Nathan Reynolds

I run Immich on a Raspberry Pi 4 with two external HDDs holding about 28,000 family photos. So when my external library stopped scanning new photos last month, I lost an entire weekend debugging it before I found the real cause: a missing mount propagation flag in my docker-compose.yml. If your Immich external library won’t … Read more

Paperless-ngx is one of the best self-hosted document management systems you can run. It automatically ingests, OCRs, tags, and stores your scanned files so you never have to dig through a filing cabinet again. The whole workflow hinges on one feature: the consume folder, a watched directory where you drop files and let the system … Read more

If you have opened a freshly consumed document in Paperless-ngx and seen nonsense characters, random symbols, or pages filled with Chinese-looking glyphs where your English invoice should be, you have hit the classic Paperless-ngx OCR failure. The text is technically searchable but practically useless. I have run into this on three different self-hosted setups and … Read more

If your Paperless-ngx auto tagging rules keep quiet when you drop a new PDF into the consume folder, the problem is rarely your keywords. The problem is almost always timing, trigger selection, or classifier training data. I have rebuilt tagging workflows for self-hosted archives of 50,000+ documents and I have seen the same five failure … Read more

Setting up Home Assistant behind Nginx Proxy Manager with trusted proxies and WebSockets takes about 30 minutes if your network is ready. Install Nginx Proxy Manager, create a Proxy Host pointing at your Home Assistant IP on port 8123, enable WebSocket support, request a Let’s Encrypt certificate, then add the proxy IP to trusted_proxies in … Read more

Fixing Zigbee2MQTT entities that show “unavailable” after restarting Home Assistant is one of the most common headaches in smart home automation. You reboot Home Assistant for a routine update, and suddenly every Zigbee sensor, switch, and light reports as unavailable — even though the devices are still paired and working fine inside Zigbee2MQTT’s own frontend. … Read more

Swapping out a Zigbee coordinator used to mean touching every bulb, sensor, and switch in your home. I have helped network owners migrate across Texas Instruments, Silicon Labs, and Nabu Casa hardware, and the modern path is genuinely painless when you follow the right order. This guide shows you how to migrate a Home Assistant … Read more

Setting up Mosquitto MQTT broker with Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant is the backbone of a reliable local smart home. I have run this exact stack on three different installations, and the configuration pattern you are about to follow is the one I keep coming back to. Once you have the MQTT broker wired in, every … Read more

I have seen the look on someone’s face when they realize their self-hosted photo library, password manager, or Git server just vanished. Usually the culprit is a stray docker compose down -v, a well-meaning docker volume prune, or a host failure with no recent backup. If you are running any self-hosted service in Docker, learning … Read more

I built a Vaultwarden server in my home lab two years ago and never looked back. The whole thing runs on a small VPS with under 200 MB of RAM, syncs across my laptop, phone, and a spare tablet, and gives me full ownership of my password database. This guide walks you through setting up … Read more