Posts

1. The homelab in one picture

   What a homelab actually is, and how my phone pulls a letter out of my archive at home while I'm on a train, without a single door open on the router.

2. No open port: how my phone reaches Paperless

   Pulling an invoice out of my own archive from anywhere, with not a single port open on the router, and measuring whether everything really is encrypted.

3. From a sheet of paper to a searchable archive

   A pile of letters, a sticker and one button. How paper becomes an archive that files itself, and why I can still find the original in seconds.

4. Code: one VM per service with OpenTofu and Ansible

   What happens between a new file and a running service, and why I read every plan before I apply it.

5. Pipeline: who actually runs my code?

   A test run fails at eleven at night although nothing is wrong with the code. Finding out why leads to the question of who actually runs my code.

6. What if something breaks tonight?

   Sunday, just after five, and an update has broken a service. How my homelab gets through a night like that, and who tells me when it can't manage on its own.

7. Replacing Google Photos with Immich

   15,237 photos and videos, six ZIP files and one weekend: how my pictures moved from Google to my own home, and why the new storage was full by Sunday morning.

8. Nextcloud on S3 instead of a disk

   My Nextcloud doesn't keep a single file on its own disk; each one becomes a numbered object in a bucket at Hetzner. Here is what that buys me, what it costs, and why the bucket on its own is still not a backup.

9. compose-backup: back up, encrypt and version Docker stacks

   How a small tool of my own packs every Docker stack ready to move, ships it encrypted to S3, and turns a plain mirror into 30 days of history.

10. AI without the cloud: a language model on a laptop GPU

    A 30-billion-parameter model on the built-in graphics of a mini PC: why my letters never leave the house for it, how fast it really is, and why the model may choose but never invent.

11. Running NetBird yourself: the matchmaker that steps aside

    A small server at Hetzner introduces all my devices to each other and then stays out of the way: what runs on it, how I upgrade it without risk, and which traps cost me hours.

12. ntfy: who's knocking at five in the morning?

    How a small push service I run myself brings every message from my homelab to my phone, who is allowed to post there, and why the most dangerous alert is the one that never arrives.

13. A green padlock for services nobody can see

    How every service in my homelab gets a real HTTPS certificate although none of them can be reached from the internet, and why one entry in the internet's phone book is all it takes.