Nathan Reynolds

I switched to Linux last Tuesday, rebooted into Windows an hour later, and the clock read 4:37 PM instead of 7:37 PM. I corrected it manually, jumped back into Linux at lunch, and the clock was three hours ahead again. If you have ever watched the time jump back and forth on a dual-boot machine, … Read more

Working across multiple Git accounts—personal projects on GitHub, client repositories on GitLab, and enterprise code on internal servers—quickly becomes a configuration nightmare. You commit with the wrong email address, push with the wrong SSH key, or forget to sign commits with the correct GPG key. Then you spend hours fixing your commit history. I’ve been … Read more

Recording your screen on Linux does not have to mean maxing out your CPU and watching your system stutter. OBS Studio Linux hardware encoding shifts the heavy lifting from your processor to your GPU, and the difference is night and day. Users who make the switch consistently report CPU usage dropping from 40 to 60 … Read more

If your Zigbee devices keep dropping on the second floor or in the basement, you are not alone. I have spent the last three months testing Zigbee repeater plugs in a two-story house with concrete walls, and the difference between a smart home that “sometimes works” and one that “just works” almost always comes down … Read more

I installed my first Home Assistant weather station three years ago because my smart shutters kept closing on sunny days and my irrigation ran during afternoon thunderstorms. Once I routed real-time, hyper-local weather data into Home Assistant, those automations finally behaved the way I expected. After testing seven current models side by side, here is … Read more

I spent the last three months building a fully local Matter-over-Thread smart home from scratch. After testing dozens of devices, swapping border routers, and stress-testing my mesh network with sensors, switches, and smart plugs, I’m confident in my picks for the best Matter-over-Thread devices available right now. Local control means no cloud dependency, faster response … Read more

Upgrading an older home with smart lighting usually hits a wall the moment you open the switch box. Most homes built before the mid-1980s only run a hot wire and a load wire through the switch — no neutral. Standard smart switches need that neutral to keep their radios alive, so a “no neutral” situation … Read more

When I plugged in my Raspberry Pi 5 for a new project last month, nothing happened on screen. No boot splash, no login prompt, just a green LED blinking in a pattern I had never seen before. That moment reminded me why Raspberry Pi green LED blink codes are worth memorizing. They turn a silent, … Read more

Setting up split-horizon DNS is how you make sure a laptop on your couch reaches your reverse proxy over the local network instead of bouncing out through your public IP. I run a homelab with about a dozen self-hosted services, and the moment I pointed my family’s phones and laptops at a real domain name … Read more

Last weekend I set up a site-to-site WireGuard tunnel between my house and my parents’ place so I could reach my home file server without poking holes in my router. It took me about an hour, most of which was figuring out two things: which subnet to give the tunnel, and why my traffic made … Read more