A productive day at the Neuadd. Three things worth writing up: a full redesign of this site, a new Akash Network provider node coming online in the homelab, and a refresh of what is happening with the RaVe game servers. Here is the rundown.
Site Redesign
The old Stucco default look was long overdue a proper dark treatment. Today I finally sat down and rebuilt the theme from scratch using a custom CSS layer on top of the existing Stucco framework - rather than forking the theme outright and giving myself a maintenance headache every time something needs updating.
The palette is built around a deep navy-black base (#0d0d0d) with purple accents (#6c3fff) - consistent across the nav, hero, cards, and footer. Every sub-page now gets an automatic banner that reads the page title from the document, so there is nothing extra to configure when adding new pages.
The home page got a proper hero section explaining who this is all for, a three-column community overview, and a footer with quick links to the things people actually want to find. No stock photography, no lorem ipsum - just what is actually here.
Akash Network Provider
Akash Network is a decentralised cloud computing marketplace built on Cosmos. The idea is straightforward: if you have spare compute capacity, you can offer it to the network and earn AKT tokens when tenants deploy workloads on your node. Think AWS spot instances, but peer-to-peer and without a corporate intermediary sitting in the middle.
The homelab has been running a Kubernetes cluster for a while now, so standing up an Akash provider node was a natural next step. Today the provider wallet is configured, the provider-services stack is deployed, and the node is going through the on-chain registration process. Once the bid engine is live and the first leases start landing I will post a proper performance and earnings write-up.
The hardware behind it is not quite enterprise-grade by cloud standards, but it is solid: the existing homelab cluster running on dedicated Ubuntu nodes with local NVMe storage. Perfectly capable of handling containerised workloads of the kind that Akash tenants typically deploy.
Worth knowing
Akash leases are paid in AKT. Running a provider does not require you to hold or stake AKT - you simply receive it when workloads run on your node. The Akash chain handles escrow, billing, and settlement automatically.
RaVe Game Servers
The RaVe game servers are running well. The dedicated hardware - a Dell PowerEdge R640 - gives us the headroom to run multiple game instances simultaneously without them stepping on each other. Server persistence and mod configurations are being refined, and the server listing pages on the site will be updated to reflect what is currently live.
If you want to find us in-game, search for RaVe. The community has been around for over 20 years and the server infrastructure is in better shape now than it has ever been. More details - including connection info, active games, and schedules - on the Server Hosting page.