Nathan Reynolds

I built my first homelab three years ago with a used Dell Optiplex and a tangle of Ethernet cords. It looked like spaghetti, sounded like a hair dryer, and taught me more about networking in one weekend than a semester of online courses. A homelab is a personal computing environment you set up at home … Read more

I spent the last three months testing eight different portable Bluetooth speakers in my own workshop and home server build room, and I can tell you one thing right away: a regular home speaker does not survive week one next to a circular saw and an air compressor. When I built out my new Raspberry … Read more

If you want the shortest possible answer for the best microphone array for local voice assistant hardware in , it is the **seeed studio ReSpeaker XVF3800 with Case**. After spending weeks comparing arrays on my workbench, running them through noisy living rooms, quiet bedrooms, and open kitchens, the XVF3800 platform kept showing up as the … Read more

When I first plugged headphones into a Raspberry Pi, the hiss and lack of detail made me shelve the project for months. That all changed once I added a dedicated DAC HAT to my Pi. A HiFiBerry HAT for a Raspberry Pi audio player turns a tinny little single-board computer into a serious source component, … Read more

Building a multi-room audio amplifier setup for a homelab used to mean cobbling together four separate stereo amps, a maze of speaker wire, and a prayer that nothing caught fire. I run my homelab in a converted basement, and I needed audio across six zones: my rack room, the office upstairs, the kitchen, the back … Read more

I have been running homelab gear out of vans, garages, and basements for years, and the one thing that separates a working setup from a flaky one is portable power. The best portable power station for a mobile homelab needs to do three things at once: ride along in the back of a vehicle without … Read more

I still remember firing up my Logitech Squeezebox Touch in 2010 and grinning at the sound pouring from a pair of bookshelf speakers I borrowed from my dad. That setup got me hooked on multi-room hi-fi streaming. Years later, the Squeezebox hardware is gone, but the community never died. Logitech Media Server (now called Lyrion … Read more

I switched to Linux full-time three years ago, and one of the first headaches I ran into was webcam compatibility. I expected chaos, but here’s the surprising truth: most modern webcams just work on Linux thanks to a kernel driver called uvcvideo that has been baked into Linux since version 2.6.26. The catch is that … Read more

If you work from home on Linux, you’ve probably noticed that almost every “best USB microphone” list online was written for Windows or macOS first. I built this roundup differently. Our team spent six weeks testing 8 USB microphones across Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 41, Arch, and Linux Mint, verifying each one with lsusb, arecord -l, … Read more

I have spent the last six months testing USB Bluetooth adapters across Ubuntu 24.04, Linux Mint 21, Fedora 40, and Debian 12. I plugged each one in cold, ran bluetoothctl scan on, and counted the seconds before a mouse, keyboard, or pair of headphones actually paired without a single terminal command. That is what “out … Read more