Systems tinkering
3D printing, Raspberry Pi, SBCs, OpenWrt, pfSense, Proxmox, Unraid, embedded devices, LTE/5G modules, routers, sensors, and other useful rabbit holes.
- 72 GB of VRAM, No Graphics Card
A mini-PC assigned 72 GB of system RAM to its iGPU and ran a 120B model, but memory bandwidth limited generation to reading speed.
- Building a Local LLM Box That Doesn't Need Babysitting
A field note on assembling a small inference machine, putting Ubuntu Server on it, and getting a stack that runs stable for daily work without constant firefighting.
- Everything With a Battery Cooks in a Parked Car
Heat, cold, and a rule against using the starter battery eliminated most parking-mode recorders and led to a battery-less 4G build.
- Fail Closed, Not Fast
DNS pinning, liveness probes, and network rules made a VPN-dependent service stop traffic when its tunnel failed instead of silently exposing it.
- I Built Cellular Routers Every Way. Then I Bought One.
Years of building 4G/5G routers from SBCs, x86 boards, and mixed modems showed what mattered—and why dependable links now get a vendor box.
- You Can't Hotfix Atoms
Parametric 3D design behaves like code generation, but every bad build still costs hours and material because physical mistakes cannot be hotfixed.
- The NVMe Specs That Actually Matter for a Homelab
For a Proxmox homelab, sustained writes and endurance matter more than Gen4 versus Gen5—and retailer specification tables can be wrong.
- Migrating a ZFS pool to new drives in Proxmox
Moving a pool to bigger disks with zfs send/receive: build a fresh pool, replicate, destroy the old one, and rename — so Proxmox never notices.
- Passing physical disks to Proxmox VMs
How to give a VM direct access to a physical disk in Proxmox, and when you'd want to do that versus passing through the whole HBA controller.
- LVM Thin Pools in Proxmox
When to use LVM Thin instead of ZFS in Proxmox, how to set it up, and what over-provisioning actually means in practice.
- Creating a ZFS storage pool in Proxmox
How to add a ZFS pool to Proxmox VE and why it's the right storage backend for most homelab VM and container workloads.
- Identifying ZFS disks with /dev/disk/by-id/
Why /dev/sda is the wrong way to reference disks in ZFS, and how to use persistent identifiers to match pool members to physical drives.
- ZFS, BTRFS, and LVM in the Homelab: Picking a Filesystem Without Regret
A concise field guide to the three storage stacks every Proxmox homelab eventually has to choose between — and the gotchas that bite after the fact.