RPiTX
Radio-frequency experiments with a Raspberry Pi, including bringing old pagers back into useful service.
Welcome to Jelly.dog
A personal corner of the internet.
Jelly.dog started as a short, catchy domain I registered on a whim. It sat around waiting for a purpose, and eventually became this: my personal website and a home for the things I write, build, host and tinker with.
I’m a commuter train driver in London, living in Kent with my wife, two teenage kids, two cats and a dog. When I’m not driving trains, I’m usually fiddling with servers, radios, code or some other idea that sounded simple at the time.
A bit about me
Trains by trade. Tinkerer by habit.
Most days involve commuter trains and London. The rest of life is based in Kent with my family and an assortment of animals who are generally less interested in servers than I am.
I enjoy taking things that already exist, working out how they tick, and finding a useful — or occasionally ridiculous — new purpose for them. That can mean self-hosting a service for the family, writing a bot for work, reviving old hardware or simply seeing whether an idea can be made to work.
Why I bother
I like the internet better when you can run bits of it yourself.
Self-hosting gives me a useful mix of control, privacy, learning and fun. Some things replace big commercial services; others solve tiny problems that probably didn’t need solving. Either way, I learn something and we end up with tools that belong to us.
Things running around here
Hosted at home, because apparently I enjoy maintenance.
Over time, one server became several services. Most exist because I wanted a private, useful alternative for family, friends or colleagues — and because installing something is often more interesting than simply signing up for it.
These are some of the things I currently run or have built. They change as I discover new software, break old software, or convince myself that moving something to another container is a perfectly sensible use of an evening.
Sharkey
My small Fediverse social network: a self-hosted alternative to relying on Facebook for keeping in touch.
Vaultwarden
A lightweight, self-hosted password vault used by the family with the familiar Bitwarden-compatible apps.
Grocy
A household stock system that helps us keep track of the things we buy in bulk and what we already have.
HumHub
A private social/intranet space I host for work colleagues, giving us somewhere useful to share information.
Navidrome
Our self-hosted family music library: a personal streaming service for the music we actually own.
Gramps
A family-history site where relatives can explore, maintain and gradually build out our shared family tree.
Prosody
Our XMPP messaging server, plus a custom work bot that can return live train, roster and document information on command.
PeerTube
A private video home for the family: our own alternative to putting personal videos on YouTube.
Pixelfed
A private family photo-sharing space with the feel of Instagram, but hosted and controlled by us.
Loops
A self-hosted home for short family videos: our own little alternative to TikTok-style feeds.
Grav
Grav is a fast, open-source, flat-file content management system written in PHP and does not use a database like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Grav is the platform which Jelly Dog is hosted on.
Not everything needs a web interface
Sometimes the fun bit is making old things useful again.
One of my favourite experiments has been using RPiTX with a Raspberry Pi to make old pagers do something again. It’s exactly the sort of project I enjoy: obsolete hardware, a slightly odd idea and just enough software to join the two together.
Jelly.dog is where I can keep notes about things like that, write about trains and technology, and document whatever rabbit hole I happen to disappear down next.