Posts
Performance vs Capability
Why buy a Hummer when an Accord gets you there just the same? I’m not talking about off-roading; I’m talking about commuting. When I used to travel from Long Island to Manhattan, there was a pattern you couldn’t ignore while staring out the window. There were parking lots at train stations filled with two types of cars: Continue reading ...
Running Your Own DNS Server in a Homelab - Architecture, Lessons, and My Setup
DNS is one of the most critical services on the internet, quietly hanging out in the background of nearly every transaction that takes place on the Internet and local area networks. Every website you visit, every API request, every SaaS application, and nearly every internal network service depends on DNS resolution. Continue reading ...
Respect the Work: Why IT Buyers Don’t Need Another Star Wars Pun
Pop culture references are everywhere in IT marketing. Infrastructure campaigns are built around lightsabers from Star Wars, firewall ads are wrapped in fantasy metaphors, and compliance webinars are named after space operas. If you need 50 “clever” taglines, you can generate them before your first cup of coffee cools. Continue reading ...
NFS Mount Lazy Loading: Fixing Slow Boot Due to NFS
If you’re running NFS in your Homelab, you’ve probably dealt with this at least once. You reboot a machine and it takes way longer than it should - long enough to mentally inventory every possible failure point before the login screen appears. Maybe Docker has a bad day because a bind mount wasn’t ready. Continue reading ...
n8n Zoom Transcript Analysis Workflow (and Download)
Chat transcripts are often packed with valuable information, much of which can be missed during a conversation. The quick mention of items that deserve more time than they were given, statements that are more powerful or clearly understood on paper rather than spoken, and serious statements masked by humor happen all the time - and the ability to extract the good stuff from them can lead to solving problems that may otherwise go overlooked: Continue reading ...
Starting a Homelab the Right Way - With the Why
There’s a pattern I’ve noticed in Homelab culture: people start with hardware. Racks of it. Blinking lights, enterprise gear pulled from datacenters, computing clusters before identifying a single problem they’re trying to solve. Continue reading ...
The Self-Hosting Responsibility Spectrum
Not all self-hosting is equal. The difference isn’t hardware, its operational accountability. I took good look at my responsibility matrix and decided it was time for an upgrade to clarify where systems sit and what it all really means in practice: Continue reading ...
Homelabs, self-hosting, and doing whatever the fsck you want.
“Homelab” is one of those worlds that mean everything and nothing at the same time. Depending on who you ask, it’s one of these: Continue reading ...
Bullshit as a Service
The modern keyboard warrior has evolved into something much worse, and all it took was access to free generative AI services - and no, this isn’t about AI-powered scams, it’s about poor judgment and getting lost in fantasy. Continue reading ...
Running Your Own Mail Server: Lessons from 25+ Years of Chaos and Custody
Email is one of the oldest, most decentralized, and most politically fraught services on the Internet. It’s also one of the messiest topics in self-hosting, Homelab, and other scenarios where you take operational responsibility for a service often best left to experts. Continue reading ...