Nathan Reynolds

I spent the last 60 days running a local coding assistant on ten different mini PCs, downloading multi-gigabyte model files, piping them through Ollama, and timing how fast they completed real fill-in-middle coding tasks inside VS Code. What I found surprised me: the spec that decides whether your coding assistant feels fast or sluggish is … Read more

I ran a self-hosted chatbot on a Raspberry Pi for two months and nearly gave up on local AI. The responses crawled, the box ran hot, and the smallest Llama model choked on anything past 512 tokens. Then I switched to a proper mini PC and everything changed. Inference jumped from a sluggish 2 tokens … Read more

Running local AI on a mini PC sounds impossible until you try it. I spent 30 days squeezing every drop out of integrated Radeon graphics before hitting the same wall everyone hits: there is no way to fit a quantized 32B model into shared system memory and still expect usable tokens per second. That is … Read more

Running serious AI models locally used to mean buying a tower workstation with a discrete GPU that cost more than a used car. That changed in . A new class of mini PC with 128GB RAM now ships with enough unified memory to load a 70B parameter language model entirely in RAM, and you can … Read more

I remember the moment our robotics team first wired a Jetson into a prototype drone and watched a vision model run at 30 fps without sending a single byte to the cloud. That kind of latency-free, private, always-on inference is exactly why picking the best NVIDIA Jetson board for edge AI inference has become one … Read more

I spent the last 90 days running large language models on every unified memory mini PC I could get my hands on, and the results surprised me. The best unified memory mini PC for large language models in is not the most expensive one — it is the one with enough shared RAM to load … Read more

I have been running 13B models on tiny boxes for the past three months, and the truth is this category has matured faster than anyone expected. In , you no longer need a $2,000 GPU rig to run a private Llama 3 assistant. A budget mini PC with 16GB to 32GB of fast RAM will … Read more

I’ve spent the last three months testing docking stations on Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 41, and Pop!_OS across Framework 16, ThinkPad X1 Carbon, and ASUS Zenbook S 16 laptops. The truth is, finding the best docking station for a Linux laptop in is harder than it should be, because some docks that market themselves as “universal” … Read more

I tested five budget PoE cameras with my Frigate NVR for 60 days, and the results surprised me. Two years ago, getting clean object detection under $70 per camera meant hunting for deals on used gear or settling for grainy footage. In , I can confidently recommend five cameras that work natively with Frigate’s detection … Read more

If you rely on an IP camera, dash cam, or home security system to capture critical footage, the microSD card sitting inside it matters more than most people realize. I have watched regular consumer cards fail within 12 to 18 months under constant write cycles, leaving huge gaps in recorded evidence right when it was … Read more