Chasing the perfect home lab is why yours never works
…Once I stopped trying to make my setup look ideal on paper, I started making decisions based on what actually held up day after day. That shift changed the lab more than…
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I tried an OpenClaw-inspired AI assistant on a $10 ESP32 board, and it actually works
…That means it’s feasible for folks who are comfortable working with a terminal, especially with troubleshooting the errors. For the MimiClaw setup, I installed the ESP-IDF v5.5 framework on…
I connected Claude Code to my home server through MCP, and now I manage my entire lab by talking to it
…Some of them have fairly complex setups. For example, Immich, Jellyfin, and Nextcloud were hosted on my server, but their media lived on my NAS. I always had to make sure the…
My DIY router has been my DNS, VPN, and ad-blocker for a year, and I'd never use an ISP router again
…In fact, it has been a long time since I built my current OPNsense setup, and it has yet to disappoint even once. Heck, even if you leave the extra security benefits…
I installed Nano11 and watched Windows 11 shrink to 9GB, but the trade-offs are brutal
…It's not a pretty sight when you boot into a mainstream operating system, especially after braving through countless OOBE setup menus, which delay the process. The OS takes up nearly 30GB…
Home Assistant freed me from the smart home brand wars, and now I buy whatever works
…A smart plug is no longer a declaration that I’m building my whole setup around one company. A temperature sensor doesn’t need to come from the same brand as my…
I automated my entire read-it-later workflow with a local LLM so every article I save gets summarized overnight
…Over the last decade he's written hundreds of articles about Linux configuration, troubleshooting weird problems, and using open-source tools in the real world. He also works a lot with Windows…
I stopped jumping between monitoring dashboards with one Claude Code command
…Sign in to your XDA account I had built a solid monitoring setup for my homelab. I had visibility for uptime, system metrics, and network performance, but everything was scattered around separate…
Your motherboard's fancy specs don't matter nearly as much as you think
…After going through several PC builds, troubleshooting hardware, and realizing which features I genuinely use every day, I’ve become far more selective about what deserves my money. Modern motherboards are packed…
Local LLMs work best when you're not loyal to just one
…Whether it’s aiding my troubleshooting efforts after a botched project renders my home lab offline, extracting precise text snippets from abysmally long documents, or helping me organize my bookmarks, local LLMs…