SumGuy's Ramblings
The art of wasting time.
Docker, self-hosting, AI/LLM, Linux, and DevOps — explained by someone who learned the hard way. No fluff, no enterprise jargon, just practical stuff that actually works on real hardware.
Recent Posts
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WebAuthn & Passkeys for Sysadmins
Passkeys finally killed passwords for real users. Here's what WebAuthn actually is under the hood, and how to roll passkeys out on your self-hosted services.
14 min read -
Give Your AI Agent a Cheap Intern
Stop burning expensive AI tokens on boring grunt work. The overseer/workhorse pattern routes mechanical tasks to a cheap model and saves more than you'd think.
12 min read -
Borg vs Duplicacy: Dedup Backup Wars
Borg is open-source classic with SSH targets. Duplicacy has lock-free multi-source magic but commercial GUI. Here's which backup tool to pick.
13 min read -
Owntracks + Home Assistant: Private Location Tracking
Stop feeding Google your daily commute. OwnTracks + MQTT broker + Home Assistant gives you real presence detection without the surveillance capitalism overhead.
10 min read -
KVM/QEMU/libvirt: CLI Workflows
virt-manager is fine, but real homelab automation lives on the command line. virt-install, virsh, cloud-init — provision VMs in seconds, not click-by-click.
11 min read -
BirdNET-Pi for Self-Hosted Bird Identification
Turn a Raspberry Pi and a cheap USB mic into a self-hosted bird ID station using BirdNET-Pi and Cornell ML audio models running entirely locally offline.
10 min read -
Claude Code + SearXNG: Private Web Search
Wire a self-hosted SearXNG instance into Claude Code via a Bash wrapper for private, scriptable web search — and when to use it vs the built-in tool.
10 min read -
fd vs find: Rust Speed vs POSIX Power
fd has sane defaults, parallel walking, and respects .gitignore. find is gnarly but ships everywhere. Here's when each one wins.
11 min read -
Linux Namespaces from Scratch
Containers are just namespaces and cgroups in a trench coat. Build one yourself with unshare and nsenter — no Docker required. Demystifies what actually happens.
15 min read -
rclone vs Restic: Sync vs Backup
rclone copies and syncs files to cloud storage. Restic does deduplicated encrypted snapshots. Confusing them costs you restores at 2 AM.
11 min read -
Scrypted vs Frigate for Self-Hosted Cameras
Scrypted bridges your IP cameras to HomeKit and Google Home. Frigate adds AI object detection on your own hardware. Here's how to pick — or run both at once.
10 min read -
mtr vs traceroute: Packet Loss
traceroute lies. mtr tells the truth. Here's how to read packet-loss reports like an oncall engineer and stop blaming your ISP for the wrong hop.
11 min read
