./techtipsy

A friend once showed me a power bank that was so cool that I had to get one myself.

As with many homelab experiments around 2022/2023, it all started with Raspberry Pi-s being either out of stock or absurdly overpriced.

2023-02-16 update: this post is not about the “GB vs GiB” issue, or the “lost disk space” that you notice after formatting the device in an OS.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about my ThinkPad T430 that was tasked with being a home server.

I hate buying things that are single-purpose, which is why I ended up with this setup.

Near the beginning of my software development career, I worked on a pretty standard web application.

This post illustrates something that is not common on modern laptops: changing the CPU.

If you have spent any time in gaming hardware circles, then you’ve probably heard about the Steam Deck, the Linux-based handheld gaming PC built by Valve.

I’ve decided to give a new laptop a test drive, mainly because I had the opportunity at work, and also out of morbid curiosity.

You have probably heard about the Raspberry Pi.

A couple of years ago, I worked on a ThinkPad T60.

I stumbled upon this post in /r/thinkpad, which got my attention.

I’ve always been a fan of tinkering with cooling setups on my computers.

After playing around with fan curves on my ASRock DeskMini X300 based home server, I noticed one interesting thing.

As some of you might own, I’m still rocking a ThinkPad T430, a laptop model originally released in 2012.

There really isn’t much to say here, nor is there a rational reason behind this.

After some spicy feedback to my post where a ThinkPad T430 acted as a server, I decided to try out one UPS that was recommended on the basis of it being much more power efficient compared to the APC UPS that I previously ran.

I like having a safety net whenever I’m doing something potentially destructive, which is why I use the btrfs file system for my operating system and my data.

I have the Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones.

You’ve disabled the boneheaded Lenovo WiFi adapter whitelist using a tool like 1vyrain, installed a better adapter like the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260, and found that Bluetooth is not working as intended on your ThinkPad T430 running Linux?

I’m a man of many ideas.

You may know that I really like small, efficient APU-based builds.

This is a quick story about a fun discovery that I made a while ago.

Update: I’ve switched to btrbk for managing btrfs snapshots due to certain deficiencies that I had with snapper.

I changed my setup again.

The tagline for /r/datahoarder reads: “It’s A Digital Disease!”.

Around a month ago I shared my blog post on HackerNews.

Not too long ago, I had the goal of consolidating all my computing needs onto a single desktop PC.

I wasn’t happy with my “one machine that does it all” setup, which is why I finally bit the bullet and got myself an ASRock DeskMini X300 bare-bones kit.

This post is inspired by this article from the Low-tech Magazine.

I’ve been running my all-in-one PC for a while now.

Do you have a need to host Wikipedia on your computer?

Welcome to 2021.

As you might have read from my previous post on this topic, I have a pretty neat “cloud” gaming setup running.

This is a follow-up to my previous post where I covered the VFIO setup in general.

Introduction Before we jump into all the nitty-gritty details, I’d like to go over what we are dealing with here since these topics may be unfamiliar to you.

Introduction About a year ago, I bought an used PC based off of a Lenovo Erazer X510.

Introduction I’ve covered my self-hosting setup in a previous post.

Background I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X230.

Setup After I had a perfectly functional, quiet and performant server up and running, I fell victim to my imagination and completely changed my self-hosting setup.

Anyone that has bought themselves external WD drives from the Elements/My Book/Easystore series are probably familiar with the acoustic characteristics of the drives.

The Orange Pi Zero is one hell of an SBC.

Reddit is a great starting point for getting new ideas for your homelab: racks full of machines in /r/homelab, storage measured in terabytes (or even petabytes) over at /r/datahoarder, all the different services that people host over at /r/selfhosted.

My self-hosting adventure started during my university days.

2025 June update: the contents of my archive are now easily accessible over at nfs-cars.com, a read-only static website that hosts content that was previously on nfscars.net.

I used to work on a short-term project a while ago where the goal was to visualize some metrics that were collected from a pretty fancy smart home setup.

This is a list of lessons that I’ve learned while playing around with my computer setup during the last 6-7 years or so.

Issue description You are running a Linux-based machine with an install of ZFS on Linux.

While listening to the SelfHosted podcast, one of the hosts brought up their peculiar living arrangement multiple times.

Introduction This is a short overview of one way to take your old video tapes and make digital copies of their contents.