homelab
Replaced UPS batteries but runtime dropped? The APC remembers old capacity. Instead of shutting down my homelab and fumbling with cables, I calibrated the UPS remotely via Home Assistant's NUT addon using raw netcat commands. Runtime nearly doubled. Zero cables touched.
microsoft
Locked out of your Microsoft account as the sole admin? Join me on a 2-week odyssey through Microsoft's Kafkaesque support system. Learn the secret backdoors, magic words, and creative workarounds I discovered to finally recover my account. A survival guide born from corporate bureaucracy hell.
bitcoin
I compare the odds of winning the Polish Lotto, the Eurojackpot, and solo-mining a Bitcoin block with a $20 ESP32. The results are shocking — in the world of “lottery mining,” your tiny device becomes a perpetual lottery ticket that also tells time and costs under $3 a year to run.
zigbee
A punchy summary that highlights the key selling points - the price, dual functionality, practical use cases (laundry + irrigation), and the advantage of real detection over forecasts. It's short, engaging, and gives readers a clear reason to read the full article.
zigbee
The heating season brings a deadly risk: carbon monoxide. See how a $25 Zigbee sensor (ZC-HM) and Home Assistant can protect your family. A simple setup for a priceless peace of mind. #SmartHome #Safety
homelab
"SMART status: PASSED" - the biggest lie in storage monitoring. My WD Red drive was dying with 69 errors at LBA=0, clicking mechanically, yet SMART said everything was fine. A 48-hour battle with silent hardware failure that nearly cost me 4.5TB of data. ZFS saved me, but barely.
truecrypt
Journey through recovering a 12-year-old TrueCrypt volume: from P2V virtualization failures to discovering VeraCrypt incompatibilities with RIPEMD-160, building a 12-million password generator, and creating a PowerShell batch-processing script that reduced 412 days to 6 minutes. Full code included.
Discover the frustrating paradox of WiFi VLANs on Cisco switches: they won't work until clients connect, but clients can't connect until they work. Learn practical workarounds for this "chicken and egg" problem affecting your wireless networks.
Transform your homelab with a custom validated domain using Nginx Proxy Manager, Cloudflare, and wildcard SSL. Access services through clean, secure URLs instead of IP addresses and ports.
"Hey, what if we made superintelligent AI without needing a data center the size of a small country?" * Probably someone at DeepSeek during a coffee break So there I was, reading about the latest AI models that need enough GPU power to light up Las Vegas, when DeepSeek
It was time to pull the 'not so old' HPE ProLiant 380 Gen9 server out of storage, as it had found a use for it as a backup test server. The ILO was statically configured on a subnet that I didn't happen to be using. Nor
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Woke up to suspicious AWS bot traffic hitting my Ghost API endpoints. Spent 5 minutes convinced I was hacked before realizing I'm just an idiot who never read the docs. Turns out Ghost's Content API key is supposed to be public. Who knew? (Everyone except me, apparently.)
The improvement is staggering! We went from ~5-6 milliseconds accuracy with internet sources to just 82 microseconds with local GPS. That's over 60 times more accurate! This is stratum 1 time accuracy in my homelab!
For years I thought my Zabbix was using TimescaleDB. A failed upgrade revealed the truth: 391 million records in plain PostgreSQL with no optimization. My queries were 7,500x slower than they should have been. Sometimes the best discoveries come from fixing what's broken.
An IT professional discovers the invisible world of radio signals through SDR, transforming a simple RTL-SDR dongle experiment into a fascinating journey of intercepting aircraft data and witnessing impossible long-distance communications.
New research from Apple reveals that even the most advanced "reasoning" AI models like o1 and Claude aren't actually reasoning at all - they're just sophisticated pattern matchers that completely collapse when faced with novel complexity, even reducing their thinking effort when problems get harder.
The CA/Browser Forum just approved shrinking TLS certificates to 47 days by 2029. We'll soon pay the same price for commercial certs that expire faster than a DHCP lease. Time to embrace automation - those 'annoying' 90-day Let's Encrypt certificates suddenly look like visionaries.
Upgrading Frigate NVR with a Google Coral TPU delivered 4× faster detection, 10× lower CPU usage, and reduced power by 50W. This essential homelab upgrade pays for itself in under 10 months while dramatically improving performance.
Discover the frustrating paradox of WiFi VLANs on Cisco switches: they won't work until clients connect, but clients can't connect until they work. Learn practical workarounds for this "chicken and egg" problem affecting your wireless networks.
Transform your homelab with a custom validated domain using Nginx Proxy Manager, Cloudflare, and wildcard SSL. Access services through clean, secure URLs instead of IP addresses and ports.
Discover how I diagnosed mysterious VM failures in my homelab by accessing my LSI RAID controller, identified cascading disk failures across multiple volumes, and developed a monitoring script to prevent future storage catastrophes.
Overcoming the challenges of accessing remote console on legacy Supermicro servers using OpenWebStart and specific Java versions, plus solving the mysterious "invalid session token" error with a creative BMC reset approach that preserves network connectivity.
Microsoft's OmniParser enables AI to control your computer through simple commands. While promising enhanced accessibility and automation, it raises crucial questions about privacy and the future of human-computer interaction.
