About the Lab
A friendly, non-technical tour of the home lab behind all this.
What this is
This is a home lab — a small collection of always-on computers I run at home for learning, tinkering, and running useful services for myself, my household, and a few friends.
It started as a way to sharpen skills I use professionally (infrastructure, automation, systems administration) and turned into a genuine hobby. Everything here is self-hosted: instead of renting someone else's cloud, the services run on hardware I own and maintain, on my own network.
The guiding principles, if you're curious:
- Own it end to end. Where practical, I run the open-source version of a thing rather than a subscription.
- Private by default. Almost nothing is exposed to the public internet; the handful of things that are sit behind a single, hardened entry point.
- Run forever, quietly. The lab is built to idle cheaply and stay up for months without babysitting.
- Write it down. This wiki exists because future-me forgets how past-me set things up.
None of the pages here contain anything sensitive — no addresses, passwords, or network internals. It's a tour, not a blueprint.
What it can do
A rough tour of what runs in the lab, in plain terms:
Media. A personal media server so my household can watch our own library on any screen in the house, plus a self-service way for the household to add to it. (If you have an account, the other books here cover how to use it.)
Home automation. Lights, sensors, and various smart-home gadgets tied together into one local system, with routines that run on a schedule or on triggers — all processed at home rather than in a vendor's cloud.
A voice assistant. A fully local, privacy-respecting voice assistant — the speech recognition, the "brain," and the text-to-speech all run on my own hardware. Nothing it hears leaves the house.
Local AI. I run large language models on local hardware for experimentation — chat, summarizing, tidying up transcripts, that sort of thing. Again, entirely self-hosted; no external API.
This wiki. Documentation for the lab, and friendly guides like the ones you're reading.
A few odds and ends. Dashboards, a pantry/kitchen helper, scheduled maintenance jobs, and whatever project I'm building out on this month.
How it's kept safe
People are sometimes surprised that a home setup can be run responsibly, so here's the philosophy in non-technical terms:
- The front door is tiny. The vast majority of the lab is reachable only from inside my own network. The few things friends can reach from outside go through a single, locked-down gateway that does nothing else — not through my home router, which forwards nothing.
- Encrypted everywhere it matters. Connections from outside are encrypted, and remote access between my own machines rides a private, encrypted mesh network rather than the open internet.
- Least exposure. Optional features that aren't in use simply aren't turned on. Fewer moving parts, fewer things to secure.
- Backups and recovery. The important stuff is backed up on a schedule, and there are written recovery steps for when something breaks (because it eventually does).
This page is deliberately vague on specifics — that vagueness is part of the security. The point is just that "self-hosted" and "careful" aren't opposites.
Why bother?
A fair question, since most of this replaces things you could get for free or cheap from a big company. A few honest reasons:
- Privacy. The voice assistant, the automation, and the AI all run at home. That's genuinely rare, and it's worth something to me that they aren't feeding a data broker.
- Learning. Every service here taught me something I now use at work. A home lab is the best sandbox there is — when you break it, you fix it, and you keep the lesson.
- Control. Nothing gets discontinued, enshittified, or hit with a surprise price hike. If I don't like how something works, I change it.
- It's fun. That's the real one. It scratches the same itch as a model railway or a project car, except the trains are Docker containers.
If any of this sounds interesting and you want to start your own, ask me — I love talking about it, and everything I use is open-source and well-documented.
Does this cost anything?
No, and it never will. This is a hobby, not a business, and money is never part of it.
Snacks, however, are always accepted. Preferred denominations: chips, gummy candy of any nationality, and anything your grandmother makes. Payable in person only. Good movie recommendations also spend well here.