Tag: homelab

Sonoff Zigbee Dongle Plus-E vs ConBee III vs SkyConnect — pick the right Zigbee USB coordinator for your Home Assistant home lab or apartment setup in 2026.

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.

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.

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.

Track which room you're in with cheap ESP32 nodes and BLE signal distance — real room-level presence for Home Assistant automations that actually work.

Picking a cheap VPS for home-lab overflow — off-site backups, public endpoints, CGNAT escape. Real tradeoffs, honest picks per scenario.

Stop staring at a Plex library that looks like a clearance bin. Kometa (formerly Plex Meta Manager) automates collections, posters, overlays, and bulk ratings.

Stop guessing whose request is clogging your 4K library. Jellyseerr tags + Sonarr/Radarr + Maintainerr = real per-user quota control that actually holds up.

Sonarr handles TV. Radarr handles movies. But who handles comics and adult content? Meet Mylar3 and Whisparr — the *arr apps nobody talks about, until now.

Expose Docker's Unix socket over TCP so remote tools and dashboards can connect — daemon.json config for Linux and Windows.

Alpine gives you a shell and apk; Distroless gives you nothing but the app. Compare attack surface, image size, and multi-stage build complexity.

Appwrite is an open-source Firebase alternative you can self-host — databases, auth, storage, and functions without vendor lock-in.