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 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

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

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.

This post is a review of Relica Backup, the software I use and depend on to backup (and restore) all of my data across several computers. Relica seems to be relatively unknown on the interwebs; I have not yet come across any user reviews or articles that describe actual experience with the software. So this is my attempt to fix that. I am not associated with the Relica folks, just a satisfied user spreading the word about something I like 🙂