All posts by Oliver Radwell

Ultimate Way of Installing Metrics Server for Production Kubernetes Clusters

Metrics are very important in your Kubernetes cluster because you need them to monitor the pod resource usage. You also need metrics to trigger an autoscale using an Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). Metrics Server provides CPU and memory metrics so you can see them in Kubernetes Dashboard’s fancy graphs.

Kubernetes dashboard showing CPU and memory metrics in graphs
CPU and memory metrics in Kubernetes Dashboard
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Hidden Method of Sharing Another User’s Video on Twitter

Do you hate that videos in quote tweets are smaller on Twitter? You may also want to remove the text of the tweet and share the video only. If you noticed a text “From <user>” under some posts with videos, you have seen these kinds of posts already. We can call this directly sharing a video on Twitter.

Screenshot of a Tweet directly sharing a video from BBC Archive
Tweet containing a video from BBC Archive
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Plastic Types and the Global Plastic Hate

Plastic became popular after World War II in the 1950s. Only in the 1980s, after much concern, the plastic industry introduced recycling. In order to make it easier to identify plastic types they created the resin code system. The hate for plastics has been growing since plastics started washing up on beaches.

Plastic Types

7 plastic types, their use, recyclability and speciality
Plastic resin codes, their use, recyclability and speciality
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Sustainable Trainers Delivered to UK

Are you looking for trainers that don’t cost the earth (literally)? Look no further because this article covers 6 shoe brands that deliver sustainable trainers to the UK.

Cariuma

Cariuma IBI off-white knit shoes
Cariuma IBI Off-White Knit

International shoe brand Cariuma offers a variety of footwear options and the Brazilian founders of this brand have put sustainability at the centre of each product they develop. They have a big vegan product range and they plan to add even more vegan shoes into their range. That said, if you’re a leather lover you’ll be happy to know Cariuma sources their leather and suede from certified by Leather Working Group. According to their materials page their plastic use consists mostly of recycled plastic. It is also pleasing to know, for each pair of shoes you buy they plant 2 trees.

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Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in UK: Purpose and Annoyance – Colossal Controversy

In 2016, Public Health England released a guide for local authorities to promote active travel as a solution to physical inactivity. Physical inactivity costs the UK billions of pounds a year when its impact on NHS, social care, absence from work caused by illness and other factors are considered. On 23rd May 2020, the UK government announced funding to local authorities in England for active travel schemes and encouraged them to make the changes as soon as possible. As a result, most London councils (by following the guidance by Transport for London) and some other cities in England started introducing modal filters to create Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) to access the government funding.

A cyclist going into a Low Traffic Neighbourhood using a modal filter
A modal filter into a Low Traffic Neighbourhood (source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackfifield/50579500182/in/photostream/)
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6 Toothpaste Tablet Brands for Complete Zero-waste Living in UK

The hardcore recyclers among us know that toothpaste tubes are very difficult to recycle. They contain a thin layer of aluminium and multiple types of plastic. The majority of the UK councils don’t accept toothpaste tubes. In the UK, Colgate partnered with TerraCycle so you can drop off Colgate products at a local TerraCycle drop-off location. Unfortunately, TerraCycle isn’t very easy to use as their drop-off points aren’t too close and are usually private homes.

It is best to avoid toothpaste tubes altogether and switch to sustainable toothpaste tablets. Thankfully here in the UK, we have quite a few toothpaste tablet brands to choose from. Below are 6 UK based toothpaste tablet brands that offer quick national delivery.

Toothpaste being squeezed onto a toothbrush and some generic tablets
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Provisioning Single-node Kubernetes Cluster using kubeadm on Ubuntu 20.04

There are many tools out there to provision single-node Kubernetes clusters but kubeadm is the way to go for a production-like set-up. Although it is more difficult to create a cluster with kubeadm, with its configuration options you can tweak the cluster to your needs. By following this post you can easily create a Single-node Kubernetes Cluster using kubeadm on Ubuntu 20.04.

Command line output of kubectl showing the WordPress components on a Kubernetes cluster
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Inbound Firewall Configuration with Firewalld

Firewalld has replaced iptables as a default in many Linux distributions. It is now the default firewall in CentOS, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise. You can also install it on Debian and Ubuntu from their official package repositories.

Fire next to a wall
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Luckily firewall configuration with firewalld is very easy, especially for predefined services like http, https, ssh, etc.

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