Nathan Reynolds

I switched from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a mini PC for Home Assistant three years ago, and I’ve never looked back. The difference in stability, SSD-backed database performance, and headroom for add-ons like Frigate was night and day. If you’re hunting for the best mini PC for running Home Assistant, you don’t need a … Read more

I have spent the last several years running my own home lab on a mix of full-size towers and small form factor machines, and one thing stands out from that experience: a well-chosen mini PC can replace a traditional home server for almost every common workload while drawing a fraction of the power. The shift … Read more

Starting your first homelab does not need a rack, a server, or a big budget. A off-lease business mini PC plugged into a wall outlet can run Proxmox, Docker containers, Pi-hole, and Home Assistant around the clock while drawing less power than a light bulb. After comparing eight machines and digging through hundreds of buyer … Read more

Choosing between the Minisforum MS-A2 vs Beelink SER8 for a home lab comes down to what you value more: raw virtualization power or budget-friendly completeness. I have spent months testing mini PCs for Proxmox, Docker, and everything in between, and these two represent opposite ends of the spectrum. One is a 16-core beast built for … Read more

I built my first home lab with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a second-hand tower PC that sounded like a jet engine. Both did the job, but my electric bill kept creeping up and the Pi hit a wall every time I tried to run more than three Docker containers. After three months of testing, … Read more

Yes, a mini PC can run Proxmox, and three of them make a fantastic cluster. After spending six weeks running two separate multi-node setups in my home lab, I can tell you that compact, low-power boxes handle real Proxmox workloads surprisingly well. Idle power drops to 10-15W per node (versus 100W+ for traditional servers), you … Read more

Every developer knows the struggle. You have your laptop, two monitors, a mechanical keyboard, mouse, ethernet cable, and a tangle of USB devices. Plugging and unplugging everything every time you move between home and office wastes precious time. I’ve spent the last three months testing docking stations specifically for developer workflows, and the right dock … Read more

If your eyes burn by 3 PM every day, the problem is probably not your monitor. It’s the contrast between your bright screen and the dim room around it. After 12-hour workdays writing and editing, I started getting tension headaches that I chalked up to aging. Then I tried a monitor light bar and the … Read more

I built my first 10GbE home lab setup in after hitting the ceiling of my 1GbE network one too many times. Waiting 45 minutes to copy a 500GB virtual machine across two servers will do that to you. Now I run Unraid on one box and Proxmox on another, and big file transfers finish in … Read more

Building a TrueNAS box means trusting one machine with every file you care about, and the motherboard you pick decides whether that trust is well placed. We spent weeks comparing 10 boards across Intel and AMD platforms for this guide to the best ECC motherboards for TrueNAS builds, and one pattern kept repeating: boards that … Read more