Markdown notes synced phone to PC with Syncthing, summarized and semantically searchable by a local LLM. No subscriptions, nothing in the cloud.

I swapped a 2020-era ESXi box over to Proxmox and moved TrueNAS CORE to SCALE in one afternoon, with a USB stick as the whole rollback plan.

Before mirroring my repos to GitHub, I audited every place a credential could hide. Found a few. This is what the pass looked like.

Custom raycast suspension in Unity, no WheelCollider. The one-system architecture lesson, and the launch-into-orbit bug that came down to initial conditions.

Rod knock killed the 2.5. What went into sourcing a clean M54B30, why the rod bearings stayed untouched, and the while-it’s-out list that makes a swap last.

The rebuild rule: the tool is not allowed to flatter me. Verified fills, buy-and-hold benchmarks, and a loss autopsy for every losing trade.

A firewall bracket nobody sells, printed in an afternoon. CAD is the skill; the printer is just the output device.

WireGuard gets me into the lab from anywhere through one UDP port. The real lesson is what the tunnel shouldn’t excuse behind it.

Running my own GitLab means backups, upgrades, and runners are my problem. That’s the point. GitHub stays as the mirror.

Spreadsheet IPAM fails the moment two people edit it. A small Flask tool where Python makes the decisions and Ansible touches the devices.

Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana in Docker. Numeric OIDs over MIBs, dashboards provisioned from git, and a diagnosis story about sparse graphs.

Ansible pulls the configs, vault encrypts them, git keeps the history, Semaphore runs it on schedule. NetBox tells everyone what exists.

My 2960G predates most of the tools trying to manage it. Legacy SSH crypto, paramiko pins, and the other gotchas of automating old IOS.

Custom TradingView indicators grew into a full Python platform: an S&P 500 scanner, honest backtesting against buy-and-hold, and a paper-trading bridge.

I got tired of my AI tools forgetting everything and each other, so I built them one shared memory that runs on my own hardware.

One orchestrator, three scoped sub agents, and a two-strikes escalation rule. What a toy game taught me about running small local models as a team.

I’ve been running a home lab since 2002, but the last few weeks it’s turned into something closer to a full enterprise analog: NetBox as the source of truth, Ansible… Read more: Home Lab AI Update

My network runs modem to OPNsense to a Cisco 2960G. The OPNsense box is a repurposed Dell thin client, and I 3D-printed a bracket so it mounts under the desk,… Read more: OPNsense Home Setup

I wanted a faster way to see what was showing up at the local junkyard without clicking through their website every day. So I built a Python scraper that pulls… Read more: Junkyard Python Scraper

When I set up my solar system, I wanted it to actually make sense. Paying someone $20k+ to install panels basically defeats the point of going solar. So I did… Read more: DIY Solar Install