Every airliner above 18,000 feet broadcasts its own GPS position once a second on 1090 MHz, unencrypted and unauthenticated, and a thirty- dollar dongle is enough to receive it. We walk what ADS-B actually is on the wire, why hobbyists ended up running the world's biggest flight-tracking network, how FlightAware and Flightradar24 fuse the feeds, and the honest privacy and security implications of broadcasting every plane's position in clear.
Privacy
-
ADS-B and Tracking Every Plane in the Sky -
Zero-Knowledge Proofs Without the Math Dump Zero-knowledge proofs let one party prove a statement to another while revealing nothing beyond its truth, which sounds like wishful thinking and turns out to be real math. We walk what ZK actually proves and how, zk-SNARKs versus zk-STARKs at an engineering level, the trusted-setup problem, real applications versus hype, and the honest cost in proving and verification time.
-
Preserving a Voice: Fine-Tuning a Local LLM on a Loved One's Writing A careful, end-to-end guide to building a private, local language model that writes in a late parent's voice — from recovering and cleaning years of blog posts, to QLoRA fine-tuning on an RTX 5090, to grounding it with retrieval, packaging it as a GGUF, and sharing it with siblings over Tailscale. Includes the honest limits and the ethics that should shape every decision.
-
Local LLMs with Ollama Running large language models locally with Ollama — VRAM requirements by tier, quantization formats explained, model selection for different use cases, Open WebUI setup, modelfiles for custom system prompts, and an honest comparison of when local beats cloud and when it doesn't.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS: Encrypting the Internet's Phone Book A deep dive into DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT): why plain DNS is a privacy and security problem, how encrypted DNS protocols work, deploying your own resolver, and configuring clients.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
WireGuard VPN: Fast, Modern, and Actually Understandable A complete WireGuard guide — how it works, server and peer setup, split tunneling, road warrior config for laptops and phones, site-to-site networking, key management, and troubleshooting.