Homelab
Ever feel like Big Brother is lurking behind your screen? Spoiler: it probably is. I'll show you how to carve out a dedicated VLAN for your corporate machine—preserving the protections you need while keeping your personal network private
Artificial Intelligence
I'm increasingly leveraging agentic AI tools—tools you can now interact with and act on your behalf directly inside your code editor. Let's talk about how to use, and not use, these incredible tools to be more productive and write code you would be proud to ship.
Artificial Intelligence
Deploy local AI Chat that is actually good, fast, and comparable to paid using metal you already own, no subscription required. We'll use Open WebUI as our ChatGPT like interface and Ollama as our local model runner. We'll integrate with premium online cloud models too!
Homelab
I'll walk you through quickly migrating your Pi-hole configuration, including ad lists, whitelists, and custom DNS, to AdGuard home. Improving performance along with enabling TLS encryption, DoH, DOT, and deployment to Kubernetes
Homelab
Harness the potential of Unifi network traffic rules for your home network by integrating them with Home Assistant. Let's dive in and unlock!
Homelab
I'm writing this homelab guide to share some of the things I've learned, so if you're starting out or looking for what to do next, perhaps you can grab an idea or two for your setup. I would always advise starting small, getting comfortable, and then deciding if you are ready for more.
Security
I hope to convince you that good personal online privacy and security is essential, accessible, and works on any budget.
DNS
Caution: prepare to enter the over-engineering zone! I assert that your homelab can have one local IP address for DNS that will be fast & resilient across a high volume of requests, survive several physical and virtual machine failures, while never failing to resolve or respond.
Artificial Intelligence
Wouldn't it be awesome to use a local LLM as your personal AI assistant on the daily, subscription-free, completely offline, and even in VS Code? Type "y" to continue.
Engineering leader and technologist Chris shares practical guides and insights for tech enthusiasts, with a focus on homelab setups, networking, and automation.
Previously, I wrote an article about how to set up two or more Pi-hole instances using Docker Swarm, which has worked quite well for me up to this point. I've since decided this setup was too easy and wanted to move from Normal to Hard mode and bring Kubernetes into the mix.
I'm a huge fan of reverse proxy tunnels. Accessing private networks, like your home network or homelab, in this way is generally considered more secure than using a VPN or exposing ports to the public internet on your router. This will get you up and running in 5 minutes; anyone can do it.
I'm a little older, and my reaction time is a little slower, but I can claw some of that back with a bit of button mapping and retraining. Casual doesn't have to mean settling for the stock option.
I'm continuing to discover new and exciting ways to access my Homelab and home network when I'm away or using a device I don't personally manage...in this case, securely, without a VPN or WARP client
Zero Trust is a platform for small businesses and enterprises to offer secure access to their networks and applications...which sounds perfect for my five-user household 🙂; oh, and it's Free!
It's to set up your secure tunnels directly to Cloudflare on bare metal or within virtual machines. Why stop there? Let’s make them easier to manage and highly available by containerizing multiple tunnels across several physical devices
This guide will walk you through securely exposing Plex, your NAS, and other services while away from home. All while avoiding UPnP and traditional port forwarding, which is typically less secure and more complex with only one dynamic IP address.
Forget the Adblock browser extension. It's time to level up your home network to block unwanted ads and trackers across all of your devices. Pi-hole is an open-source project that has been around for a while and makes this dead simple.
In my opinion, Remote is here to stay. Companies that have embraced this will likely lead the pack to the most desirable places to work and are already innovating and transforming shared workspaces, embracing frequent travel, and offering home office perks.
Corporate policy restrictions got you down? Me too! I've struggled to find a reliable solution for local Slack, Github, or cloud development when Ngrok, the most commonly used tool for exposing services locally, is restricted by either a local execution policy or via OpenDNS (or similar)
In all companies, large and small, there is no One app to rule them all. The reality is that there are often dozens, sometimes hundreds, of apps/services/tools/etc that we use to help ourselves or to provide services to our clients.
I had a great time getting my yearly injection of the future as Microsoft sees it. The Azure, The Windows, The AI, and The .NET all got The Love. Azure even received the coveted day one keynote slot, so from my perspective, we got right to the good stuff.
