Nathan Reynolds

I remember the frustration of plugging a “compatible” portable monitor into my ThinkPad running Fedora, only to get a black void and a flood of xrandr errors. That experience sent me down a rabbit hole testing eight different displays over three months across Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora Workstation, and Arch Linux. A truly Linux-friendly portable monitor … Read more

Running Whisper locally is the smartest move for anyone who transcribes audio regularly and wants to keep their data private. I have been running Whisper models on everything from a Raspberry Pi 5 to dual RTX 3090 rigs, and the hardware you pick changes everything about your experience. This guide is my honest breakdown of … Read more

I built my first Proxmox homelab on a $6 USB stick from a gas station, and it died in 47 days. The kernel log writes alone wore through the NAND cells faster than I could blink. After losing three more drives to the same fate, I started keeping notes on what actually survives a Proxmox … Read more

I learned the hard way how fast a server closet can turn into an oven. After losing two switches to a failed AC unit at 2 AM, I started testing temperature sensors for server closet monitoring like my job depended on it, because honestly, it did. A reliable temperature sensor for server closet use does … Read more

Three months ago my main server refused to boot after a bad Proxmox update. I was stuck on a remote connection with no way to reach the BIOS, and that’s when I realized every self-hoster needs a hardware KVM over IP on their rack. That panic led me down a rabbit hole testing nearly every … Read more

When my apartment started looking like a cable spaghetti factory, I knew I needed a 10-inch mini rack. The question every homelabber asks is simple: DeskPi RackMate T1 vs GeeekPi 12U Mini Rack – which one deserves the spot on your desk? Both promise to tame the chaos, but they take wildly different approaches to … Read more

I’ve been a developer for 12 years, and my wrists started complaining long before my code did. After two bouts of tendinitis and one near-miss with carpal tunnel, I went deep into the world of ergonomic keyboards. What started as a personal recovery mission turned into three months of daily testing, comparing eight boards side-by-side … Read more

Running large language models locally used to mean buying a workstation with a $1,500 GPU and a tower that hums like a server room. That changed in when AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395, also known as Strix Halo, landed in compact mini PCs that fit behind your monitor. I have spent the last three months … Read more

Running local virtual machines on a laptop changes the way you work, but only if your hardware can keep up. After weeks of testing, I found the best Linux laptop for running local virtual machines is one that pairs a multi-core CPU with at least 32GB of RAM, an NVMe SSD, and confirmed BIOS-level VT-x … Read more

I spent the last two months running Llama 3.3 70B, Qwen 2.5 70B, and DeepSeek-V3 distilled models on every mini PC I could get my hands on. The honest truth is that in , a handful of compact machines powered by AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) finally make local 70B inference practical on … Read more