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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Kill-A-Watt Tour of Every Box in the Rack
Measure real homelab power draw box by box: wall meter vs smart plug, UPS, IPMI and RAPL, which numbers lie, and how to log watts to CSV and average them.
16 min read -
Radicale vs Baikal: CalDAV That Syncs
Radicale or Baikal for a shared family calendar? Compose files, a rights file that shares one calendar, Caddy redirects, and the DAVx5 and iOS sync gotchas.
12 min read -
Clef vs Jev: Cloudflare's 4x Tie
Cloudflare's Clef decision model tied Jev on accuracy in a private benchmark, abstained on junk better, and cost 4.2x more per decision. Real numbers inside.
13 min read -
GitOps Rollback: Argo CD vs Flux
How to roll back a broken GitOps sync in Argo CD v3.5 and Flux v2.9: git revert, argocd app rollback, HelmRelease remediation, plus a 2 AM runbook to copy.
12 min read -
Temporal vs Cron: Durable Home Lab Jobs
Temporal vs cron plus bash for multi-step home lab jobs: what durable workflows buy you, the setup cost, and when a systemd timer is the smarter choice.
15 min read -
VLAN Trunking Gotchas Nobody Warns You
VLAN configured but traffic still breaks? Native VLAN mismatches, PVID traps on cheap switches, Proxmox bridge gotchas, and Docker macvlan fixes, with commands.
10 min read -
journald Structured Logging, No ELK
journald already stores structured key/value log fields. Learn to write custom fields, query them, and ship logs to one box before reaching for Loki or ELK.
12 min read -
AppFlowy vs Notion: Self-Host Your Notes
AppFlowy vs Notion in 2026: the self-host server is now proprietary and the free tier is one browser seat. Licensing, Docker Compose setup, and real prices.
12 min read -
LinuxGSM: Boring Game Servers Done Right
LinuxGSM manages 140 game servers from one script. Compare bare-metal tmux plus cron against the official Docker image, using a Valheim server as the example.
11 min read -
Prompt Injection vs Your Coding Agent
Prompt-level defenses against injection are probabilistic and lose to a patient attacker. Here's the capability-level design that holds, with working configs.
14 min read -
SurrealDB vs Postgres: Real or Toy?
SurrealDB promises documents, graphs, search and realtime in one binary. I tested it against Postgres to see where that pitch holds up for self-hosters in 2026.
13 min read -
Batch Inference: One Model, 100 Users
Loading model weights, not math, is your GPU bottleneck. Continuous batching with llama-server serves many concurrent requests for close to the cost of one.
12 min read
