Home Lab
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The setup day most Bambu Lab owners skip is the only one that matters
Most Bambu Lab printers feel ready out of the box, but setup day matters. These six steps help prevent bad first prints and messy habits.
I ditched iCloud for Immich, and my photo library finally feels like it's actually mine
A completely self-hosted photo library with virtually all the same bells and whistles
Repurposing an old PC as a NAS seemed smart until I checked the power bill
Saving money only to spend more later.
My home server now hosts my entire ebook collection, and this free container makes managing everything painless
It turned my home server into a personal digital library
Bambu's A2L shows why larger build plates are becoming the real differentiator for budget printers
Bambu’s A2L shows how larger build plates are becoming the new way budget 3D printers stand out from the crowd.
I love functional prints, but I'd never trust my 3D printer with these 3 household fixes
Functional prints are useful, but some household repairs are too risky for 3D printed parts, especially around weight, water, and heat.
I stopped asking Claude Code to build things, and that's when it got actually useful
Claude Code is most useful in my home lab when I give it boring chores.
I tried to replace every Cloudflare service in my homelab — here's what I kept and what I dropped
Some Cloudflare services just earned their place.
Claude Code found the quiet problems hiding in my Home Assistant setup, and I've been ignoring them for months
Claude Code found the quiet Home Assistant problems I had stopped noticing, and the cleanup made my setup easier to trust.
Jellyfin's embedded title setting is quietly ruining your media library
One small Jellyfin setting can make a clean media library look far messier than it really is.
Plugins made Claude Code feel less like a chat window and more like a command center
Claude Code plugins made my setup feel more connected, more useful, and much less like a simple chatbot.
I spent hours troubleshooting my NAS until electrical tape fixed what software couldn't
A fix from the unlikeliest of places
I stopped checking my home lab backups manually after Claude Code helped me build these checks
Claude Code helped me replace manual Proxmox backup checks with readable scripts, making my home lab easier to trust.
Proxmox Backup Server is the boring home lab upgrade that made me less afraid to break things
My Proxmox backups stopped being fragile once I added a dedicated PBS node
A used workstation costs less than a new GPU, but it pays for itself in ways gaming hardware never will
Different hardware for different use cases, but one is more complete
3D printing filament got cheaper this year, but that's not where I actually saved money
3D printing got cheaper, but better profiles, fewer failed prints, and useful replacement parts saved me more.
I used a LattePanda Sigma with 32GB of RAM as my ‘too much power’ home lab box, and immediately found work for it
The LattePanda Sigma seemed excessive for my home lab, but 32GB of RAM quickly became useful headroom.
HBA cards unlock cheap enterprise storage for your NAS, but the gotchas are real
HBAs come with their own quirks when installed in consumer-grade hardware, but they're well worth your while
LXC updates in Proxmox aren't hard — managing 20 of them at scale is another story
Everything in the home lab gets trickier with scale
Your backup strategy is probably broken, and a $250 second machine can fix it
Disaster recovery is a lot easier when you've got a remote backup server