Rudzki.com

The division of persons

To bring about similarity among people in the world, to apportion to people, if possible equally, the conditions of temporality, is indeed something that preoccupies worldliness to a high degree. But even what we may call the well-intentioned worldly effort in this regard never comes to an understanding with Christianity. Well-intentioned worldliness remains piously, if you will, convinced that there must be one temporal condition, one earthly dissimilarity—found by means of calculations and surveys or in whatever other way—that is equality.
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847)

The Spirit helpeth our infirmities

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 8:16-28

Homelab

Some documentation of my homelab, mainly for personal reference.

Primary Server

Intel i7-14700K (20 cores @ 5.5GHz)
MSI MAG z790 Tomahawk Max WiFi Motherboard (Manual)
64GB DDR5 RAM
2x 2TB SSD/NVMe (Mirrored)
2x 6TB HDD (Mirrored)
256GB SSD (Boot)
3 of 4 M.2 slots remaining
5 of 8 SATA ports remaining 🙂
TrueNAS Scale

Secondary Server

I host a variety of local services from a Lenovo m720q mini-workstation. It’s a portable NUC-style 1L form factor, very well built and serviceable.

These units are widely available from corporate liquidators for as little as a hundred bucks, and outperform cloud servers costing many hundreds of dollars monthly (particularly given their storage capacity). And as for public connectivity, with VPN tunneling and gigabit connections now commonplace – why do this to yourself?

This model features an Intel i5-8500 (3.50GHz) processor, 32GB of RAM, 2x2TB NVMe SSD (Mirrored), 2x6TB HDD (Mirrored), and a 256GB SSD (Boot). It runs TrueNAS Scale to manage ZFS storage, Kubernetes, and VMs.

Primary Drives List

1TB SSD
2TB SSD
2TB SSD
2TB NVMe
6TB HDD
6TB HDD

Spare Systems & Parts

3x Lenovo mini-workstations
NVMe Drives: 512GB, 256GB, 256GB
1TB SSD
2TB SSD
2x 32GB DDR4 RAM

Services

Cloudflare	Network tunneling
WordPress	Content management system
Jellyfin	Media server
Kavita	Reading server
Ollama	Large Language Model (LLM) UI and management
File Browser	Browse mounted directories and files
Transmission	Download server
Syncthing	File synchronization server
Uptime Kuma	Web services monitoring
n8n	Automation server

Dreamers of day are dangerous men

“All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds awake to find that it was vanity; But the dreamers of day are dangerous men. That they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible.”

T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

Enemy-occupied territory

“Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.

When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.

I know someone will ask me, “Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil—hoofs and horns and all?” Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Reading & learned reading

“If you happen to be a scholar, then please do see to it that in all this learned reading (which is not reading God’s Word) you do not forget to read God’s Word. If you are not a scholar, do not envy him: be glad that you can start reading God’s Word right away!”

Søren Kierkegaard

On the pattern of this world

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 12:2

About

Hi, my name is Chris.

I live in Western Pennsylvania, and spend most of my time reading old essays and books, tinkering on software and servers, and pretending to repair a 150-year-old house and tame fifty acres of woods. I build and direct technology at Beck & Stone, a design-driven consultancy.

I’ve been building on the web for over twenty years, and got my start at Automattic, the company stewarding the WordPress project.