Tag: homelab

Raspberry Pi 5 vs Mini PC for Home Lab

Raspberry Pi 5 vs Mini PC: when ARM wins, real costs with NVMe HATs, power consumption, performance, and ecosystem trade-offs for your home lab.

Mini PCs for Home Lab: N100 vs N305 vs Ryzen 7000

Head-to-head benchmarks: Intel N100/N305 vs Ryzen 7000 mini PCs. Power consumption, NVMe slots, RAM, transcoding, virtualization. Which one to buy.

Used Enterprise Servers in 2026

Dell R630/R730, SuperMicro buyer's guide. Real noise, heat, idle power. What to avoid. eBay sourcing tips.

Home Assistant + InfluxDB for Long-Term History

Store years of sensor data with InfluxDB. Skip the 10-day limit, query historical trends, build Grafana dashboards for your home lab.

Tdarr: Auto-Transcoding Your Media Library

Batch transcode h264 to h265 or AV1 with Tdarr. GPU/CPU strategies, plugin flows, Docker Compose setup, and storage savings math for your media server.

Home Assistant Energy Dashboard with Shelly

Power monitoring with Shelly EM/Pro/3EM, Home Assistant energy dashboard, circuit-level metering, solar+grid tracking, and wiring sanity checks.

Z-Wave vs Zigbee in 2026

Z-Wave vs Zigbee: range, mesh, cost, and which radio protocol to choose for home automation in 2026.

Matter and Thread for the Suspicious

Matter and Thread protocol overview: what actually works in home labs, what's vaporware, and why you should be skeptical of the hype in 2026.

Home Assistant Backups That Actually Restore

Home Assistant disaster recovery: off-site backups, secrets handling, Z2M coordinator, restore drills that catch missing pieces.

Calibre-Web vs Calibre Server vs Kavita

Self-hosted ebook library showdown: Calibre-Web vs Kavita. Which stack handles your comics, manga, and ebooks?

Navidrome vs Funkwhale: Self-Hosted Music

Navidrome vs Funkwhale for self-hosted music streaming. Subsonic API support, mobile clients, federation, and which one fits a homelab in 2026.

Tautulli Beyond Plex Stats

Tautulli's notification webhooks, automation, transcode alerts, and custom triggers unlock Plex monitoring beyond leaderboards and statistics charts.