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.