How an innocent uptime check turned into a practical lesson in Cloudflare’s order of operations, free‑tier realities, and why understanding constraints matters more than fighting them. The Original Goal (Simple, Right?) The task sounded trivial: “Stand up Uptime Kuma on a remote cloud host so it can monitor my self‑hosted lab from the outside.” I…
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….
