Latest Posts
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The Layer the Cable Map Doesn’t Show
I’ve already drawn the cables. This is where the packets actually go.
Back in May I published the full topology of the house: every switch, every 10G run, every zone. That was the easy half. Cables tell you what’s physically possible. They tell you nothing about where a DNS query goes, which door a request came through, or why one machine’s traffic leaves the country and another’s doesn’t. If you go back far enough in this blog, you would have noticed that I’ve been using the Asus RT routers since the original N56U (in 2011!). While they can do most of the basic functions (and some of the advanced ones with the Merlin firmware), I’ve taken advantage of my homelab to add on a few more bells n whistles.
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I Built a Dashboard for the Things I Actually Check
Five separate logins became one page. The interesting part was how often I turned out to be wrong.
I check five things regularly: whether the homelab is healthy, my portfolio, my health trend, whatever trip is coming up, and my to-do list. Each one lived somewhere different. Each had its own login. None of them talked to each other. I have to go looking for information by opening a browser, going to my bookmarks page and finding the right tile to click:
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Two Brains for My AI: How Obsidian and Trilium Split the Work
I've spent the last few months tinkering with a local AI stack on my desktop — Ollama for local inference, Hermes orchestrating the whole thing, and a Claude subscription for the heavy lifting. It works. But there was always one nagging gap I kept dancing around: where does the AI's memory actually live? For a…
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Home Network Topology 2026: The Full Map
Between the 2024 network upgrade post and the Homelab 1.0 post, I’ve talked a lot about individual components — the 10G switches, the Proxmox cluster, the NAS stack. But I’ve never actually drawn the full picture of how everything connects. Partly because it was always evolving, and partly because I suspect I was slightly embarrassed about how complicated it had gotten.
Well, here it is.
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Homelab 1.0: Compute, Storage, and Power
I’m back for my annual update on the state of my home network (state-of-the-network?)
This year, I’ve gone in at the deep-end with a full 3-node Proxmox cluster for compute, and expanded from 2 to 3 storage servers.