Run your own tailnet with Headscale and skip Tailscale’s cloud
I did not get the Tailscale pitch until I installed it. The client goes on a device, you log in once, and the rest of the tailnet shows up like it was…
#development
258 articles
Stop Windows Update from restarting your work: a tiered guide
Windows Update is one of those background systems that works fine until it does not. The default behavior on Windows 10 and 11 is to download updates in the background and install…
Hard drive errors: how to triage before you lose the data
A failing drive rarely announces itself with a single dramatic crash. More often it whispers for weeks: a file that will not open, a save that takes five seconds longer than it…
Self-hosting did not kill these four subscriptions
I spent two years replacing cloud subscriptions with self-hosted alternatives. Immich holds my photos. Nextcloud replaced Google Drive. Jellyfin runs the music. Plex serves the movies. After all that work, four services…
What Chrome’s new auto-clicking actually does to your workflow
For thirty years, the web ran on a single assumption: a person is doing the clicking. Every form, every checkout button, every “are you sure?” prompt was built for human hands and…
KOReader plus an LLM turned my old Kindle into my favorite reader
I have a Kindle 4 that was obsolete when the Obama administration was still young. The battery is shot, the bezels are thick, and it does not have a touchscreen. I have…
Five self-hosting stories worth following this week
A useful self-hosting roundup should do more than list releases. It should tell me which change deserves an evening, which one deserves caution, and which one can wait until somebody else finds…
Nine Rust publishing tools matched to the work they fit
Rust static site generators have split into recognizable jobs. One wants to build a conventional website from a single binary. Another turns Markdown into a book. A third treats connected notes as…
I stopped opening ports to reach my smart home and you should too
My Home Assistant install used to live behind a port forward on my router. So did my NAS, my printer, and a long-forgotten Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole. Every one of those was…
Stop paying for Windows cleanup and learn Sysinternals
I have removed more paid “PC cleanup” suites from family computers than I have installed. The pattern is familiar: a yearly subscription, a red warning badge, and a dashboard that claims the…