Nathan Reynolds

I built my first mini server cabinet in a closet three years ago, and within two weeks I had a NAS throttling, a switch running hot to the touch, and a very angry power bill from the AC working overtime. That experience taught me that picking the right rack cooling fan kit for a mini … Read more

I lost 4TB of family photos in 2019 when a single drive failure wiped out everything I had not bothered to back up. That disaster pushed me into the world of the 3-2-1 backup strategy, and over the past three years I have personally set up cloud storage for a 3-2-1 backup strategy across three … Read more

Looking for the best Intel Arc card for Linux transcoding in ? I have spent the last three months running Plex and Jellyfin workloads on eight different Intel Arc GPUs across Ubuntu 24.04, Unraid 6.12, and Arch to see which cards actually deliver when the rubber meets the road. Intel Arc has quietly become the … Read more

Finding the best Linux laptop for machine learning workloads in is harder than it should be. I spent the last three months benchmarking six workstations with NVIDIA RTX and AMD Radeon GPUs, running PyTorch training loops and fine-tuning 7B parameter models to see which ones actually deliver under real Linux driver conditions. The short answer: … Read more

I spent six weeks testing ten renewed and used graphics cards in my home office to find the best used GPU for a home AI workstation. The short answer: VRAM capacity matters more than raw CUDA core counts, which is why a 24GB RTX 3090 still beats newer 16GB cards for most local AI tasks … Read more

When I set up my first 10-inch homelab rack, I was stunned at how few DC PDU options actually fit. Most 19-inch power strips either hang over the rails or require ugly mounting brackets, and the dedicated mini rack units were buried on Amazon with thin review counts. I spent three weekends testing eight contenders … Read more

I remember the day I closed on my first house and immediately started pricing out camera systems. There are dozens of brands, hundreds of models, and somehow every listing assumes you already know what an NVR is. If you are shopping for your first DIY security system, you are not looking for the most advanced … Read more

I spent the last three months testing eight single-slot GPUs in our homelab racks, and the truth is, most guides skip what actually matters when you’re running these cards in a small form factor server 24/7. Heat in confined chassis, noise in a home office, and whether your Plex transcode pipeline survives a weekend unattended. … Read more

I spent the last three months testing PoE security cameras at my own 200-foot driveway in rural New Hampshire, where winters hit -10°F and summers bring thunderstorms that drop two inches of rain in an hour. After wiring eight different weatherproof PoE cameras through CAT6 runs buried in conduit, I learned exactly what separates a … Read more

Most break-ins happen after sunset, and that’s exactly when cheap security cameras fall apart on you. After spending three weeks testing eight different models on my garage, driveway, and back porch, I found real differences in how each one handles near-darkness. If you’re searching for the best turret camera for low-light recording, the answer depends … Read more