Home-Lab

Two spare Pis sitting around. Already running AdGuard, so Pi-hole was off the table. I wanted something actually useful. I’ve been paying $10/month for Obsidian Sync. The vault lives on my hardware anyway — it felt like paying rent on my own stuff. The alternative: run CouchDB on a Pi, point the Self-hosted LiveSync plugin at it, and use Tailscale to make the Pi reachable from anywhere without port forwarding or a public IP. E2E encrypted, zero ongoing cost, fully under my control. ...

I ordered a TRMNL X e-ink display to put on my desk. It’s a 7.5" e-paper panel that polls a server for images and refreshes on a schedule. TRMNL has a cloud service, but I’m not paying a subscription for a display I can host myself — and BYOS (Bring Your Own Server) mode is the whole reason I bought the X model over the cheaper ones. The device hasn’t arrived yet. The server is already running. ...

I wanted a passive ambient display that tells me something useful without picking up my phone — weather at a glance during the day, a wind-down mode at night, green at 6:30am if it’s worth cycling to work. The IKEA Varmblixt is $30, Zigbee-native, and pairs directly to ZHA without an IKEA hub. Pairing Not obvious. There’s no reset button. To enter pairing mode, power-cycle the lamp 12 times in rapid succession — plug, unplug, plug, unplug… It flashes white 3–4 times when it’s ready. A smart plug makes this way easier than fumbling with the physical outlet. Source ...

ChatGPT worked fine for one-off questions, but it was isolated from the systems I actually use: calendar, email, Strava, GitHub, Obsidian, Spotify, and the half-finished project notes scattered across repos. I wanted a small assistant I could run myself, with persistent memory, scheduled checks, and enough tool access to be useful without turning into a full product. So I built Molty. Architecture Molty runs on OpenClaw — an open agent platform that handles the gateway infrastructure: Telegram integration, LLM API routing, and session management. It runs on a Hostinger VPS. I didn’t build any of that. What I built is everything layered on top: the memory system, integrations, heartbeat logic, and skills. ...

I kept missing shows I would have gone to. The data was public, but checking it required a weird amount of manual attention: venue calendars, Spotify history, ticket prices, neighborhoods, and a final “would I actually leave the apartment for this?” filter. I built a weekly concert digest into Molty, my Telegram-based assistant. Every Monday morning it checks SF venues, matches artists against my Spotify library, and sends a ranked list of shows. ...