Nathan Reynolds

I built my first Frigate NVR in 2021 with a Raspberry Pi 4 and the Coral USB Accelerator. It handled two 1080p cameras just fine, but the moment I added a third stream, the whole system fell apart. That’s what pushed me to test every Coral M.2 Accelerator I could find on a real mini … Read more

I installed my first fanless camera server in a bedroom closet three years ago, and I have not looked back since. The silence is the whole point. A regular mini PC sounds like a tiny jet engine when it sits next to your winter coats, but a true zero-decibel unit disappears into the background while … Read more

A package was delivered at 5:24 PM. By 6:05 PM, it was gone. That Reddit post stuck with me because it captures how fast porch piracy works, and how a missing camera window turns evidence into a shrug. Package theft hit record highs last year, and our team saw the same pattern in across dozens … Read more

If your surveillance rig spends more time sweating than detecting, you already know the pain of CPU spikes at 90% every time a tree branch moves. I have spent the last three months running an AI camera detector across a Raspberry Pi 5, an old i5 NUC, and a rackmount server, and the difference between … Read more

I learned the hard way why a UPS matters. A brownout hit my street one evening, and my 4-bay NAS shut down mid-write, leaving a Btrfs volume that took nine hours of scrubbing before I trusted it again. That was the day I stopped treating a battery backup as optional gear. If you are running … Read more

A single bad power blip took out my DS920+ a few years back, and I lost two months of family photos that I thought were safe inside a SHR array. That moment made me obsessive about finding the best pure sine wave UPS for a Synology NAS, and I have been testing UPS units on … Read more

A power cut at 2 AM is the fastest way to learn why every homelab owner eventually buys a UPS. One bad shutdown can corrupt a ZFS pool that took weeks to build, and a brownout can quietly kill a power supply that seemed perfectly healthy. After running eight different units in our own racks … Read more

A power blip shouldn’t mean your work call drops or your security cameras go dark. We tested 10 best budget UPS for a router and modem setups in our home lab, from a 425VA CyberPower brick to a 74Wh pocket-sized DC backup, and we measured how long each one actually kept a typical cable modem … Read more

Finding the best rack-mount UPS for a 10-inch mini rack is harder than it should be. Almost every rackmount UPS on the market is built for a 19-inch rack, and the few compact units that exist come with trade-offs in depth, runtime, or waveform quality. I ran into this exact wall when I built my … Read more

Power outages kill NAS filesystems. I learned this the hard way when a sudden blackout corrupted my ZFS pool during a scrub operation. The solution is a UPS with USB monitoring that enables TrueNAS to perform graceful shutdowns before the battery dies. TrueNAS uses Network UPS Tools (NUT) to communicate with UPS units via USB. … Read more