Your Zigbee mesh is drowning in cheap repeaters, and here's how to save it
…It can only track a fixed number of direct child devices and source routing tables. When a battery-powered sensor wants to send a temperature update, it looks for a path to…
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Some of my smart devices were sneaking around my Pi-hole, and blocking them was easier than I thought
…I started investigating those queries, and the investigation turned out to be far more interesting than the fix itself. Related 5 reasons a Pi-hole isn’t enough to protect your home…
I asked Claude to improve my home lab and it was wild
…I would often change a setting or a port number just to get something working for a quick test and promise myself I would fix it properly later. Later never came. My…
Proxmox's real advantage isn't the platform, it's what the community built around it
…It’s the sheer number of guides, scripts, forum posts, and shared fixes that make common tasks less painful. In a home lab, that kind of ecosystem matters just as much as…
The services you ignore are quietly breaking your home lab
…But certificates expire, container names change, backend ports move, and access rules can become dangerously broad after a few quick fixes. A reverse proxy is convenient because it centralizes access, but it…
5 self-hosted tools I prefer to install on every new PC
…By moving away from "black box" services and hosting my own infrastructure, I’ve managed to kill the friction. Home Assistant Turning my PC into the ultimate smart home hub Home Assistant…
Your Ethernet wall ports might already work, but your builder wired them for phones
…Thankfully, the fix is straightforward, if not easy to execute. Related I wired my house with Cat6 and regret not spending the extra $50 Get cabling right the first time. Identifying networking…
I replaced Uptime Kuma with this powerful tool, and it monitors my Proxmox, Docker, and TrueNAS systems like a pro
…For example, it works with ESXi and Unraid right out of the box, and although I had some trouble pairing it with TrueNAS using the built-in Infrastructure detection facility (which might…
Claude's scheduled tasks finally fixed what ChatGPT, Gemini, and every other AI tool got wrong
Claude's scheduled tasks finally fixed what ChatGPT, Gemini, and every other AI tool got wrong
Claude Fable 5 caught bugs GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 missed, then the US government forced it offline
…I had previously run both GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 on the same codebase, explaining the problem, the problem path, and what I suspected some of the fixes to…