Home lab

A 10-inch rack in the living room runs the house. A UniFi gateway and 2.5GbE switch segment the network into VLANs (trusted, IoT, guest), a Raspberry Pi runs Home Assistant with a little rack-mounted status screen, and a Beelink mini PC carries everything else.

What the mini PC does all day:

• Serves the second brain’s live dashboard, with a hero sky that a local diffusion model repaints nightly
• Runs local LLMs through Ollama, reachable from anywhere over a private, allowlisted Telegram bridge, so I can chat with my own hardware from a train
• Plays the network as ambient music (see Hum)
• Builds and deploys this website

The rules of the lab:

• No cloud where local works, and no open ports: outbound tunnels and a WireGuard VPN only. The external audit found exactly what it should: nothing.
• Everything is in git. Every service, script, and config is a repo with a protected main branch.
• Boring hardware doing interesting things. The whole stack idles under half a load average.

Next: a 2-bay NAS and a proper 3-2-1 backup for the files that can’t be re-made, because RAID is uptime, not safety.