The Smart Home Wi-Fi Trap: Are We All Being Conned by Convenience?
I spent way too much time scrolling through a social media thread this morning about setting up smart home gear for a beginner. You know how it goes. Someone asks…
Home Lab
Upgrading Jellyfin to Version 12.0: Migration Guide
Jellyfin 12.0 changes how major updates are numbered, moving away from the old 10.x.y scheme used since 2018. Previously, massive under-the-hood overhauls, like rewriting the entire database structure were bundled…
Why Big Tech’s War on Game Servers Should Terrify Every Home Lab Enthusiast
Coming across the video “They’re Banning Your Home Servers” from creator Loyal Moses discussing the California legislative battle over the “Protect Our Games Act” (AB 1921) immediately caught my eye,…
The Stack: A Tour of My Privacy-First Home Lab
I’ve never been terribly good at letting commercial cloud providers hold onto my life. Between wanting actual ownership of my data, a lingering distrust of corporate telemetry, and the sheer…
I Added Analytics to the Blog: Here’s Exactly What I’m Collecting
I’ve spent years shouting about privacy. And now, I’ve installed a tracker. I know. The irony is thick enough to cut, and the hypocrisy probably looks huge from where you’re…
The “Nude” Ultimatum: My Phone is Not a Government Narc
The UK government has officially gone off the deep end, giving Apple and Google a three-month ultimatum: build device-level scanning to detect “illegal images” or we’ll pass laws to force…
Plex, Plex Pass, and the Slow Creep of Enshittification
I’ve been a Plex user since 2012. Back then, I paid around £50 for a lifetime Plex Pass. It felt like a bargain. Plex was a genuinely useful piece of…
Simple Tricks to Make Your Docker Setup Safer in Your Home Lab
Docker is great for tinkering, slap containers together and off you go. Then you add Vaultwarden or JumpServer and start worrying about security. Don’t panic: small, sensible tweaks close the…
From Tailscale to WireGuard: Why I Built a Private VPN with Two VPSes
In my ongoing quest for digital sovereignty, I recently replaced Tailscale with a plain WireGuard setup that I control myself. No third-party control plane, no extra SaaS layer, no mystery…
My 3-2-1 Backup Strategy: Why I Swapped MEGA S4 for Scaleway S3
A 3-2-1 backup rule is the industry standard for data survival, dictated by the logic that any single point of failure is a guaranteed disaster waiting to happen. It requires…