The Manzoors — a household that fixes what breaks, builds what's missing, and grows a fair share of what ends up on the table.
This is the Manzoors' corner of the internet — one household, two very different sets of hands, and a shared habit of not buying what we could make, fix, or grow instead.
Software pays the bills on one side — sixteen-plus years of it, computer science background and all — which spills over into networks, engines, bikes, and a drawer of dead electronics nobody else would bother saving. On the other side is the land: a vegetable garden and fruit trees that actually feed us, chickens and sheep raised for eggs and meat, and a coop that mostly runs itself thanks to a door built from scratch — our own electronics design, our own PCBs.
Different halves of the same instinct: understand a system well enough to fix or grow it yourself, rather than simply buying the finished result — whether that system runs on Linux, on petrol, or on soil.
Proxmox, OPNsense, TrueNAS, VLAN segmentation, self-hosted email and media. If a service can run on my own hardware instead of someone else's cloud, it probably will.
A working vegetable garden, fruit trees, chickens, and sheep raised for eggs and meat — run together. Sheep graze on rotated meadows; the chicken run was recently extended and runs on a coop door, feeders, and mains-fed watering I built myself.
Engines, electrics, and everything that goes wrong with both. I'd rather diagnose a fault myself than hand it to a shop — even when it takes three evenings longer.
The drawer of things that "just need one part." Soldering irons, multimeters, and the stubborn belief that most broken things are fixable if you're patient enough.
Plumbing, masonry, and whatever the house or the land needs next — chicken coops, fencing for the sheep, sheds, retaining walls. If it needs a level and a bit of patience, count me in.
Remote access is live via WireGuard, and a self-hosted media server is up and running for personal music streaming. Redundant storage hardware has arrived and is queued for testing before it goes into service.
A working vegetable garden and fruit trees supply a good share of what we eat, and we raise chickens and sheep together for eggs and meat. Sheep graze on rotated meadows, and the chickens range in a large, recently extended run. Most of the daily upkeep is automated: automatic step-on feeders, a watering system tied into the village mains, and a coop door I designed and built myself — electronics, firmware, and custom PCBs made in China.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it is Leila, our Great Pyrenees mix — pure companion, no job on the land, no interest in having one. Mostly she just wants to know where everyone is.
Reach us at the address below — we read everything that lands there.