Proxmox · OPNsense · Home Assistant · Backups
Homelab the Right Way
Practical, no-drama guides for people past the "install Proxmox, spin up Plex" stage. Backups that actually restore, networks that stay up, and builds that still work next month. A new article every day, each with a short companion video.
Read the latestWatch on YouTube
Free articles · 14 ebooks · new video daily at 12 PM ET
Latest articles
One a day. The trap, the fix, and a checklist.
-
Three new Homelab the Right Way ebooks: monitoring, containers and automation
Homelab the Right Way Books 7, 8 and 9 are out: Watch Your Homelab (monitoring and alerts), Containers Without the Chaos (Docker Compose, Caddy, HTTPS and single sign-on) and Automate Your Homelab (Git, cloud-init, OpenTofu and Ansible). Each has a free sample chapter.
-
Premieres Wed Oct 21Self-host your photos, files and passwords the safe way
Immich, Nextcloud and Vaultwarden on one small box at home, without the six classic traps: one disk for everything, a database on a network share, open signups, forwarded ports, a backup that isn't one, and updates that are never or always.
-
▶ VideoPawdub: your dog finally has subtitles (and yes, it's a joke app that really listens)
Pawdub puts funny movie subtitles on your dog or cat when it actually barks or meows. Real on-device sound and scene detection, 8 personas, 59 languages, no account and nothing uploaded. It is a joke app and says so. Coming soon to Google Play.
-
Upgrading to AGP 9: the Kotlin plugin you can delete
Since Android Gradle plugin 9.0, Kotlin is built into AGP. Here is what to remove, what to move, why kapt has to go, and the one icons dependency Material 3 stopped adding for you.
-
Premieres Thu Nov 12MeshTalk: chat and talk over Bluetooth mesh with no signal
MeshTalk connects nearby phones over Bluetooth mesh for text, group chat and walkie-talkie voice. No internet, no accounts, no servers.
-
The two decisions you can't undo before your first Google Play upload
Your application ID and your signing setup are the two Android decisions that are expensive to change after the first upload. Here is how to get both right, plus the versionCode rule that catches people later.
-
▶ VideoShape & Shade: find your face shape on your phone, without uploading your selfie
Shape & Shade estimates your face shape from your own measurements, on your phone, and gives you hairstyle, glasses, brow, beard and contour ideas for it. No upload, no account, no beauty scores. Coming soon to Google Play.
-
Premieres Tue Oct 20A backup job that never runs never fails
Failure alerts can't warn you about a backup job that stopped running. A vzdump hook that pings a dead-man's switch, plus a weekly backup-age report, turns that silence into a phone notification.
-
Premieres Sun Nov 15Aria: a private voice assistant that runs on your Android phone
Aria handles speech recognition, the language model and voice output on your phone. No cloud LLM, no voice uploads, no account.
-
▶ VideoThe Homelab the Right Way merch store is open: every item, reviewed
The merch store is open. Here is every item in it, the design behind each one, and a one-minute video review that shows the real products.
-
Premieres Mon Oct 19DS18B20 reads 85 °C or -127 °C? Here's why
A DS18B20 that reports 85 °C hasn't measured anything; that is its power-on value, and -127 °C means no probe is connected. How the tank monitor's firmware and ESPHome drop both, and the wire to check when the probe is stuck at 85.
-
Android the Right Way: 5 new ebooks on making Android apps
A new five-book series on building and shipping Android apps, from an empty Android Studio project to Play review, monetization and on-device AI. Every book has a free sample chapter.
-
Premieres Mon Nov 9PixelDream: generate AI images offline, entirely on your phone
PixelDream turns a short description into an image using AI models that run on your phone. No account, no uploads, no internet after setup.
-
Premieres Sat Oct 17Why your 2-node Proxmox cluster freezes
With two Proxmox nodes, losing either one leaves the survivor with one vote out of two, so it loses quorum and /etc/pve goes read-only. Here is how a QDevice adds a third vote without a third server, plus the Wi-Fi trap and the emergency lever.
-
New book: Automations That Just Work (Home Assistant without the surprises)
Book 6 in the Homelab the Right Way series is out: reliable Home Assistant, from Zigbee coordinator placement to automations you can read a year later and a monthly update hour with a way back. Here is the motion-light automation from Chapter 4, done properly, and the one Zigbee change that fixes most dropped sensors.
-
Premieres Tue Nov 3Grocy Fridge Scanner: update your Grocy stock from a photo
Take a photo of your fridge or pantry and on-device AI updates your Grocy inventory. No cloud uploads, no account required.
-
Premieres Fri Oct 16Never delete this stopped Proxmox VM
A Proxmox template is always stopped, so it looks exactly like an abandoned VM. Here is how full and linked clones differ, how to find every guest that depends on a base, and how to retire a template safely.
-
Premieres Fri Nov 6TrailSage: an offline GPS audio tour guide for your road trips
TrailSage turns a drive into a guided audio tour, with offline maps and AI commentary generated on your phone. No accounts, no cloud.
-
Premieres Sat Oct 31Ollama AI Chat: use your Ollama server or offline models on Android
Ollama AI Chat connects Android to your own Ollama server or runs models like Gemma and Qwen fully on the phone, with optional browser sync.
-
Premieres Wed Oct 28OctoPulse: watch and control OctoPrint from your Android phone
OctoPulse finds OctoPrint on your Wi-Fi, pairs in one tap, and puts progress, camera, temps and controls on your phone. Free, no account.
-
▶ VideoRAID is not a backup: the 3-2-1 rule, honestly
What actually counts as a copy under the 3-2-1 rule, why a RAID mirror or a snapshot only protects against one kind of failure, and the one-page inventory that exposes the gaps.
-
▶ VideoProxmox backups that actually work: 3-2-1, step by step
The whole backup playbook in one walk-through: the 3-2-1 plan, vzdump, Proxmox Backup Server, retention, an off-site copy, restore drills and the alert for jobs that quietly stop.
-
▶ VideoYour Proxmox backup job is probably skipping your new VMs
A backup job built for a hand-picked list of guests silently misses every VM you create afterwards. Here is how to switch to "All" with excludes, and the other checks that make the green tick mean something.
-
▶ VideoThe one wire that can fry your ESP32 tank monitor
A turbidity sensor runs on 5 V and outputs up to about 4.5 V, but an ESP32-C3's pins only take 3.3 V. Here is why it needs a voltage divider, how to wire it, and the checks to do before you plug in USB.
-
▶ Videokeep-daily=7 doesn't mean 7 days of backups
Proxmox and PBS retention keeps the newest backup in each calendar bucket, not a span of days. How a month of failed jobs can prune away your history, how the keep-* rules combine, and how to set retention in one place.
-
▶ VideoDelete old Proxmox VMs without regret
The backup, verify, then destroy-with-purge routine for clearing out stopped guests safely, including the linked-clone check that stops you deleting something a running VM depends on.
On YouTube
A new video every day
Short, specific videos on the same topics as the articles: Proxmox backups, OPNsense, Home Assistant, ESP32 builds. Subscribe so the premieres land in your feed.
- Thu Oct 15keep-daily=7 doesn't mean 7 days of backups▶ Live
- Wed Oct 14Proxmox backups that actually work: 3-2-1, step by step▶ Live
- Tue Oct 13The one wire that can fry your ESP32 tank monitor▶ Live
- Fri Oct 16Never delete this stopped Proxmox VMPremieres 12 PM ET
- Sat Oct 17Why your 2-node Proxmox cluster freezesPremieres 12 PM ET
- Sun Oct 18Lock down Vaultwarden: 3 settings that matterPremieres 12 PM ET
- Mon Oct 19DS18B20 reads 85 °C or -127 °C? Here's whyPremieres 12 PM ET
- Tue Oct 20A backup job that never runs never failsPremieres 12 PM ET
The ebooks
Each one is the trap, the fix and a checklist, chapter after chapter. Sold on Payhip.
-
Homelab the Right Way
Proxmox, OPNsense and Home Assistant without the pain: the lessons most people learn the hard way.
$19
-
Self-Host Your Life
Replace Google Photos, Drive and your password manager with Immich, Nextcloud and Vaultwarden.
$19
-
Never Lose Your Data
A homelabber's backup playbook for Proxmox, Home Assistant and OPNsense.
$19
-
Smart Turtle Tank
Build a DIY camera, water sensor and monitoring setup for your turtle with an ESP32.
$19
-
Lock Down Your Home Network
VLANs, firewall rules, WireGuard and DNS filtering with OPNsense: split a flat home network into zones that stay put.
$19
-
Automations That Just Work
Reliable Home Assistant: Zigbee and Z-Wave that stay up, automations you can read a year later, dashboards people tap, and updates that don't break things.
$19
-
Ship Your First Android App
From an empty Android Studio project to a real app live on Google Play: setup, a first Kotlin + Compose app, the decisions you can't undo, a signed release build, Play Console and the 12-tester closed test.
$19
-
Compose Without the Confusion
Kotlin and Jetpack Compose that make sense: state and recomposition, layouts that behave, Material 3, Navigation 3, ViewModels with StateFlow, and Room.
$19
-
Pass Google Play Review
Get an Android app through Google Play review and keep it there: target API 36, 16 KB page size, sensitive permissions, Data safety and account deletion, honest listings and vitals.
$19
-
Get Paid for Your Android App
The money side of an Android app done honestly: the right business model, AdMob with consent first, Play Billing from connection to acknowledgement, subscriptions, and listings that convert without overpromising.
$19
-
On-Device AI for Android
Real AI features in a Kotlin app without sending everything to someone else's cloud: ML Kit, Gemini Nano, LiteRT, a local LLM on the phone, and a streaming chat with your own Ollama server.
$19
-
Watch Your Homelab
The monitoring stack that tells you first: Uptime Kuma checks from outside, Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, alerts to your phone through ntfy, and logs in Loki with Grafana Alloy, for Proxmox, Docker and Home Assistant.
$19
-
Containers Without the Chaos
Self-hosted apps on Docker without the mess: one Docker VM on Proxmox, one folder per stack, Caddy as the only front door, trusted HTTPS for internal names without opening a port, Authelia single sign-on, and updates and backups you control.
$19
-
Automate Your Homelab
A Proxmox lab you can rebuild in an afternoon: the definitions in Git, cloud-init golden images, VMs declared with OpenTofu, Ansible roles that stick, secrets in a vault, and a rebuild drill that proves it all fits.
$19
Android apps
38 free apps on Google Play from the same maker, including an OctoPrint remote, an Ollama chat client and a Grocy fridge scanner.
Merch
25 designs: tees, hoodies, hats, a mug, a sticker, a desk mat and a poster, printed on demand.
