Or: why context windows, KV cache, and humility matter more than bigger models. My last blog post ended on a high note: I had a functional, fully local LLM stack running in my homelab. Models were answering questions, Open-WebUI was humming along, and Ollama had made the early experimentation delightfully easy. Then I tried to…
When you’re trying to turn your homelab into SkyNet, it helps to start with a blueprint. So before we dive into the debugging hijinks, existential model crises, and browser-induced gaslighting that dominated this chapter, let’s start with the real architecture I built, the one that turned my homelab into a fully offline, containerized AI city‑state,…
There’s a saying in engineering that “everything works perfectly—right up until you actually try it.” This blog post is about one of those journeys. A technical adventure where I set out with a bold vision, built a lot of infrastructure, wrestled with more containers than a shipping port, and ultimately arrived at one undeniable conclusion:…
A Tale of Fans, Frustration, and Finally Figuring It Out Introduction What began as a simple mission—“Make the fans go brrrr”—quickly transformed into an unexpected deep dive into the mysterious inner workings of nvidia-settings on a headless Linux box. As any good homelab tinkerer knows, nothing is ever truly simple, especially when GPUs are involved….
Like any sensible cybersecurity professional with entirely normal hobbies, I occasionally spin up a small digital nation-state of VMs on my Fedora desktop. Usually they behave. Usually. Then one day, without warning, they staged a coordinated rebellion. This post chronicles how my Fedora workstation decided to reinvent network segmentation, how libvirt lost its memory of…
Why bother? Markdown is much easier and faster to work with than building HTML, or WordPress blocks, so my personal theory is that I might actually post more if I make it easier for myself. Also it is an excuse to play with automation and AI. Do we need more of a reason then that?…
It wasn’t just one thing that prompted me to switch it was a number of factors. Microsoft’s latest feature “Recall” just happened to be the straw that broke the camels back here. Though it is a heavy piece of straw in and of itself. Like a lot of people I was getting tired of the…
This is a longer post so here is a Table of Contents Migration Attempt #Two So this is my second attempt to migrate away from VMware’s platform. This one went better then last time, though there were some causalities along the way. Namely all my Windows VMs. The reason for the migration has not changed,…
The Backstory It is coming up on time to renew my VMug advantage, but with VMware dropping support for a lot of older hardware, plus Broadcom’s statement about not really caring about any one but their 5 biggest customers. I figure I should migrate to a more open source solution, plus my wallet will feel…
So I rebuilt my computer about 4 months ago and I run Windows 10 for my primary desktop. When I did that I decided to also implement some security best practices. Namely not always running as an account with admin permissions. Here is my summary of that experience. Configuration and Setup Immediately after rebuilding I…
