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 nerding out on this month.