Nathan Reynolds

If you’re building a media server in and torn between the Intel Arc A380 vs NVIDIA RTX 4060 for transcoding, you’re not alone. This is one of the most common questions I see on r/PleX, r/selfhosted, and the Unraid forums right now. Both cards claim to handle multiple 4K streams, but they take very different … Read more

I spent the last three months running 70B parameter language models, Stable Diffusion XL, and a private RAG stack on six different machines, and the GMKtec EVO-X2 vs Minisforum MS-A2 for local AI question came up in almost every conversation with developers. Both machines use AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU, both promise massive unified … Read more

I’ve spent the last three months going deep on Linux laptops for our Eglug team, and one question keeps coming up: how do you choose between a modular laptop like the Framework Laptop 16 and a Linux-first workstation like the System76 Oryx Pro? Both brands have cult followings. Both promise a better experience than mainstream … Read more

If you’ve been planning a home lab upgrade in , you’ve probably hit the same wall I did: gigabit is officially not enough. My NAS copies topped out at 110 MB/s, my Wi-Fi 6 access point sat on a 1GbE uplink like a race car stuck in a parking lot, and my hypervisor VM traffic … Read more

A few months ago, I built a small home rack right next to my desk. After plugging in my first “managed” switch, a low hum showed up and never left. That constant drone is exactly what the best fanless managed switch for a quiet rack solves: full Layer 2 control with absolutely zero moving parts … Read more

I built my first 10-inch home lab rack two years ago, and the cable mess taught me a quick lesson: without the right patch panel for a 10-inch mini rack, the entire setup looks like spaghetti behind the door. After testing panels from GeeekPi, Rapink, Cable Matters, and five other brands in my DeskPi RackMate … Read more

A burst pipe at 2 AM can dump 4-8 gallons of water per minute into your basement. By morning, that leak can wreck flooring, ruin stored belongings, and leave you holding a $10,000-plus repair bill. I learned this the hard way after my water heater failed while I was on vacation. I spent the next … Read more

Running your own VPN at home used to mean renting a VPS or trusting a third-party provider with your traffic. I built my first self-hosted VPN on a Raspberry Pi 4 four years ago, and that little single board computer handled gigabit WireGuard with only a passive heatsink. Since then I have deployed PiVPN, OpenVPN, … Read more

Last year I spent three weekends untangling power bricks behind my IKEA Bror shelf, trying to figure out why half my cluster nodes were mysteriously rebooting. That was the week I decided every future distributed node in my home lab would run on Power over Ethernet. A PoE-powered SBC turns one Ethernet cable into both … Read more

I’ve spent the last six months pressing, double-clicking, and holding just about every wireless remote I could get my hands on, and I’m convinced a good Zigbee smart button is the single fastest way to make a smart home feel less like an app and more like a home. A Zigbee smart button is a … Read more