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I archive my favorite YouTube channels to my NAS with Pinchflat-NGX, and it's better than the original
Now I can watch YouTube on my terms
The best NAS I've owned is a 10-year-old office PC with four drives crammed inside
It's uglier, cheaper, and better than any NAS appliance I could've bought.
I let a local LLM control my Home Assistant automations, and it took a wrong turn before I added guardrails
I should have added them sooner.
I turned off constant polling in my automations, and Home Assistant finally ran cool
Your automations don't need to check everything all the time.
I built my own alarm system with Home Assistant and it beats anything we had before it
Protecting the home for less.
Your router avoids the best 5GHz channels by default, and turning on DFS gave my Wi-Fi room to breathe
This is the best hack for apartment dwellers.
Bluetooth proxies are the most magical, simple tech to deploy in your smart home
Extend Bluetooth range, boost battery life, and unlock local control in your smart home with simple, low-cost Bluetooth proxies.
I let my router auto-pick my Wi-Fi channel for a month, and it chose badly almost every time
Auto-channel selection is a one-time guess.
Narrowing my Wi-Fi channel made my streaming box faster, even though it should've done the opposite
Wider width isn't always the best option.
I turned off 2.4GHz Wi-Fi on my primary SSID, and household smart devices stopped dropping offline
My smart plugs and cameras kept going offline until I split my Wi-Fi into two networks.
Used Wi-Fi 6 routers are still a better home networking deal than Wi-Fi 7 routers for most homes
You can boost coverage and performance for a fraction of the cost
The Lucy AI Studio brings AI agents, local models, and private storage together
This article is sponsored by Cephalon
Two-bay NAS boxes are the worst way to start self-hosting, and a used mini PC is better for home server projects
A used mini PC makes a better self-hosting server than a 2-bay NAS
Self-hosting doesn't actually save you money, and the people who promise it does are setting beginners up to quit
Self-hosting is worth it, but not for the reasons you've been told
I segmented my home lab's network from my smart home, and stability improved overnight
Everything in its place, and a place for everything
I turned off 160MHz channels on my router, and my Wi-Fi got more stable for every device in the house
Turns out my laptop never used 160MHz, anyway.
My microwave knocked my Zigbee sensors offline every lunch, and one channel change fixed it
My router took the blame first, and it was innocent.
All-flash NAS was supposed to be the future, and SSD prices just pushed it back by years
Despite being silent, fast, and portable, all-flash NAS units aren't worth picking up in 2026
Buying all your NAS drives in one batch is a mistake, and I mix brands and dates on purpose
One batch of bad drives can wipe out your NAS