Posts
Page 33 of 58
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Appwrite: Your Own Firebase, Minus the Google Surveillance Subscription
Firebase is convenient right up until your bill is $300/month or Google quietly deprecates the product you built on. Appwrite is self-hosted BaaS, auth, databases, file storage, serverless functions, and realtime, on hardware you control. Here's how to set it up and build something real.
8 min read -
Colima vs OrbStack vs Docker Desktop on Mac
Docker Desktop got expensive and RAM-hungry. Colima is the lean alternative. OrbStack is the one everyone's actually using now. Here's the honest breakdown for Mac developers.
7 min read -
NocoDB: Because Airtable Doesn't Need to Know Your Business
Airtable is $20/user/month for features that a spreadsheet-over-Postgres can handle. NocoDB gives you the same gallery views, kanban boards, and auto-generated APIs, running on your own hardware, with your own database. Here's how to set it up and actually use it.
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nftables: Modern Linux Firewalling
iptables is being phased out. nftables is faster, cleaner, and already the default on modern Linux. Here's how to actually use it without wanting to quit.
6 min read -
Ollama Model Management: Beyond ollama run
You can pull and run a model. Now learn Modelfiles, GPU layer tuning, the REST API, running multiple models without OOM-killing your server, and useful system prompts.
7 min read -
Uptime Kuma: Status Pages, Alerts, and Knowing Before Your Users Do
Your users shouldn't know your service is down before you do, but here we are. Uptime Kuma goes way beyond basic HTTP checks, TCP monitors, Docker container health, certificate expiry, push monitors for cron jobs, and your own statuspage.io. Here's how to actually use it.
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Caddy Advanced: Automatic HTTPS, Plugins, and Config That Doesn't Make You Cry
Nginx config files make you feel like you need a certification to write them. Caddy's Caddyfile is what happens when someone decides web server config should be readable by humans. Here's everything beyond basic reverse proxy, wildcards, plugins, forward auth, and the config API.
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Restic vs Borg vs Kopia: Backups That Actually Deduplicate
rsync is not a backup. Restic, Borg, and Kopia do deduplication, encryption, and incremental snapshots properly. Here's which one fits your home lab and why.
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Suricata vs Snort: Network Intrusion Detection That Actually Works
Snort invented network intrusion detection. Suricata multi-threaded its way past it. Here's how to set up real IDS/IPS on your home lab and actually understand what it's telling you.
6 min read -
Proxmox vs XCP-ng: Hypervisors for People Who Like Their Data Center at Home
Running 15 VMs on a machine that cost $300 because you're an adult with hobbies, that's the homelab dream. But first you have to pick a hypervisor, and the two best free options take completely different approaches to the same problem. Here's how to pick the right one.
9 min read -
Continue.dev vs Cody vs Tabby: AI Code Help Without the Cloud
GitHub Copilot is great until you read the ToS. Continue.dev, Cody, and Tabby bring AI code assistance to your editor with local or self-hosted models, no code leaves your machine.
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Self-Hoster's Disaster Recovery: When Everything Goes Wrong at Once
Everyone has a backup strategy until their backup fails the one time it matters. Disaster recovery is the full plan: what you recover, in what order, and how you know it worked. Here's how to build one for your home lab before you need it.
9 min read
