…Sign in to your XDA account Synology used to power my entire smart home. The single prebuilt turnkey network-attached storage (NAS) box ran it all. Home Assistant, backups, media streaming, office…
…NAS boxes weren't always equipped with large RAM pools and processors that rival mid-range mini PCs; that change was driven by the self-hosting paradigm shift. Manufacturers are starting to…
…Not every successful weekend project should become a cornerstone of your home lab. Sometimes the smartest move is admitting that a task belongs on a mini PC, while the Pi handles something…
…Even worse if it goes down, and I'm not at home, Home Assistant is no longer running my smart home. To fix it, I picked up a capable KVM-over-IP…
…It's also likely capable of running services such as Home Assistant and Jellyfin, among countless others. It's where most journeys start, and mine was no different a decade ago. I…
…Related 9 Docker containers that run 24/7 on my $100 mini PC Maximum value budget homelab. It's quick, easy, and convenient Printing a new label takes around a minute or…
…Meanwhile, Qwen 3.5 and DeepSeek are better for calling tools on external apps (namely, my NAS server , Nextcloud instance , and Home Assistant hub ) via MCP servers. Related I built a local…
…A decent GPU has typically been a minimum requirement, or at least a mini PC like a Mac Studio, Mac Mini, or one of those 128GB DGX-adjacent workstations . What it didn…
…The first could be a home system voice satellite. In the Home Assistant 2026.3 update, it brought high-performance local-only wake word detection to the Android app, meaning that you…
…As a tool, they're great at offloading mundane tasks, quickly looking something up, or even interacting with other parts of your home. Throw in a smart home platform like Home Assistant…