homelab

Discover how I enhanced the reliability of my Tailscale setup by deploying a backup node in Azure after my Raspberry Pi failed during a home office refurbishment. I walk through spinning up a secure Ubuntu virtual machine with Defender for Cloud and installing Tailscale to ensure continuous access to my on-premises devices.

I examine whether a dedicated NAS remains essential in 2020 by weighing the performance limitations of my aging Synology unit against its reliability, ease of management, and long-term affordability. Despite the hardware struggling with large files and multiple concurrent services, I explore why the robust ecosystem of features and low maintenance requirements might still justify keeping it as my primary storage solution.

If you are considering a high-end ergonomic chair for your home office, my experience switching from a broken IKEA model to the Herman Miller Aeron (remastered) might help you decide. I detail my research process, the showroom visit in Helsinki, and my first-week impressions of the size C model, including the comfort, build quality, and the two-month wait time for delivery.

In this post, I share my experience with Cloudflare’s new free 1.1.1.1 for Families service, which adds malware and adult content blocking to their popular DNS. I investigate how the filtering actually works by examining the underlying Cloudflare for Teams controls, ultimately finding that the service offers robust privacy and performance benefits for protecting a home network.

I share the practical steps and hardware requirements I used to transition this blog from a costly managed service to a self-hosted Ghost installation running on Docker, saving significant annual costs. By detailing my specific setup, including resource usage and configuration files, I aim to help others who have the technical skills and hardware consider making the same move.