Analog Array — Blog

Tirau, Te Waihou, and Huka Falls

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Drove south for the day with no real plan, just a few stops we had been meaning to get to for ages. The kind of day where you actually follow through and it turns out to be worth the early start.

Tirau

Tirau is a small town on State Highway 1 that you would drive straight through without registering, except someone has put giant corrugated iron animals on the main road. There is a ram with enormous curved horns staring at you from the footpath and a sheep next to it, both made of corrugated iron and much larger than any photo suggests.

Building and Hardening My Spend Tracker

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I built a personal spend tracker to answer one question quickly: where is my money actually going each month? The app ingests ASB statements, categorises transactions, tracks budgets, and runs a local AI assistant for summaries and cutback advice.

Over time it stopped being just a finance tool and became a proper systems project. Once I decided to put it on the public internet, the focus shifted from “does it work?” to “can I trust it when I am not watching it?”

Late Night in the Lab

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is something about a university computer lab at 11pm that feels different to working during the day. Everyone else has gone home. The building is quiet. You can actually think.

Methindu, Mithila and I stayed back to work on some networking concepts we had been meaning to get hands on with. We needed access to the rack equipment and the lab gives us that without having to simulate everything in Packet Tracer. There is only so much you can learn from a diagram.

How I Self-Hosted This Blog on a Mini PC

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I got tired of the free tier anxiety. Vercel and Netlify are solid until they change their pricing or disappear, and I did not want a recurring bill for a static site. I wanted a machine sitting in my house actually serving the files.

The machine

The site runs on a generic mini PC — an N100 processor, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD. Mini PCs like this are worth knowing about if you are doing homelab work on a budget. They pull around 6W at idle, run silently, and handle a static site without any trouble. Overkill for this use case, but that just means it will never struggle.

Viaduct Harbour and Making Ramen Together

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Took the afternoon off from the lab and went for a walk around Viaduct Harbour with my girlfriend. We have been talking about doing this for a while and it was one of those days where the weather was too good to stay inside.

The walk

Viaduct is one of those spots that feels different depending on the time of day. In the afternoon with the sun on the water it is genuinely beautiful. We walked along the harbour edge, past the superyachts that always seem to be there, and down towards the waterfront. It is not a long walk by any stretch but it was nice to just slow down and not be staring at a screen for a bit.

Starting HIIT and Feeling It

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Decided to shift the focus for a while. I have been lifting consistently but not paying much attention to body composition or cardio. Time to change that.

The plan

Signed up for 6:00am HIIT classes. The idea is to get the cardio work done early before the day gets away from me. Training in the morning means it is done and I do not have to think about it for the rest of the day. In theory.

Getting PlainSight Off the Ground

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is my capstone project for Unitec, built in partnership with Netbridge. The idea is simple: instead of logging into three different vendor portals to check what is happening on the network, everything feeds into one dashboard that uses a local AI model to explain what it all means in plain English.

What it actually is

PlainSight is three things working together. A Wazuh SIEM backend sitting on Ubuntu via VMware ESXi that ingests syslog from the FortiGate 60E, the Ruckus R650 WAP, and the FS-148F switch. A Streamlit dashboard that talks to Wazuh via its REST API and surfaces everything in one view. And a local phi3:mini model running through Ollama that reads the alerts and writes a plain English summary with MITRE ATT&CK tags attached.

Setting Up a WireGuard VPN From Scratch

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I run my own web server at home. It works fine when I am sitting next to it. The problem is when I am not.

I wanted a way to SSH in and edit files on my site from anywhere without exposing everything to the open internet. The answer was a VPN. Specifically WireGuard, which is supposed to be the modern way to do this.

It took longer than I expected :(

Wellington for Work

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Got sent to Wellington for work. One hour on a Jetstar flight, two days, back home by the second evening. Short enough that you pack light but long enough to actually get a feel for the place.

The flight down was straightforward. Window seat, clear skies, and that view just before landing where you can see the whole city laid out below you with the harbour cutting through it. Wellington from the air looks compact. That turns out to be accurate.

About

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am Anjelo Fernando. I live in Auckland, New Zealand. I work with Netbridge on network infrastructure, and I am currently completing a networking qualification at Unitec.

This blog is where I keep notes from three parts of my life that do not overlap much but feel like they belong in the same place.

The Lab is for technical work. Networking projects, homelab builds, and whatever I am working on or breaking at the time. Right now that is mostly PlainSight.