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 Backups That Actually Restore
Home Assistant disaster recovery: off-site backups, secrets handling, Z2M coordinator, restore drills that catch missing pieces.
13 min read -
Calibre-Web vs Calibre Server vs Kavita
Self-hosted ebook library showdown: Calibre-Web vs Kavita. Which stack handles your comics, manga, and ebooks?
12 min read -
Multiple Claude Code Accounts, One Config
Run several Claude Code accounts on one Linux machine. CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR plus symlinks share your skills, hooks and history while each login stays isolated.
15 min read -
Navidrome vs Funkwhale: Self-Hosted Music
Navidrome vs Funkwhale for self-hosted music streaming. Subsonic API support, mobile clients, federation, and which one fits a homelab in 2026.
10 min read -
Tautulli Beyond Plex Stats
Tautulli's notification webhooks, automation, transcode alerts, and custom triggers unlock Plex monitoring beyond leaderboards and statistics charts.
10 min read -
Overseerr vs Jellyseerr
Overseerr vs Jellyseerr media request UIs: Plex-only vs Jellyfin/Emby. Setup, auth, Sonarr/Radarr integration.
10 min read -
The *arr Stack Without 9000 Reddit Threads
Self-hosted *arr stack (Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Bazarr) with durable Docker Compose. Hardlinks, folder layout, no breakage.
9 min read -
Synthetic Browser Monitoring with Playwright + Grafana
Set up Playwright synthetic monitoring: scheduled headless browser checks, login flow validation, and pass/fail metrics piped into Grafana dashboards.
12 min read -
VictoriaMetrics vs Prometheus
VictoriaMetrics as a Prometheus drop-in replacement: lower RAM footprint, longer retention, better compression. When the switch actually pays off.
11 min read -
Node Exporter Internals That Actually Matter
Which 30 Node Exporter metrics matter for Prometheus monitoring. Skip the 200 noisy ones. Textfile collector trick included.
10 min read -
Grafana OnCall + Webhooks: Paging Without PagerDuty
Self-host Grafana OnCall as a free PagerDuty alternative: escalation policies, Alertmanager webhooks, and phone alerts for your home lab (plus the 2026 catch).
10 min read -
Healthchecks.io Self-Hosted: Cron Monitoring
Self-hosted Healthchecks.io for cron monitoring with dead-man-switch alerting, Docker setup, and backup integration. Never miss a silent failure again.
9 min read
