Notes from the Homelab and Beyond

You can’t delete your primary Google Calendar. Google doesn’t let you, it’s tied to your account. So when someone wants a totally clean slate, the only official option is the “Remove all events” flow buried in Calendar settings. I tried that recently for someone with years of accumulated events on their primary calendar. Click it, and a little “Deleting…” toast pops up from the bottom of the page like every other Google Calendar action. Except this one just sits there. Eventually it either says failed, or it dismisses itself quietly like the job finished. Refresh the page either way and the calendar’s still full. Ran it again. Same result. No useful error, no explanation, just a toast lying to you and a pile of events that refused to leave. ...

Bit rot is the failure mode nobody plans for: a file that was fine last year won’t open today, no error, no warning, no dramatic failure to point to. One bit somewhere flipped from a 0 to a 1, and now something chokes on it. Everyone plans for the drive dying. Almost nobody plans for the drive quietly lying to them instead. There’s a tool built specifically for this, decades old, still actively maintained, and most people have never heard of it: PAR2. ...

The standard Windows installer refuses to install to a USB drive, and that’s on purpose. Microsoft blocks it outright, which is a problem if you want a portable, bootable Windows environment you can plug into any PC for troubleshooting or borrowed-hardware work, without installing anything on the machine’s internal drive. The fix: Rufus, a free tool for writing bootable ISOs to USB drives, has a mode built exactly for this, called “Windows To Go”. It writes a full, runnable OS straight onto an external drive, bypassing the installer’s block entirely, and it boots on basically anything with a USB 3.0 port. ...

We have spent years auditing artificial intelligence. We have written white papers, formed safety boards, and convened international summits to debate the existential risks of systems that hallucinate, that repeat patterns without understanding, that cannot be fully explained even by their creators. Nobody is auditing Human Intelligence. This is a catastrophic oversight. If we apply the same standards we use to evaluate AI systems to the biological substrate currently running our hospitals, legal systems, financial markets, and nuclear arsenals, only one conclusion is possible: Human Intelligence (HI) is fundamentally unsafe, and we have been running it in production since the Pleistocene with zero safety reviews. ...

This is the exact stack behind this blog. If you want a super fast, self-deploying tech blog with zero servers, zero monthly bills, and VS Code as your entire CMS — here is how to build it. By the end you will have: A Hugo blog with the PaperMod theme VS Code as your editor, file manager, git client, and terminal — all in one Automatic deploys to Cloudflare Pages on every git push Why this stack Hugo is a static site generator. It turns markdown files into a complete website in milliseconds. No database, no runtime, nothing to keep running. ...

FTP isn’t a workflow. It doesn’t know who changed what. It has no memory of previous versions. It’s blind, manual, and prone to breaking mid-upload. If you’re still dragging files into a folder to “deploy”—or worse, manually creating site-backup-v2-final-actual-FINAL.zip before every change—you’re working harder than you need to. Enter The Solo Developer Workflow. In this guide, we’re building a professional pipeline: Local → Git → Server. No more “ghost files,” no more zip-file hoarding, and no more deployment anxiety. Just a clean, versioned, and automated path to production. ...

Ever wondered why copying a file to an external hard drive feels slow while your SSD-based machine flies? The answer comes down to data transfer speeds – and understanding the numbers across storage and networking technology helps you make better hardware decisions. Bits vs. Bytes Before looking at the numbers, there’s one conversion to keep in mind: 1 byte = 8 bits Network speeds are almost always quoted in megabits per second (Mbps) or gigabits per second (Gbps) Storage speeds are typically quoted in megabytes per second (MB/s) or gigabytes per second (GB/s) So a 1 Gbps network connection has a maximum throughput of 125 MB/s (1,000 / 8 = 125). This distinction matters when comparing specs across different product categories. ...

rsync is one of the most useful tools in a sysadmin’s kit. It copies and synchronizes files and directories locally or over SSH, and only transfers the parts of files that have changed – making it far more efficient than a plain cp or scp for repeated transfers. These are the commands you’ll reach for most often. Common Flags The -avP combination is a solid default for most operations: -a (archive) – preserves permissions, ownership, symlinks, and timestamps -v (verbose) – shows what’s being transferred in real time -P (progress + partial) – displays a progress bar and resumes interrupted transfers 1. Copy a Single File rsync -avP /path/to/local/file.zip user@remote_server:/path/to/remote/directory/ 2. Copy a Directory The trailing slash matters here: ...

If you use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), you may have noticed a large file on your system drive: C:\Users\<YourUser>\AppData\Local\Packages\<YourDistroFolder>\LocalState\ext4.vhdx This is a virtual hard disk that stores the entire Linux filesystem. It expands automatically as you install packages and create files, but it does not shrink automatically when files are deleted. Over time, this can leave you with a multi-gigabyte file containing mostly unused space. Here’s how to safely compact it and reclaim that space. ...

Most home networks are still running 1 Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE), which caps out at a theoretical 125 MB/s. That’s a real bottleneck when you’re working with high-resolution video, large game libraries, or a home lab with a NAS. The good news: you don’t need an enterprise budget to fix it. This guide shows how to get a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network running for under $300 using a few key pieces of affordable hardware. ...

Search for BCM4332 and Linux and you’ll find years of forum threads with the same discouraging pattern: someone asks for help, someone replies “that chip doesn’t work on Linux anymore,” and the thread dies. That conclusion is wrong, and it’s been wrong every time someone wrote it. The BCM4332 chip works on modern Linux. Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Linux Mint, Debian 12 — all of them. But it requires steps that the default package manager doesn’t take automatically, and if you skip any of them, you’ll end up with a chip that either doesn’t appear at all, or worse — works right now but vanishes silently after the next reboot. ...

Note: This build is from 2016. The i5-6500, GTX 970, and every price below are long obsolete. Same as the 2014 version of this guide, the budgeting logic still holds, just not this parts list. The goal of this guide is to build the best gaming PC possible for a $1,000 budget. Not only will this system handle modern games, it’ll also hold its own for streaming, video editing, and graphics work. ...

Note: This guide was written in 2015 for OpenVPN Access Server 2.0.24 on Ubuntu 14. The general process remains similar on newer versions, but package names, download URLs, and some commands will differ. Check the OpenVPN Access Server docs for current instructions. In this guide we’ll install OpenVPN Access Server onto a VPS and connect to it using the built-in client web portal. Step 1: Get a VPS You’ll need a VPS with full root access. For this guide we’re using a 512MB VPS running Ubuntu 14 64-bit. If you use a different OS, the installation commands in Step 3 will differ. ...

Note: This guide is from 2014. VPS pricing has moved since, and the linked Transmission installer script may no longer be maintained, review it before running it (as the guide already tells you to) or look for a current alternative. The general approach, a small VPS running Transmission behind a web UI, still works fine. In this guide we’ll set up a seedbox (a BitTorrent client running on a remote server) on a Linux VPS in four steps. Once it’s running, you can queue downloads from any browser and pull completed files down to your local machine when ready. ...

Note: This build is from 2014. The i5-4670, GTX 760, and every price below are long obsolete. The budget-allocation logic (spend on the GPU, don’t overpay for the motherboard) still applies to building a PC today, but don’t go looking for these exact parts. The goal of this guide is to build the best gaming PC possible for a $1,000 budget. Not only will this system handle modern games at this price point, it’ll also hold its own for everyday tasks. ...

If you manage servers that use OpenVZ (Virtuozzo), chances are you’ll spend a lot of time working with vzctl to start, stop, and maintain containers (CTs). While modern virtualization has largely moved on to KVM, Docker, and LXC, plenty of production systems still rely on OpenVZ — especially for legacy applications. This is a quick reference of essential vzctl commands for day-to-day container administration. List All Containers vzlist -a Displays all containers, including stopped ones. ...

Note: This build is from 2011. The parts, prices, and retailer links below are long gone, and the goal itself (a cheap box for 1080p streaming) is basically solved by any current mini PC. The general shopping logic (spend on CPU/GPU, keep it small and quiet) still holds if you’re building something similar today, just not this exact parts list. So you want an HTPC (Home Theater PC / Media Center) but you’re not Mr. Money Bags? That’s fine — you can still build a great one. ...