I almost forwarded a port to check my home camera. The better path
A friend asked me last month how to peek at his porch camera from the office, and before I could stop myself I was halfway through describing port forwarding. Then I caught…
#home-lab
14 articles
What your ISP can actually see about your browsing in 2026
The honest answer to whether your ISP can see what you do online is yes, more than most people expect, and the gap between what HTTPS protects and what the ISP still…
8 DuckDuckGo settings that earn it the default slot
I run DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, and the honest answer is that I am not there for the privacy pitch alone. The privacy is real, but the day-to-day reason is…
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…
A home network dashboard that ends the SSH-and-guess routine
I used to guess whether my home network was healthy. SSH into the router, check the load, count the connected devices, check the ISP status, check the NAS. The guess work was…
Six Jellyfin settings that turned my media server around
I paid for Plex Pass for about six years before the math stopped working. Hardware transcoding (using your server’s graphics card to convert video formats on the fly) was the feature that…
I ditched Alexa for a bedside briefing box, fully offline
I have been trying to replace my Alexa morning briefing for two years. The Alexa one was fine for weather and the BBC, but the headline mix was wrong. Too many stories…
Three containers that took my homelab from hobby to legit
I run a homelab with a Proxmox cluster (a setup where Proxmox, an open-source virtualization platform, lets one physical machine run many virtual machines and containers as if they were separate servers),…
OpenVPN Access Server: bridging home lab to AWS, no duct tape
I run a small lab in my office that talks to a few EC2 instances in eu-west-1, and until last month the connection was a constant source of friction. SSH keys scp’d…
A self-hosted dashboard for Hermes Agent that does not need a browser zoo
If you have been running Hermes Agent on your own box and you keep opening three or four tabs just to check what your assistant is doing, you already know the pain.…