Posts
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Postgres vs SQLite for Home Lab Apps
SQLite is brilliant until you need concurrent writes, replication, or online migrations. Here's the actual line where Postgres earns its keep.
12 min read -
SOPS + age: Secrets in Git
Stop the .env-in-1Password dance. SOPS encrypts secrets per-key, age provides modern crypto, and git stores them safely. Here's how to ship it without footguns.
12 min read -
Self-Host a Local AI Coding Workhorse
Self-host Gemma 4 or Qwen3-Coder via Ollama or llama.cpp in Docker, then let Claude delegate the grunt work to it. Free tokens, zero code leakage.
14 min read -
ddrescue vs TestDisk vs PhotoRec
Drive is dying. Which tool do you reach for? ddrescue clones, TestDisk repairs partitions, PhotoRec carves files. They're a workflow, not rivals.
14 min read -
Zigbee Coordinator Showdown: Sonoff vs ConBee vs SkyConnect
Sonoff Zigbee Dongle Plus-E vs ConBee III vs SkyConnect — pick the right Zigbee USB coordinator for your Home Assistant home lab or apartment setup in 2026.
11 min read -
WebAuthn & Passkeys for Sysadmins
Passkeys finally killed passwords for real users. Here's what WebAuthn actually is under the hood, and how to roll passkeys out on your self-hosted services.
14 min read -
Give Your AI Agent a Cheap Intern
Stop burning expensive AI tokens on boring grunt work. The overseer/workhorse pattern routes mechanical tasks to a cheap model and saves more than you'd think.
12 min read -
Borg vs Duplicacy: Dedup Backup Wars
Borg is open-source classic with SSH targets. Duplicacy has lock-free multi-source magic but commercial GUI. Here's which backup tool to pick.
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Owntracks + Home Assistant: Private Location Tracking
Stop feeding Google your daily commute. OwnTracks + MQTT broker + Home Assistant gives you real presence detection without the surveillance capitalism overhead.
10 min read -
KVM/QEMU/libvirt: CLI Workflows
virt-manager is fine, but real homelab automation lives on the command line. virt-install, virsh, cloud-init — provision VMs in seconds, not click-by-click.
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BirdNET-Pi for Self-Hosted Bird Identification
Turn a Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB mic into a self-hosted bird ID station using BirdNET-Pi and Cornell ML audio models running entirely locally offline.
10 min read -
Claude Code + SearXNG: Private Web Search
Wire a self-hosted SearXNG instance into Claude Code via a Bash wrapper for private, scriptable web search — and when to use it vs the built-in tool.
10 min read
