This is a personal blog focused on computer software and hardware. Most projects are implementing software and hardware for a homelab. What is a homelab? I would say a homelab could be a single computer or dozens of computers connected in a network. You can also integrate with computers in the Cloud.
Today I am reflecting on the year 2025. I try to avoid my personal life on this blog but this year has been more eventful than most.
My first son was born this year, we said goodbye to a feline friend, my vehicle was totaled, AI tools have made big changes in my day to day work, and I have renewed my interest in photography with a Sony mirror-less camera.
In this post, we’ll walk through setting up monitoring for a Synology NAS using the Prometheus SNMP Exporter, which taps directly into Synology’s official Management Information Bases (MIBs) to expose hardware-level metrics that other monitoring approaches simply can’t reach.
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system that collects numeric metrics from targets at regular intervals, stores them in a time-series database, and lets you query that data. It integrates seamlessly with visualization tools like Grafana. If you are not familiar with Prometheus, check out a previous post to get started before diving into SNMP metrics.
In today’s tech infrastructure landscape, understanding what’s happening on your systems in real-time can be the difference between catching a problem before it escalates and dealing with an outage. Netdata is an open-source, distributed monitoring solution that brings real-time, per-second metrics to your infrastructure. This blog post explores what Netdata is and how it differs from traditional monitoring approaches. While it may seem like overkill for a simple homelab, Netdata is actually remarkably easy to deploy and scales effortlessly from a single system to hundreds of nodes.
If you’ve ever wished diagramming tools felt less like enterprise software and more like grabbing a marker and sketching on a whiteboard, you will like Excalidraw. It’s fast, intuitive, works offline, supports collaboration, and keeps things simple without getting in your way.
This post walks you through installation options and essential usage.
Excalidraw is an open-source, zero-friction virtual whiteboard that produces hand-drawn-style diagrams. It’s used by engineers, product teams, DevOps, architects, and teachers.
Running AI-powered coding assistants locally doesn’t have to break the bank or compromise your privacy. With OpenCode and Ollama, you can create a local development environment that compares to commercial tools like Claude Code and Gemini CLI. All will run on your network instead of some cloud platform.
In this post, we’ll walk through everything you need to know to get OpenCode working seamlessly with Ollama’s local models.
Before we dive in, make sure you have:
Telegraf is an open-source metrics collection agent that gathers system and application data, while InfluxDB is a time-series database built for storing these metrics. Telegraf can write directly into InfluxDB with nanosecond precision giving you finer granularity than Prometheus, which stores measurements in milliseconds. This guide shows how to collect metrics from your host and applications, store them in InfluxDB 1.x, and maintain a minimal containerized setup. I have used all of these tools at work and in my homelab. If you are not familiar with Telegraf, check out a previous post where I set it up along with Prometheus.