Blog
Dispatches from the homelab front lines — build logs, post-mortems, and the occasional thing that actually worked.
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AI @ Home - Part Four: I'm Not Sure Any Of This Was A Good Thing
The opinions the build log kept deferring: rate limits as somebody else's gpu-memory-utilization, the gate that serves eighty-four other people you'll never see, peak pricing paid in conversations, and AI changed my life - I don't know if that's good.
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AI @ Home - Part Three: Filling the Knowledge Base, and the Tangent Nobody Asked For
Part two ended with a chat window. This is the half that was always the point: pointing it at my own documents, the embedding node that served me a 200 OK full of lies, and - because this is my blog - the week it also got pointed at two Windows boxes from 2017 and 2009.
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AI @ Home - Part Two: Two Borrowed Supercomputers and Everything That Went Wrong With Them
Somebody lent me two DGX Sparks. A checkpoint that fits on no machine I own, a vLLM image compiled from an unmerged pull request, and a memory setting that switched both hosts off.
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AI @ Home - Part One: Everything I Got Wrong Before the Expensive Hardware Turned Up
From LM Studio to a 26B model on a 12 GB card: what a model file actually is, a conversion that produced the same sentence six thousand times, and a card I never thought to check.
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Errata: The PTR Record, I Was Wrong (Thank You, Yahoo)
About that time I confidently understated the importance of PTR records, got soft-rejected into oblivion by Yahoo's postmaster, and relearned that email deliverability is an endless war against capitalism.
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Going Hybrid: Bolting Mailcow Onto Microsoft 365 (And the One Line That Made the Whole Exchange Detour Pointless)
The sequel nobody asked for: I needed my apps to send mail, and rather than use Microsoft's perfectly good printer-relay method I funnelled the whole thing through my self-hosted mailcow as a split-domain hybrid - then ran Exchange's AD prep chasing a targetAddress fix that did nothing, before a single line of PowerShell solved it all.
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Building My Self-Hosted Mail Server with Mailcow-Dockerized
How I turned 'I should run my own email' into a two-node, MAAS-provisioned, Ansible-deployed, cold-spare mailcow cluster - because nothing says 'simple' like a 24GB RAM budget for sending the occasional newsletter.