A new local model gets validated by a dashboard feature built before it existed. A DNS outage traces back to two unrelated bugs. A deliberate reboot of the homelab’s Proxmox host finds a third bug neither fix would have caught.
A phone-friendly status page for a two-machine homelab, built in phases. Why it lives on the Proxmox box next to Home Assistant instead of the AI workstation, how it talks to Uptime Kuma with no REST API to speak of, and why the third phase, waking the workstation remotely, is still waiting on a cable move.
Episode 4 gives an agent real write access to Uptime Kuma, retires the last manually-copied secret files, test-builds Proxmox Backup Server in Docker (catching a build that silently deleted the very package it installed), and catches a Wake-on-LAN plan that was about to fail for a reason nobody had checked yet.
Episode 3 installs HACS and an MCP server entirely over SSH, chases a phantom outage down to a single stuck config value, and wires nine Uptime Kuma checks with Discord alerts, then fixes a cron bug and a false-alarm habit before publishing.
Five local models, six evals, one real job: run Home Assistant, a calendar, an investment portfolio, and a to-do list — all self-hosted, no cloud. Qwen 3.6 holds the crown, but only barely, once three full runs replace one. Meta’s six-day-old Muse Glimmer nearly took it. Hermes 4.3 finishes last twice over. The scores, the failure transcripts, the run-to-run noise, and the one safety-relevant nuance the numbers alone don’t show.
Episode 2 of the SmartThings-to-Proxmox series: hardening the ThinkCentre, wiring up Tailscale so a Coder Agent can SSH in and administer it directly, standing up the Home Assistant OS VM, Uptime Kuma, and AdGuard Home, and ending on a single page load that quietly fired 53 blocked ad-tech requests.
Kicking off a series on replacing a Samsung SmartThings hub with a self-hosted Home Assistant box. Episode 1: picking the hardware, fighting a Lenovo BIOS setting hidden behind a decoy, and the increasingly absurd path to actually getting an OS onto the machine when there wasn’t a single working USB drive anywhere in reach.