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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AnythingLLM as Knowledge Base
AnythingLLM is the closest thing to a real private NotebookLM you can self-host. Workspaces, RAG, agents, document chat — running locally on Ollama in 20 minutes.
13 min read -
FRR vs BIRD
FRR vs BIRD: two open-source routing daemons compared for BGP, OSPF, and home-lab dynamic routing. Which one belongs in your stack?
9 min read -
Home Assistant Add-Ons vs Docker Containers
HAOS Add-Ons vs bare Docker Compose for Mosquitto, ESPHome, Frigate — when the Supervisor magic is genuinely worth it and when it just gets in your way.
10 min read -
Local Vision LLMs Worth Running in 2026
The 2026 local vision LLM landscape: LLaVA's exit, Pixtral's OCR wins, Qwen3-VL's new tricks, and why Gemma 4 is the home-lab dark horse.
15 min read -
HAProxy vs Envoy
HAProxy vs Envoy for L4/L7 load balancing — config style, performance, observability, service mesh fit, and which one belongs in your home lab.
9 min read -
Home Assistant Voice: Wyoming vs Rhasspy
Wyoming protocol vs Rhasspy for local Home Assistant voice — which offline stack actually works in 2026, hardware requirements, and when to choose each one.
11 min read -
MCP Servers: Tools for LLMs
Model Context Protocol turns your LLM into a tool-using agent — file access, APIs, your home lab. Build your first MCP server in under 50 lines of Python.
12 min read -
Caddy vs Traefik
Caddyfile zen vs Traefik labels-everywhere — picking a reverse proxy for self-hosted services in 2026. Real configs, real gotchas.
10 min read -
Promtail to Alloy Migration: A Practical Diff
Promtail is deprecated. Here's how to migrate your scrape configs, pipeline stages, and Docker log setups to Grafana Alloy without losing your mind or data.
9 min read -
RAG Evaluation with Ragas
Most RAG demos look great until you ship them. Ragas measures faithfulness, context precision, answer relevancy — the metrics that actually predict user trust.
13 min read -
Bun vs Deno vs Node in 2026
Picking a JavaScript runtime in 2026 — Bun, Deno, and Node compared on speed, ecosystem, TS support, and self-hosted use cases.
11 min read -
LibreNMS for SNMP-Heavy Home Networks
LibreNMS auto-discovers your switches, APs, and UPS over SNMP with zero MIB hunting. Here's how to deploy it and stop abusing Prometheus for this job.
9 min read
