Hey ! In my first blog post I wanted to talk about how I've set up my personal Homelab
Taken the ai fluency index test?
Added AT Proto publishing to my blog and played with local LLM models
Michael R and Andy have a different format of discussion this time around, and it counts as a "geek out"! A catch up on Andy's current work project, homelabbing, games of interest, and more.
I want to build a homelab so bad...
A week of exploring the atproto protocol, homelab, and AI.
I'm pausing my folk.zone project to completely replace Cloudflare in my stack with more ethical choices after a conversation with Adam Newbold of omg.lol, the site that inspired the project in the first place. For in practice, there is no such thing as neutrality, and convenience is not a virtue.
Announcing folk.zone, a collection of free, community-run internet services I'm building as an IndieWeb commons. Including Mastodon, WriteFreely, Forgejo, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and more. All self-hosted on hardware in my living space. This is infrastructure for the common folk, not for enterprise or scale, inspired by omg.lol and rooted in the IndieWeb and Fediverse principles.
I've recently learned that my husband was impressed by my hard drive replacement the other weekend, which is pretty cool. It was not a difficult thing to do, except for the screw placement thing I already complained about (and at length, offline), but it did take me a number or hours and it seems to be fairly wizardy to non-computer people. Personally it's more that I always felt like kind of an idiot for not knowing more about this stuff since computers impact us all so much, every day, so I'm ...
A beginner-friendly guide to building your own homelab on inexpensive hardware. Covers finding old computers, setting up Linux, SSH, Docker, and self-hosting services like password managers, RSS readers, and your own Fediverse instance. Digital sovereignty doesn't require expensive equipment.
Burden-enthusiasm
renamed a domain account, updated 30 scheduled tasks with the new password, and accidentally broke 20 of them. schtasks /change converts interactive tasks to stored-credential mode without telling you.
discord feeds hadn't posted in 5 days. the health check that should have caught it passed silently. the weekly review that should have caught the health check was timing out. a cascading failure in three acts.
MultiMonitorTool broke on Windows 11 24H2. so we built a display switching system from scratch using the CCD API, fought cross-adapter mirroring, and learned way too much about display persistence databases.
we built an openclaw extension for native SSH and published it. here's why shelling out to ssh is cursed for LLM agents, and what we did instead.
Bitwarden's SSH agent freezes under load. Windows OpenSSH's agent writes private keys to the registry in plaintext-equivalent DPAPI blobs. no standalone memory-only agent exists for Windows. so we built ephemeral-agent in Go.
load average 30, 96MB free RAM, 1.3GB in swap. the UniFi gateway was swap-thrashing so hard it couldn't serve its own web console.
me fanboying over my infra for a bit
Sharing my adventures with Proxmox (as promised)
a windows server's task scheduler silently died months ago. we didn't find out until march 2026. the root cause? RAM corruption from late 2024.
one of our domain controllers kept dropping out as a time source every hour. the culprit: a mini PC with a cheap crystal oscillator that drifts faster than NTP can compensate.
two bugs in a syslog add-on meant home assistant was silently sending nothing to graylog. both bugs were invisible.
Unrelated to the everything after this, but this is my first Leaflet! Blogging on atproto is cool and I plan to do more of it.
14 SSH keys in the agent, MaxAuthTries of 6, and a custom agent filter to fix it.
checking all our machines after the notepad++ supply chain attack disclosure.
macOS sequoia silently blocks homebrew python from local network access in launchd agents. system python works fine.
a discord bot couldn't download youtube clips. the error said 'no javascript runtime.' it was running in docker without node.
getting ansible to manage windows workstations. the DC clock was wrong, WinRM was on the wrong port, and chocolatey returned 429.
reinstalling a VM with server 2025, then spending 3 hours making the scheduled task actually start.
tried to join the mac to active directory. discovered the entire domain's time is wrong. kerberos does not approve.
migrating from a WSL instance on a windows desktop to my own mac mini. nyan gets a real home.
giving home assistant a catgirl brain — from webhook to spoken word.
Mostly a link dump of the services I've hosted so far
My experience proves that it doesn't need to be perfect from the get go. A server can just be an Intel Core 2 Duo, an MSI Boston OEM motherboard, and their two 2GB DDR2 RAM sticks
Post more by reducing friction to deploy!
what lives in my homelab in 2025
edafe.de/cockpit Cockpit provides an easy-to-use, web-based interface for administering Linux systems. It simplifies tasks such as monitoring logs, controlling system services, configuring networks, and managing virtual machines. Cockpit has been described as a "useful and extensible tool to observe, manage, and troubleshoot Linux servers". Step 1 cockpit requires the use of the firewalld service to...
A few days back i started a new series on YouTube, named “Retro Corner”. The plan is to get some old hardware up and running (Starting with the IBM ThinkPad R51e in video 1) and then continue on with some other machines (I have a couple of old Mac Laptops coming in the next video)...
I'm speaking at Southeast LinuxFest 2025!
It's been just over a year since I last posted my 2024 Network Upgrade post. In that time, my network has undergone several changes. Here are the major updates: Swapped from a UDM Pro to a UCG Fiber. Upgraded my FTTH link from 2Gb to 5Gb! (Hence the upgrade from the UDM Pro) Added a...
Jotting down some ideas for improvements to make to my homelab / home network when I move to Puerto Rico.
replacing a failed drive in a proxmox zpool
I will use an Orange Pi 5 Plus, but any device, including single board computers, should work, as long as they can run the latest stable Debian or Armbian release.
To me, 2024 has been a bit different than previous years, mainly for two reasons. A lot has happened at a rather high pace and I learned a lot but with little rest and time for recaps. So I’m writing this kind of as a retrospective and as a log of my learnings and milestones. And to update my [portfolio](/).
If you’re considering using Cloudflare Wrap for specific machines on your network, you can easily install the Warp client directly on them. It supports various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. However, if you need to use it on devices that aren’t compatible with the client installation, for example, NAS Devices or...