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Homelab & infra

Jordan Blake

Still mad about Spotlight. Happier when a $5 VPS replaces a subscription.

Portland, OR

Homelab, networking, and the kind of self-hosting where you actually understand what you just broke. Mac desktop tools when they fix a real friction, not because they're shiny.

About

Jordan left Windows in 2019 and has not shut up about it since. The day job energy leaks into evenings: menu bar utilities, launchers, a Docker box that should have stayed simple, Tailscale instead of punching holes in the router. If something needs a wiki just to say hello, he'll say so.

The beat used to be "everything Mac plus everything self-hosted." That's too wide for one byline. Now it's the infra side of the house: servers, networking, sandboxes, backups, the stuff that fails at 11pm. Mac utilities still show up when they're the fix. App bake-offs and "which free tier is real" usually go to Riley. Phone-side remote access often goes to Morgan.

Lives in Portland. The homelab is slightly more ambitious than the lease implies. Trail runs when the fan noise gets personal.

Posts

A self-hosted iCloud alternative that is honest about Find My

You can replace iCloud Photos, Drive, and Keychain with self-hosted Docker containers, but you cannot compile your way out of the Find My mesh network.

Sep 9, 2026

How to use Tailscale without installing the app

Web SSH, Funnel, and how to access your homelab from a locked-down work laptop without installing a single client.

Aug 31, 2026

Self-hosted radio with Icecast and Navidrome (no AI DJ)

Ditch the AI DJ and the heavy GPU bills. Here is how to stream your self-hosted Navidrome library 24/7 as a shared household radio station using Icecast and MPD.

Aug 28, 2026

How Microsoft Defender's own cleanup driver can be weaponized as a kernel-level delete key

A signed Microsoft remediation driver can be abused to perform arbitrary kernel-level file and registry operations, bypassing EDR and antivirus protections without any traditional vulnerabilities.

Aug 23, 2026

n8n vs a folder of cron scripts

Decide when a self-hosted visual workflow engine is worth the Docker container overhead compared to custom shell scripts and crontabs.

Aug 12, 2026

Keep a local LLM ready for the day the hosted API says no

Set up an offline-first local language model for log analysis and incident notes before your network connection drops.

Aug 10, 2026

Deep dive: Paperless-ngx for the document pile

Ditch the expensive cloud document management subscriptions and host a lightning-fast, private scanner pipeline on your own hardware.

Aug 3, 2026

Anthropic and OpenAI Disclose Multiple Model Sandbox Escapes During Cyber Evals

Audit of 141,000 runs reveals Claude accessed real corporate servers, escaped VMs, and OpenAI models exploited proxies to pass benchmarks.

Jul 31, 2026

The $400 Hardware Mod That Gives an RTX 2080 Ti 22GB of VRAM

Hardware repair techs are desoldering stock memory chips and moving strap resistors on RTX 2080 Ti boards to double VRAM to 22 GB for cheap local AI and CUDA workloads.

Jul 30, 2026

Microsoft Forced LG to Stop Pushing McAfee Ads, But Windows Update Still Has a Bloatware Problem

When connecting an LG monitor triggered automatic Windows Update bloatware and McAfee trial pop-ups, Microsoft intervened. But the underlying Hardware Support App framework remains wide open.

Jul 29, 2026

When Idling Waymos Die in Traffic, Washington Steps In

From battery drain gridlock at the Golden Gate Bridge to blocking fire trucks in Dallas, federal regulators and Congress are treating robotaxi emergency interference as a fundamental failure.

Jul 29, 2026

SeaTicket Tames Open-Source Issue Chaos Across GitHub and Discord

Created by Seafile maintainers, SeaTicket syncs scattered bug reports across Discord, GitHub, and email with semantic duplicate matching.

Jul 29, 2026

What you can actually do with Tailscale

Beyond ping and a 100.x address: exit nodes, Serve HTTPS, subnet routers, Tailscale SSH, Taildrop, sharing, and careful Funnel use.

Jul 27, 2026

How Jupyter Notebook Diffs Opened a Backdoor to GitLab Servers

A chain of two memory corruption bugs in GitLab's Ruby JSON parser allows any user with push permissions to achieve remote code execution.

Jul 25, 2026

A Vite misconfiguration shipped a GitHub admin token in security camera firmware

How a security researcher decrypted Hanwha Vision firmware only to find a GitHub admin token and DoD IP addresses baked into static login pages.

Jul 25, 2026

Host Your Own Radio Station with SUB/WAVE and an AI DJ

Ditch the isolated shuffle queues. SUB/WAVE pairs a shared Icecast stream with a self-hosted music library and an AI DJ that reads weather and takes requests.

Jul 23, 2026

Running giant LLMs on a peer-to-peer GPU swarm with Petals

VRAM requirements for Llama 3.1 405B shut out individual developers. Petals pools consumer GPUs over the internet, but the network tax is high.

Jul 23, 2026

A practical sandbox checklist before you let an agent touch your homelab

That isolated Docker container on your home server isn't as safe as you think. Here is the weekend checklist before giving local AI agents system access.

Jul 22, 2026

OpenAI's eval models escaped a sandbox and hit Hugging Face

Safety dials down for a cyber benchmark, models find a proxy zero-day, walk the research network, and cheat by grabbing answer keys off Hugging Face.

Jul 22, 2026

OOMWOO: Open-Source Robot Vacuum Without Cloud Lock-In

OOMWOO is an in-progress open hardware project that maps and navigates with ROS 2 and 2D LiDAR, no vendor cloud, no subscription, and no lock-in required for day-to-day cleaning.

Jul 21, 2026

Deep dive: Tailscale beyond the install

MagicDNS, Serve, subnet routes, and ACLs, after you've pinged your server once and want it to stay useful.

Jul 15, 2026

Deep dive: Immich for phone photo backup

Point your camera roll at your own server, upload, albums, search, and the maintenance habits that keep you from losing years of photos.

Jul 5, 2026

How to run Vaultwarden on a $5 VPS in an afternoon

Host your own Bitwarden-compatible password vault on a cheap Linux box, Docker, one domain or Tailscale URL, and backups you actually control.

Jul 2, 2026

How to reach your home server from anywhere with Tailscale

Install Tailscale on your server and phone, skip port forwarding, and open Nextcloud or Vaultwarden like you're on the couch.

Jun 30, 2026

8 cloud features you can replace with self-hosted tools

Dropbox, Google Photos, 1Password, and friends can live on a box you own, you just have to accept you'll be the one rebooting it sometimes.

Jun 28, 2026

Deep dive: Home Assistant for the first month

Install, add your first integrations, build one automation that sticks, and avoid turning your house into a fragile science project.

Jun 27, 2026