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
-
zstd vs lz4 vs gzip vs xz: Measured
zstd -3 compresses 4 to 6x faster than gzip -6 with smaller files. At the top end, xz -6 beat zstd -19 on speed. 19 configs, 4 public data sets, measured.
18 min read -
Grafana Dashboard Sprawl: 50 Panels to 10
Your Grafana dashboard is a wall of 50 panels nobody reads. Use USE and RED to cut it to ten, move the rest to drill-downs, and keep the result in git.
13 min read -
Crawl4AI: Feed Your RAG From the Web
Crawl a docs site to clean markdown with Crawl4AI, embed it with Ollama, store it in Qdrant, and query it. A working local RAG ingest pipeline, with politeness.
13 min read -
nginx vs Caddy: Measured on 2 Cores
We pinned nginx 1.31 and Caddy 2.11 to 2 CPU cores and measured both. nginx wins per core, but a bare proxy_pass started returning 502s after 28,231 requests.
19 min read -
Solar Plus Battery for Your Home Lab
Grid-tied solar shuts off in an outage. The battery keeps your lab alive. Size it first, then the panels, with real prices for a power station vs a 48V build.
14 min read -
Train a Tiny GPT, Part 5: Fine-Tuning
A 5.8M-parameter GPT scores 1.626 bits per byte on Holmes. Gemma 4 E4B scores 0.953 untrained, and a 34-minute QLoRA run on an 8 GB GPU gets it to 0.865.
17 min read -
Devcontainers for a Whole Team
Turn a devcontainer into a team standard: Compose with Postgres, pinned Features, lifecycle hooks, one prebuilt image for laptops and CI, and the UID gotcha.
12 min read -
Migrating 10 Years of Bookmarks
Merge Chrome, Firefox, Pocket, Raindrop and Pinboard exports into one deduplicated file with tags, triage dead links, and import it all into linkding.
15 min read -
OpenCost on k3s: What Your Pods Cost
A home lab has no cloud invoice. Feed OpenCost your power rate and hardware price, then see which namespace on your k3s cluster is the real monthly cost hog.
13 min read -
Train a Tiny GPT, Part 4: Inference
The KV cache sped a 5.8M-parameter GPT up 4.4x on a laptop CPU and did almost nothing for the RTX 3070 at batch 1. Then sampling settings decide how it reads.
16 min read -
Train a Tiny GPT, Part 3: Training
Train a 5.8M-parameter GPT on Sherlock Holmes: 59 seconds on an RTX 3070 vs 48 minutes on its CPU, and the overfitting that starts near step 1,250 of training.
16 min read -
gVisor vs Firecracker vs Kata for Agents
Letting a coding agent run npm install and arbitrary shell? Compare gVisor, Firecracker, and Kata on startup, KVM needs, Docker fit, and network egress.
14 min read
