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.
ghost
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.)
ntp
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!
timescaledb
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.
SDR
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.
ai
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.
TLS
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.
frigate
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.
cisco
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.
homelab
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.
homelab
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.