I’ve tried a lot of note-taking and knowledge-management systems over the years — different apps, different tools, different organizing principles, each one adopted with real enthusiasm. None of them stuck. Looking back, I think the reason is the same every time: the friction of capturing a thought, then organizing it, then periodically re-organizing everything as my sense of the “right” structure changed, was just enough to make the initial burst of enthusiasm fade. The system would keep working; I’d just quietly stop feeding it, and a few months later I’d have a knowledge base gathering dust instead of a second brain.

I am a self-hosting hobbyist. In a moment of madness, I signed up for a cheap IPv6-only Virtual Private Server (VPS). The consequences of being ipv6-only were a bit more than I had naïvely assumed (although obvious in retrospect). This blog post describes the steps needed to prepare the VPS for my self-hosting adventures.

Read along if you are into self-hosting but new to IPv6.

I just got a new UM790 Pro Mini PC (barebones with RAM and SSDs separately purchased and installed). This blog post describes some fixes to improve WiFi and Bluetooth performance (range, speeds, reliability etc.) as well as cooling and fan noise.

This post explains how I built a Network Attached Storage (NAS) for home use in August 2023. The various hardware build steps are carefully document with lots of photos.

Seafile is a secure, reliable, and performant file sync and share solution. I have been using it since about 2014, occasionally trying out other solutions, but keep returning to Seafile. It has a fairly large feature list and works on every major OS/mobile-device. Self-hosting it has been painless and performance is rock solid. This post describes one particular feature that is useful to me and is present ONLY in Seafile (to the best of my knowledge).

(I am not associated with Seafile in any way. Just a happy user.)

This site is built using the Hugo static site generator. Hugo is awesome. Its documentation is not. That is my personal opinion :) This post explains why I find the existing documentation so frustrating and how it could be improved.

This post explains a home-grown personal finance tool that aggregates transactions from various bank accounts and credit cards, auto-categorizes them, and presents information/analyses via a set of dashboards. All this is accomplished without sharing your banking credentials and financial transactions with a third party.

The pattern: How to remotely access a service that is bound to localhost and refuses to respond to requests not originating from localhost? The instance: If using Speedify CLI on a linux-based router with no GUI stack, how to nevertheless view the Speedify GUI in a web browser, from another device on the same network? This post documents some non-conventional hacks needed to get a working solution.

Home network schema

This series of posts describes the setup of a custom router for a home network. The router takes full advantage of multiple Internet connections, seamlessly manages Internet traffic when one of the connections drops or behaves poorly, and provides some additional functionality like firewalls, adblocking, VPN tunnels for specific clients, bandwidth shaping, network flow monitoring etc.

Home network schema

This series of posts describes how to set up a custom router from scratch for a home network. The router takes full advantage of multiple Internet connections, seamlessly manages Internet traffic when one of the connections drops or behaves poorly, and provides some additional functionality like firewalls, adblocking, VPN tunnels for specific clients, bandwidth shaping, network flow monitoring etc.