I have so many irons in the fire I can never quit...

Right now I am tinkering with a local only HomeAssistant AI voice assistant. I have an Ubuntu VM running docker on my TrueNAS which has an ARC A310. The reason I'm running a VM is because I'm using A Dual Edge TPU module for FrigateNVR while using the ARC A310 for video decoding. Ollama is running Qwen2.5 3B. I'm also running Wyoming Whisper and open-webui for the voice AI. I'm using a ESP32-S3 AI Smart Speaker Dev Board for voice control.

I found a project on GitHub that looked really good but was designed to always pull files and so I forked that to create a local only version and setup a small docker container for the audio files. Still working on modifications of the repository but the setup is working OK but I'm trying to work out the bugs.

I'm also working on a Halloween project. I have a plastic pumpkin with a big red arcade button for a nose, LED's for eyes, a speaker, some car horns, proximity sensors, and a temper.... I call it my Doom Pumpkin. It will go outside a week before Halloween and complain about people touching it's buttons or lack there of during the day and stay quiet at night. On Halloween it will keep going till later and when someone presses the button it will randomly honk horns in different ways. When someone steps in front it will say funny things to get them to press the button. If they walk behind it will warn them something bad might happen (like saying it farts fireballs.) It's all setup in ESPHome and will be controlled by HomeAssistant and NodeRed. There is also a theft prevention mode built in that will cause it to just spazz out and blow the horns.

I've still gotta pull another 500 feet or so of ethernet then get those and some others dropped into the server closet and shift some stuff around so it feeds into the rack. I've also got to pull my current camera lines from my POE injector and run them into my POE switch.

This is all on top of building and installing racking for solar, getting the solar installed, pulling a wall in a couple inches at the top where it pulled away during an earthquake before we bought the place, and fixing a bunch of other stuff.

I completed a 300 mile move yesterday, and my homelab was one of the least stressful parts thanks to my pre-emptive downsizing from a half rack to just a Synology + Intel nuc. I also pre-emptively switched from forwarded ports to a reverse proxy because I didn't want to be thinking about what isp I would end up with. Even further, I linked the nas and nuc directly with Ethernet so that I wouldn't need to rely on static IPs or router-assisted local hostnames, mdns, avahi, whatever because I wanted to be able to transplant my lab onto any network just in case of emergency - thankfully I haven't had to test that out but it's nice knowing my lab should work on any network where both boxes can reach the internet / my reverse proxy. I was thinking worst case if we ended up in some apartment complex with some crappy provided setup that had broken local discovery then it would be 1 less thing to worry about.

I just set up an orange pi as an off-site restic backup!

I use restic for backups in my homelab onsite to my NAS. I've been doing this for about a year but I don't have off-site backups. I've set up the orange pi with just a small HDD and set up wireguard on it so I can still access the pi when it is outside my network.

Then I added a restic copy command to copy my repo from my NAS to the remote, and it's working!

Now I'll leave it in my house for about a month or two to test that it's still working, then take it to a family member's house!

Finally moved everything to the basement.

Spent years with everything in the office with me. Used to run some pretty old and noisy devices too lol. I always wanted to move everything somewhere else to cut down on noise but that means cables to run and total disassembly. Finally bit the bullet and moved it all last Saturday. The office has never been so peaceful

I have been on vacation and not a single alert has come through. I count that as a win.

got a busted Lenovo Ideapad 520ISK out of a dumpster, missing screen but otherwise perfectly functional. the thing has i5-7200u, 8 GB, two SATA ports inside and this prompted me to look up converting the thing into a server, specifically figuring out how to run 3.5" drives off it; I'm very anti-friendly towards using USB solutions for such a task.

searching was arduous, both web and yotube, and except one lonely forum post (remember those?) didn't find anyone attempting let alone succeeding in running it thus. the 2.5" and 3.5" connectors are identical (there are micro SATA to SATA adapters for the DVD port) but the drives will need 12 V that the 2.5" ports ain't got.

what I've concluded is that all that's needed is a M/F SATA extension cable which I have trouble sourcing locally; the power will come from a separate ATX PSU for the time being, although I'm sure I can pull 12 V from somewhere on the board.

don't got no 3d printing nor fabricating options, so it'll likely look super-janky, but that's not a huge concern for me now. I'll do a write-up if I succeed.

Fiddling around with Renovate Bot on my Forgejo instance. It's not working perfectly yet, but it's getting there.

Also I began using LubeLogger to track my car expenses and fuel efficiency. Works beautifully.

I set up oauth for my sites

I found the best thing to deal with a device that won't work...

I'm trying to get the 3.5" adafruit touchscreen working and it's being stubborn....

So... I went outside and split a large pile of logs.

Problem still not fixed, but I feel a hellofalot better

I just published the weekly report for OpenAltFinder: #31

Added 19 new alternatives, and all projects in the CMS gained a total of 26,373 stars! The top gainer was Pi, with 2,302 new stars.

Infrastructure as code. My lab has been working stable for a while now, so it's time to mess things up again. I want everything in code. The POC with the ansible proxmox collection is already working, but it will surely take some time. In particular since I want to implement some improvements like VLANs, proper user management and such

Not to brag but everything's working fine, clean as a whistle. Upgraded forgejo to the latest version. I'm still helping maintain the awesome-selfhosted list, and get inspiration from selfh.st a lot (big shoutout!) Hope to make sure some postgres dbs are up to date at some point, all of my dockhand instances that i set up have been a big help :)

I built a dashboard themed around my dog. It uses the Home Assistant API to get various stats from the house. I'm pleased with it!

Not working on anything particular, but I'm going on a road trip on Tuesday to this regional airport that is giving away two racks perfect for my use case. Deep enough for my larger machines, sound proofed and 42U tall.

Finally my hardware can have a proper rack instead of being in a stack/pile in this harrypotteresque locker under my stairs.

spent some time last week adding metadata to my mp3 music obtained with yt-dlp. used musicbrainz Picard.

I'm actually really surprised how comprehensive that database is, and how easy it was to manually tag the tracks that didn't get picked up automatically.

I finally got my immich docker running again. I lost all my meta data in the process but oh well, it works again.

[AIT] I know this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m excited about Deepseek V4 flash. It’s (for me) the perfect size and architecture to self-host an LLM.

My box (and brain) are chugging through a queue:

• Figure out why my swap is going crazy, and how to ban processes from it [Done].

• Figure out why Code OSS is unhappy [Partially Done].

• Make an ik_llama.cpp iMatrix for Deepseek V4 [Done].

• Figure out why quantization isn’t working [Done].

• Make a test IQ2_KL/MXFP4_R8 quant to see how it does squeezed onto my box [in progress].

• Test. Tune. Inevitably troubleshoot the dozen other things that go wrong. Figure out how much spare RAM that leaves me.

• Make a higher quality IQ3_KT quantization. This will take all night on my CPU.

• KLD test both of them vs the full precision, to quantify quantization loss. Likely an overnight task, too.

• Try merging the new model release with the base model, 50/50, for a less “deep fried” model. imatrix, quant, test.

The goal is to host it on a single RTX 3090, Ryzen 7000 with 128GB RAM, for anyone curious. Though I may try smaller models too, like Laguna S1.

The best thing I did was probably set up Obsidian Live Sync after hearing about it in selfh.st weekly. Compared to the Syncthing setup I had before it is so much quicker, much easier to catch sync errors, and won't drain my damn phone battery as much! The more things I can move away from Syncthing the better so I will probably be looking at Immich for my photos soon as well.

On the management side, I've had my Docker stacks split across Dockhand and Komodo ever since a poorly executed move away from Dockge a few months ago. I finally thought about it and had the time to decide to give up on them both. I like some of the concepts of compose in a git repo and the fancier interfaces, but I just realised it was all over the top for what I need. I missed being able to simply SSH into a damn machine and docker compose up -d in an emergency. Compared to the constant deploy errors of Dockhand and the potential of scrounging application databases for in-DB compose data or attempting to deploy stacks from forgejo when forgejo itself is a stack deployed via git... going back to basic files is a blessing. Lesson learned!

What that culminated in is all my stacks are now in Sencho (which clearly uses a lot of AI code sadly), but it was that or Dockge and I knew Dockge lacked a few things I wanted. The nice thing about Sencho (and Dockge) is that I don't need either of them because they are based around file-on-disk simple operation. I can cut it out of my setup entirely at any moment and not shed a tear. So much peace of mind leaving Dockhand. Now I just need to find a builder image or write a script to replace Komodo's build feature because I don't want to keep using it.

Tired. Tired, tired.

A little minor struggle with Immich. It happens sometimes that I cannot upload MOV files. Not all, just some. I've tended to circumvent its making big refusals by switching between my reverse proxied address and my local IP address for it but that didn't work today, and since these are videos of my baby, I'm a little frustrated. I don't really have the time to dig into that though.

I wonder whether it's possible to split tunnel traffic bound for the app from web traffic so I can serve it to my family members without exposing it to the web. Right now I don't trust its security—the authors even state you really shouldn't—so I have it behind a Cloudflare Zero Trust MFA prompt. But I get comments sometimes from family that it feels like a hoop to jump through since the longest CF will let them stay authorized is 30 days. Not a real 'today' thing, but just a general thing. It's the app I use the most besides Jellyfin, both to free myself from Microsoft, Google and Apple's monthly subscriptions, but also, to share privately my baby photos with the family so I can protect the kid's privacy and all that. I wish it was smoother for my end users but I've done what I can for now.

I tried migrating to new hardware recently because I wanted to virtualize most everything. I thought there was sense in being able to get snapshots in proxmox for rollback and ease of backup purposes. It ended up that only about half my servers made it over, and Immich and Jellyfin didn't make the cut because they need a Quadro T400 that lives in the original machine. Chatbot led me to think passing that GPU through virtualization was going to be a major complicating factor.

I've got a backup NAS off-site at my parent's house ~20 miles away but it has been offline since I changed ISPs because my silly ass hard-coded my public IP address into WireGuard's config (it auto-launches WG on boot) rather than a DNS address that gets dynamic DNS updating and resolves to whatever my home IP is. I should get to make it out to fix that on Thursday, finally. I went to all this trouble to buy and set up a backup NAS and it has been totally without backups for probably two months now.

Back to the subject of Cloudflare, I know they have a laundry list of security things I need to look at and I want to take those things seriously. With the new baby, and with how demoralized I have felt from work, and with of course all the normal obligations of life, I haven't ever had the time or felt like dealing with it, but I have a degree in cybersecurity and I want to take my home network / home lab security seriously. For protecting myself of course, but also because I think it'll be a big growing opportunity technically; maybe some stuff I learn can end up on the résumé. I desperately need to get out of my current role and anything that would help the résumé would be good. But there never seems to be time. Or if there is time there is no will.

I had a Cisco 2960x in my basement that I never did much with because I was suspicious it was drawing a lot of power (likely coincidence but it seemed like the electric bill went up every month I tried plugging it in), and it didn't seem to have enough memory to run without constantly causing me issues. I wanted to learn Cisco switches with it since I don't get enough hands-on time at work but it just didn't seem to work out. I was going to sell it on Facebook but never made time to do that either, so today I just put it back in the rack to have one less thing on the floor. Ironically, now we've upgraded to 3Gbps Internet and none of my home network stuff supports it. If I'd thought about that I would have likely let the ISP install their own mesh APs but I had put so much money and time into my own setup, I thought, surely I don't need them putting their hardware in my home. Well, here we are, and neither my little baby switch, nor my Cisco switch, nor even my OPNsense router support 3Gbps and there's no money to upgrade any of it 🥲

That's about all I can think of for today. Check in next Sunday, and I bet the update would be precisely the same :p

Finally think I got everything installed on my Raspberry Pi 4 that I want there, thankfully.

I've been trying to document my journey with selfhosting this time better than previous attempts, as far as writing down what worked and didn't work. It's coupled with me trying to write little explanation guides for my partner about what service does what, and how to use them. They're really excited to actually use them, but I want to get the guides done first, which has been a challenge.

Kinda surprised Grimmory is taking up so much RAM but if it becomes an issue I'll put it on my other, beefier server. It was the last service I was struggling with, because every time I would upload a book, something would go wrong. An example being that one time I uploaded a book and it went into every single folder after, then deleting one copy deleted all the copies.

Admittedly, I'm not terribly well experienced so it was probably an issue on my end. Still learning!

Speaking of, my next project to tackle is overhauling my more powerful server and what it's running. Since I use a split setup where I store media on my NAS, I've had difficulties with databases hating that aspect. Now that I know a bit more than I did when I started, and I have nowhere else to ask (thank you for having this community, by the way, it seems a lot more newbie friendly than some others) I was wondering if I could map the database of a service to be on the server itself, while having the media mapped to my NAS? From my research, I think this is possible, but I'm not 100% sure.

Hope everyone else's experiences are going well!

What's up? Not Grafana. I did docker compose pull on the stack (without version pinning) then recreated the containers, and now it's fucked. Or maybe it's not because the logs are fine but it only serves the web app but 404s on any connection to the Grafana backend.

Now I need to do some investigation into any recent changes to try to work out what's going wrong.

Mealie, recipe manager and Social to Mealie. Scrapes recipes from instagram reels, tiktok, youtube shorts.

Bar Assistant, bar and cocktail management. You can add your ingredients and it shows what can you make, you can share a menu to your friends, its cool