SumGuy's Ramblings
The art of wasting time.
Docker, self-hosting, AI/LLM, Linux, and DevOps — explained by someone who learned the hard way. No fluff, no enterprise jargon, just practical stuff that actually works on real hardware.
Recent Posts
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Home Assistant + InfluxDB for Long-Term History
Store years of sensor data with InfluxDB. Skip the 10-day limit, query historical trends, build Grafana dashboards for your home lab.
8 min read -
Reolink + Frigate: A Practical NVR Build
Build a DIY NVR with Reolink PoE cameras and Frigate. RTSP URLs, sub-stream tricks, storage math, doorbell support, and a complete working config.
10 min read -
Frigate Beyond Coral: GPU and OpenVINO
When Coral USB isn't enough: GPU and OpenVINO detector performance, config gotchas, hardware picks for home lab NVR
10 min read -
MQTT Broker Choices: Mosquitto vs EMQX
Mosquitto vs EMQX: lightweight vs enterprise MQTT brokers. Feature comparison, clustering, auth, resource use, and when each is overkill for your home lab.
8 min read -
Garrul: 53 Releases Later
Garrul's 2026-05-25 roadmap promised moderation tools, a faster widget, and admin polish. 89 days and 53 releases later, here is the honest scorecard.
12 min read -
Unmanic vs Tdarr: Transcode Pipeline Comparison
Head-to-head comparison of Unmanic and Tdarr transcode pipelines, config style, plugins, workers, GPU support, and when to pick each.
8 min read -
Tdarr: Auto-Transcoding Your Media Library
Batch transcode h264 to h265 or AV1 with Tdarr. GPU/CPU strategies, plugin flows, Docker Compose setup, and storage savings math for your media server.
10 min read -
Home Assistant Energy Dashboard with Shelly
Power monitoring with Shelly EM/Pro/3EM, Home Assistant energy dashboard, circuit-level metering, solar+grid tracking, and wiring sanity checks.
10 min read -
Z-Wave vs Zigbee in 2026
Z-Wave vs Zigbee: range, mesh, cost, and which radio protocol to choose for home automation in 2026.
10 min read -
Matter and Thread for the Suspicious
Matter and Thread protocol overview: what actually works in home labs, what's vaporware, and why you should be skeptical of the hype in 2026.
9 min read -
HyperDX vs OpenObserve
HyperDX (ClickHouse, session replay) vs OpenObserve (Rust, cheap object storage), two modern self-hosted observability platforms compared for homelabbers.
13 min read -
Garrul: The Audit Found My Rate Limiter
A security audit of Garrul, my Cloudflare Workers comment system, found 2 critical bugs. Both had the same root cause as one I had already fixed in June.
14 min read
