Three years ago, I lost an entire NAS array to a surprise power outage during a thunderstorm. The drives survived, but the corrupted ZFS pool took me a weekend to repair. That is the day I started running every piece of my homelab gear through a lithium UPS, and I have not looked back since. … Read more
I plugged a basic power meter into my homelab last year and nearly fell off my chair. My rack was pulling 0.12 kW around the clock, and that single measurement changed how I deploy every service since. Before I knew the real cost, I treated uptime like a free resource. After I saw the bill … Read more
Our homelab lost three weeks of Home Assistant automations last winter when a brief storm knocked out power for under a second. Just enough to corrupt the SD cards on two of my four-node Raspberry Pi cluster. That single event pushed me down the rabbit hole of testing small UPS solutions for Pi clusters. I … Read more
I spent the last three months testing eight smart PDUs with per-outlet metering across my home lab rack, a friend’s small colocation setup, and a mid-sized office data closet. I’ve watched wattage logs scroll by, rebooted frozen servers from my phone, and discovered which brands actually deliver on the per-outlet promise and which ones just … Read more
If you run a self-hosted camera system with Frigate, you already know the moment your CPU fans spin up at 3 a.m. because motion detection is pegging every core. That is exactly why I started hunting for a cheap GPU for Frigate instead of throwing money at a used workstation. The Google Coral TPU, the … Read more
Watching HDR content on non-HDR devices shouldn’t be a headache. Yet many Jellyfin users struggle with washed-out colors or that dreaded pink-green tint when their server tries to convert HDR to SDR. The right GPU makes all the difference between smooth, accurate tone mapping and frustrating transcoding failures. Jellyfin HDR tone mapping requires hardware acceleration … Read more
When three people in my house start watching Plex at the same time, the wrong GPU turns into a stuttering mess in seconds. After swapping cards across our three test servers for the past four months, I can tell you exactly which ones hold up and which ones fold when the household pressure ramps up. … Read more
Building a Linux media server used to mean choosing between a noisy power-hungry Nvidia card or settling for slow software transcoding. After spending the last three months swapping GPUs across our test Plex and Jellyfin servers running Ubuntu 22.04 and unRAID, I can tell you the AMD GPU landscape for Linux media servers has changed … Read more
I built my first Plex server on an old office desktop with no GPU, and it crashed every time my wife tried to watch 4K in the bedroom while I streamed 1080p downstairs. That frustration sent me down a six-month rabbit hole, testing eight different budget graphics cards across Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby to find … Read more
I’ve spent the past three months running builds, container clusters, and full IDE toolchains on every laptop in this guide, and I can tell you the best Linux laptop for developers in is no longer a niche question. Mainstream hardware from Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Panasonic now ships with Ubuntu or Linux Mint pre-installed, and … Read more