An honest look at multi-gig home networking: what gigabit really limits, why your disk is the bottleneck before the link is, the 2.5G/5G/10G ladder and its cabling and PoE realities, the handful of workloads that justify 10 GbE, and a sane topology that spends the money only where it pays off.
Homelab & Self-Hosting
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10 GbE at Home: When It Actually Matters -
Designing a UniFi Home Network: Cameras, Doorbells, and Multi-Zone Audio A complete, opinionated plan for wiring an older house during a remodel around Ubiquiti UniFi: which gateway, switch, access points, cameras, and doorbells to buy and why, how Protect storage and retention math actually work, a camera-placement and cabling plan, where UniFi stops and you need a third-party audio vendor, and how you access footage and get notifications.
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Tailscale Funnel vs Cloudflare Tunnels: Two Ways to Expose a Service Through NAT Both Tailscale Funnel and Cloudflare Tunnels solve the same problem — getting public traffic to a service behind NAT without forwarding a port — but they make opposite architectural bets. A deep dive on the data planes, who terminates your TLS, the identity models, the real limits, and which one to actually reach for.
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Build an E-Paper Status Dashboard Building an e-paper status dashboard is the right project to learn how much the display technology constrains the software stack. We walk hardware choices (Pi versus ESP32), the refresh and ghosting physics that shape the design, partial-refresh strategies, ESPHome and Python options for rendering, deep sleep for months of battery life, and the enclosure and mounting decisions that make the difference.
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Liquid-Cooling a Homelab Liquid cooling in a homelab is either the thing that finally lets you run a quiet 600 W GPU under your desk or the slow-moving disaster about to short a $4,000 rig. We walk the actual thermodynamics, AIO versus custom loops, what changes when the heat is GPU-class instead of CPU-class, the failure modes that bite 24/7 hardware, and the honest cost-benefit against better airflow.
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Folding a NAS Into Your Daily Workflow: Linux, macOS, and Windows A NAS only earns its keep when it disappears into your daily work. This is a practical guide to wiring TrueNAS or OpenMediaVault into Linux, macOS, and Windows for both live storage and backup — the right protocol per platform, mounts that survive reboots, and an honest look at how the network decides what feels fast and what feels like wading through mud.
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Creators Worth Following: A Trust Map for This Blog's Subjects A curated, opinionated map of the YouTubers, bloggers, podcasters, and writers who are actually trustworthy and informative across the spaces this blog cares about — homelab and self-hosting, 3D printing, PC hardware and silicon, networking, electronics, DevOps, and food science — organized by platform and category, with an honest note on each one's incentives and where to be skeptical.
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Yxk Zero1 4-Bay NAS: OS Options, Use Cases, and Drive Recommendations The Yxk Zero1 is a compact 4-bay NAS built around Intel's N100 — low TDP, QuickSync transcoding, and dual 2.5GbE in a desktop form factor. This guide covers every serious OS option, practical use cases, drive selection, and the real trade-offs you need to know before buying.
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Measuring What Your Homelab Actually Costs How to find your homelab's real power draw and turn it into honest dollar figures: plug meters, Tasmota smart plugs, used enterprise PDUs, CT-clamp monitors, the Home Assistant energy dashboard, and the math from watts to your actual marginal rate.
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Raspberry Pi vs the Competition: How the SBC Landscape Stacks Up in 2026 The Raspberry Pi 5 is not the fastest single-board computer you can buy, nor the cheapest, nor the one with the most I/O — Rockchip RK3588 boards from Orange Pi and Radxa beat it on cores, NVMe, and 2.5GbE for less money. So why is the Pi still the default? Its moat is software and supply: a purpose-built OS, thousands of compatible HATs, the best documentation and community in the category, and a committed production lifetime that the clones can't match. This guide maps the whole landscape — the RK3588 challengers, the proven Odroid, NVIDIA's CUDA-powered Jetson, x86 N100 mini-PCs, and the ESP32 microcontroller floor — and gives you an honest framework for picking the right board instead of the most-hyped one.
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Solar and Battery Backup for Network Gear: A Reality Check An honest engineering assessment of running homelab and network equipment on solar and batteries: load math, panel sizing with real capacity factors, LiFePO4 vs NMC vs lead-acid, DC-direct distribution, power stations as UPS, and the payback math that usually does not work.
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UPS Sizing and NUT for the Homelab: Graceful Shutdown Done Right How to actually size a UPS for a homelab rack — VA vs watts, sine waves, runtime math — and a full Network UPS Tools walkthrough: drivers, upsd, primary/secondary upsmon, shutdown sequencing across Proxmox and TrueNAS, and testing discipline.
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Why Your Homelab Burns 300W Doing Nothing Where 300W of idle homelab power actually goes, and how to claw most of it back: C-states, ASPM, powertop, HDD spindown, BIOS settings, consolidation onto mini-PCs, and scheduled wake-on-LAN — with the savings math worked out at real electricity prices.
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Frigate: AI-Powered NVR Frigate is a self-hosted, open-source NVR that runs real-time object detection locally using dedicated AI accelerators — no cloud subscription, no footage leaving your network, and sub-second alerts when the model is tuned correctly.
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GitLab Self-Hosted A no-fluff guide to running GitLab CE on your own infrastructure: install paths, runner architecture, resource realities, backup discipline, and an honest verdict on when the weight is worth it.
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Matrix and Synapse: Self-Hosted Chat Deploy your own federated, end-to-end-encrypted chat server with Matrix and Synapse — covering the protocol, real deployment configuration, bridges, and honest performance trade-offs.
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Oracle Cloud's Always-Free ARM Tier A dense, honest guide to Oracle Cloud's Always Free Ampere A1 tier: exactly what the 4 OCPU / 24 GB allocation buys you, the notorious 'Out of host capacity' problem and how to fight it, idle-instance reclamation and account-closure risks, and how to run real workloads — k3s, WireGuard, self-hosted stacks — at zero marginal cost.
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Audio and Video Setup for Remote Work and Content Creation Dynamic vs condenser microphones, USB vs XLR signal chains, acoustic treatment without destroying your room, webcam vs mirrorless camera setups, and background options — a practical guide to sounding and looking professional on video calls and recordings.
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Building a High-Productivity Home Office on Any Budget The minimum viable home office, a phased upgrade path from $200 to $5000+, the peripherals with disproportionate daily impact, used hardware markets, DIY desk options, and an honest accounting of where premium gear earns its price and where it doesn't.
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Cable Management and Desk Hardware Setup A practical guide to taming desk cable chaos — routing philosophy, monitor arms, docking stations vs KVM switches, power strip placement, and the honest case for going wireless, with product categories and what to actually look for.
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Ergonomics Fundamentals for the Home Office The science behind desk height, monitor distance, and chair selection — plus standing desk protocols, wrist and neck pain prevention, OSHA guidelines, and a practical setup checklist for building a workspace that doesn't hurt you.
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Lighting Your Home Office for Focus and Video Calls Color temperature, circadian rhythm, and lux levels for sustained focus — plus practical guidance on controlling natural light, eliminating monitor glare, and setting up key lighting for video calls that doesn't make you look like an afterthought.
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Home Assistant OS Deep Dive A thorough guide to Home Assistant OS: the add-on ecosystem, automations and blueprints, Zigbee2MQTT, Z-Wave JS, ESPHome device integration, local voice assistants with Whisper and Piper, the energy dashboard, and remote access options.
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Forgejo and Gitea: Self-Hosted Git Deploying Forgejo or Gitea as a self-hosted Git platform: SSH and HTTPS access, Forgejo Actions for CI/CD with runners, migrating repositories from GitHub, webhooks, organization and team permissions, the built-in container registry, and backup and restore.
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Immich: Self-Hosted Google Photos Deploying and running Immich as a self-hosted photo and video library: Docker Compose setup, PostgreSQL with pgvecto.rs, machine learning face recognition and CLIP semantic search, hardware transcoding, external library mounting, and a solid backup strategy.
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Proxmox VE: The Comprehensive Guide A complete guide to Proxmox Virtual Environment: installation and post-setup hardening, KVM virtual machines with cloud-init, LXC containers, ZFS and Ceph storage, bridged and VLAN networking, clustering with Corosync, high availability, GPU passthrough, Proxmox Backup Server, and automation via the REST API and Terraform.
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ZFS for the Homelab: Storage That Doesn't Lie A practical guide to ZFS on Linux: pool layout decisions (RAIDZ vs mirrors), dataset properties, snapshot strategies, send/receive replication for offsite backup, scrub scheduling, and ARC tuning for systems where RAM is not unlimited.
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Repurposing Old Phones and Mini PCs: Giving Retired Hardware a Second Act How to give retired phones and mini PCs a useful second life — low-power servers, thin clients, and self-hosted services — covering postmarketOS, Android options, and the workloads these efficient little machines handle well.
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Running a Homelab on a Power Budget How to run a capable homelab without a punishing electric bill — measuring real draw, picking efficient low-idle hardware, consolidating workloads, and the power-versus-capability tradeoffs that show up on the first monthly statement.
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10 Tech YouTubers Actually Worth Your Time A curated list of high-quality tech YouTube channels covering homelab, AI, networking, and DevOps — long-form, well-researched, and genuinely educational rather than clickbait.
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Kavita: Self-Hosted Reading Server for Manga, Comics, and Ebooks Kavita is an actively developed, self-hosted reading server that handles manga, comics, light novels, and ebooks with automatic series organization, cross-device progress sync, and OPDS support.
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Miniflux: Minimal Self-Hosted RSS Miniflux is a single-binary, PostgreSQL-backed RSS reader that trades feature bloat for speed and simplicity. Here's how to deploy it, configure it, and get the most out of it.
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Stirling PDF: Self-Hosted PDF Swiss Army Knife Run 50+ PDF operations locally with Stirling-PDF — merge, split, OCR, convert, compress, sign, and redact without sending a single byte to the cloud.
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Wallos: Take Control of Your Subscription Sprawl Wallos is a self-hosted subscription tracker that shows you exactly what you're paying for, when it's due, and how much it costs — without sending your financial data anywhere.
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Immich Deep Dive: AI-Powered Photo Management for Your Homelab A complete guide to deploying and running Immich — self-hosted Google Photos with AI-powered face recognition, smart search, and hardware-accelerated machine learning.
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Immich: Self-Hosted Google Photos That Actually Competes A complete guide to deploying Immich — the best self-hosted photo and video library — covering Docker Compose setup, hardware-accelerated transcoding and ML, mobile backup, storage management, and keeping a library of hundreds of thousands of photos running smoothly.
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Jellyfin vs Plex vs Emby: The Self-Hosted Media Server Showdown A deep, honest comparison of Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby: feature sets, hardware transcoding setup for Intel/NVIDIA/AMD, client ecosystems, metadata management, and a clear recommendation for each use case.
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Monitoring Your Homelab with Prometheus and Grafana: The Complete Stack Build a production-grade homelab monitoring stack from scratch: Prometheus with Node Exporter and cAdvisor, Grafana dashboards, alerting with Alertmanager, and long-term storage with VictoriaMetrics.
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Nextcloud: Your Own Google Drive (That You Actually Control) A complete guide to deploying Nextcloud: Docker Compose setup, performance tuning with Redis and APCu, external storage backends, Nextcloud Office for collaborative editing, mobile sync, and maintaining a fast, reliable installation.
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Paperless-ngx: Building a Document Management System That Actually Works A deep dive into Paperless-ngx: deploying it with Docker Compose, building an automated scanning pipeline, mastering tags and correspondents, and integrating with your homelab storage.
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Pi-hole and AdGuard Home: Network-Wide Ad Blocking for Your Homelab A practical guide to deploying Pi-hole or AdGuard Home as your homelab DNS server — covering blocklists, DNS-over-HTTPS, split-horizon DNS, DHCP, and keeping the whole family happy.
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Vaultwarden: Running Your Own Password Manager A complete guide to deploying Vaultwarden — the lightweight Bitwarden-compatible server — with HTTPS via Traefik, automated backups, admin hardening, and migrating from LastPass or 1Password.
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Home Assistant: The Local-First Smart Home That Actually Respects Your Privacy A comprehensive guide to Home Assistant — the open-source, local-first home automation platform. Covers installation, Zigbee/Z-Wave/Matter hardware, ESPHome, automations with real YAML examples, Lovelace dashboards, presence detection, templates, and security best practices for homelabbers who want control and reliability over cloud-dependent solutions.
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Home Network Design: Wired Backbone, Wi-Fi Coverage, IoT Isolation, and Cable Management A comprehensive guide to designing a reliable, fast, and secure home network — covering ethernet cabling, switch and router selection, Wi-Fi access point placement, VLAN segmentation for IoT isolation, and professional cable management practices.
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Homelab Hardware Guide: Mini PCs, Used Enterprise Gear, NAS Picks, and Power A comprehensive hardware guide for homelabbers at every level — covering mini PCs, used enterprise servers, NAS platforms, networking gear, rack vs desktop tradeoffs, power consumption math, and tiered starter build recommendations.
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Nextcloud: Your Self-Hosted Google Workspace Replacement A comprehensive guide to replacing Google Workspace with a self-hosted Nextcloud stack — covering files, calendar, contacts, Collabora office editing, and migration from Google services, with complete Docker Compose configs and hardening tips.
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Self-Hosting Your Email: Postfix, Dovecot, Stalwart, and the Deliverability Gauntlet A brutally honest, comprehensive guide to running your own mail server — covering the Postfix+Dovecot+Rspamd classic stack, the modern Stalwart all-in-one, DNS authentication records, and the deliverability reality that makes getting into Gmail's inbox the hardest part of the whole endeavor.
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The Self-Hosted Media Server Stack: Jellyfin, the *arr Apps, and Full Automation A complete guide to building a fully automated, self-hosted media library using Jellyfin, Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, qBittorrent, Bazarr, and Jellyseerr — everything you need to run a home streaming setup that rivals Netflix without subscriptions, ads, or disappearing content.