn’t much of a community.
I’ve also put protection on the sign-up and contact forms so bots don’t flood them. It runs quietly in the background, so you shouldn’t notice it. If it ever blocks you by mistake, let me know and I’ll fix it.
Articles
The Articles column on the hub is a new section for longer pieces, separate from my project posts and the quick forum chatter. It’s empty for now, but I’ll have more to say about it soon, so keep an eye on it.
Behind-the-scenes upkeep
Not everything I did is something you can see. A widely reported flaw in PHP, the language WordPress runs on, came out this week. As soon as I heard about it I updated the server to the newest PHP my host offers and refreshed every plugin on the site. That’s patched now, and the update also helps with speed and stability.
I also set up a dedicated support email address for the site, so questions and problems have somewhere to go besides my personal inbox. None of this is exciting, but it’s the stuff that keeps a small site from falling over. I’ll keep doing it quietly and only mention it here when it matters.
What’s next
I’ll keep adding ArchThinkCluster docs, and I’d love for the boards to fill up with people’s projects. Come say hi in General, tell me what you’re building, and tell me what you’d like to see on the site.
Thanks for stopping by.