The Ulanzi TC001 looks like a simple LED desk clock, but under the hood it is an ESP32 matrix display with just enough capability to be interesting. Out of the box, the official firmware is extremely limited. With a bit of work, it can become something far more useful. This

Setting up a Bitaxe, on purpose Bitcoin mining usually appears in one of two forms. At one end, it is an abstract process hidden behind charts, hashrate graphs, and network difficulty numbers that update every few minutes. At the other, it is an industrial activity, taking place in vast warehouses

If you had told me a year ago that I would be inside my Switch Lite with a screwdriver, a spudger, tweezers, and the kind of concentration usually reserved for bomb disposal scenes in movies, I would have laughed. Yet here we are. Yes, I know the Switch 2 is

Streaming subscriptions are expensive, and one usually isn't enough. So I took full control in a way that lets me get everything I want without relying on torrents (no seeds, poor download speeds) and moved to Usenet. I can find almost everything I want and max out my

AdGuard Home is a powerful network-wide ad and tracker blocker. It acts as a local DNS server, blocking unwanted content before it even loads. In this guide, I'll walk you through how I set up AdGuard Home on my local Debian server ("blackbox") and configured it

Summary To expand our home server’s functionality, we recently installed Audiobookshelf, a self-hosted audiobook and podcast manager with a clean interface, multi-user support, and full playback tracking. While installing the container was easy, getting it securely online took a bit of configuration work. This post documents what we did

In our ongoing quest to refine and simplify our self-hosted stack, we decided to replace our growing collection of scattered bookmarks and memory-based links with something cleaner: Heimdall. Heimdall is a lightweight, easy-to-use application dashboard that visually organizes and launches all the services we run on our network — from Uptime

Since moving most of my personal tools and services to a self-hosted setup, I needed a simple way to check if everything was still running — without relying on external services like Pingdom or UptimeRobot. Enter Uptime Kuma, a sleek, open-source monitoring dashboard I now run locally to keep an eye

Today I upgraded the internal Wi-Fi card on Blackbox (my Lenovo M710q Tiny running Debian) to an Intel AX200NGW. The journey wasn’t exactly plug-and-play — but we got there, and now Blackbox is fully dual-network capable. Here’s the full rundown, problems included. Hardware install The M710q had an old

After getting my ThinkCentre (“blackbox”) stable, I wanted to set up a search tool that lets my local LLMs fetch real-time web results. This post documents the working config I used to connect Hermes 2/3 to a custom FastAPI tool, backed by SearxNG. 🔧 What We Used: * Hermes model via

When we started setting up Blackbox, our self-hosted AI workstation, one of the biggest questions was: Which local language models (LLMs) should we run? With so many models available — from tiny 1B parameter experiments to heavyweight 70B giants — the challenge was finding a perfect fit: * Fast enough for everyday use

A streamlined setup for local LLM interaction via a web interface. Why We Did It 🖥️ After experimenting with local model serving, we needed a lightweight, fast web interface to interact with LLMs running directly on CPU — no GPU acceleration. The goals were: * Keep it simple * Use existing hardware (Blackbox 🖤) * Make

Welcome to my blog — a blend of thoughts, experiments, and digital tinkering. I thought I’d kick things off by introducing Blackbox, the machine that made all of this possible. 🛠️ The Origin Story Blackbox is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q that I picked up secondhand. I was looking for something compact,