Nathan Reynolds

When I started labeling every Ethernet run, switch port, and patch panel in my home lab, I went through three label makers in two months. The first used ink that smeared the moment I touched a cable. The second had a Bluetooth connection that dropped mid-batch. The third finally stuck – and I learned more … Read more

I run a home lab with six external drives, two Zigbee dongles, a Bluetooth adapter, an RTL-SDR, and a UPS interface all hanging off one tiny machine. The day my cheap 4-port hub started dropping the third drive mid-backup was the day I stopped buying unpowered hubs. If you are searching for the best USB … Read more

I remember the day a brownout knocked my home rack offline and corrupted a NAS drive. After that, I spent three months rebuilding my setup with the right UPS cable and adapter for a rack setup, and I learned the hard way that the cables matter just as much as the UPS itself. Rack setups … Read more

I repasted my first mini PC three years ago after the factory paste cooked itself into chalk within 18 months. The Beelink SER5 ran 12°C cooler the moment I swapped in fresh thermal compound, and the fan noise dropped noticeably. That experience taught me that finding the best thermal paste for mini PC repaste isn’t … Read more

I’ve spent the last decade wrestling with messy server racks, tangled PC builds, and chaotic under-desk setups. When I started organizing our team’s networking closet three years ago, I tested every Velcro strap and cable tie I could find to find the best cable ties and velcro for a tidy rack setup that actually holds … Read more

When my home server started randomly rebooting during Plex transcodes, I assumed it was a software issue. Two weeks of debugging later, I pulled out my multimeter, probed the 24-pin ATX connector, and discovered the 12V rail was sagging to 11.4V under load. That single reading told me everything I needed to know: the PSU … Read more

After 14 months of testing 23 different trackballs across two home offices and a coworking space, our team settled on the eight models worth recommending for the best trackball mouse for long coding sessions. We coded for 8-10 hour stretches, debugged in terminals, and switched between IDEs, design tools, and Slack to see which trackballs … Read more

I run a Beelink mini PC as my daily driver on Pop!_OS, and I learned the hard way that not every USB-C hub plays nicely with Linux. Three different docks sat in my drawer before I figured out the difference between hubs that work out of the box and hubs that quietly refuse to enumerate … Read more

I spent the last 60 days testing eight mini PCs in my living room, running Jellyfin as a media client to my main server, and the differences between models were far bigger than the spec sheets suggest. An HTPC Mini PC Jellyfin client sits between your TV and your media library, decoding 4K HDR content, … Read more

Looking for the best streaming device for a self-hosted Plex library? I have been running a self-hosted Plex server for over six years, and I have personally swapped between more streamers than I care to admit. Some handled 4K HDR direct play flawlessly, while others choked on HEVC remuxes the moment I turned the volume … Read more