10 entries
Build notes, things that broke, and what comes next. Infrastructure, automation and self-hosted tools, documented as the work happens.
10 posts
Field notes · Latest
Installing a Claude Code skill is one line that drops a stranger's code where your AI agent will run it. So I built a small local page that downloads, checks, installs and tests skills, and shows me what's inside first.
Read the article : Skill Manager: checking Claude skills before they get anywhere near my machine
Field notes
I tried to list what runs on my home network from memory and came up short. So I ran a census: twenty-plus live systems, a dozen machines, one flat network, and the open items, admitted up front.
Read the article : Census day: everything running on my network
Field notes
Unplugged is an Open edX learning platform running on my own Kubernetes cluster. This week it got its first course, drafted from a real security incident on this site. The first of many.
Read the article : Unplugged: the homelab starts teaching
Field notes
Two critical PHP bugs, exploited before the fix existed, and this site was running a vulnerable build. Here is how it got measured, patched, swept and locked down in about an hour, plus the three-month-old intruder that turned out to be me.
Read the article : PHP2Shell: patching this site in an hour, and the intruder who wasn’t
Field notes
One Saturday night, a drawer of Raspberry Pis, and a question: can any USB webcam become a clean HDMI camera, run from a phone? By Sunday afternoon camhdmi was on GitHub, MIT, v1.0. Here is the build.
Read the article : camhdmi: a clean HDMI camera from any USB webcam, built in a weekend
Field notes
From a proposed workstation to a clean second-machine rebuild: what worked, where the complexity lived, and which benefits belonged to Atomic rather than the provisioning system.
Read the article : Fedora COSMIC Atomic: I built the recovery plan — then tested it
Field notes
A practical look at atomic Linux desktops: COSMIC, Flatpak, Toolbx and a worked administration-laptop example, including update recovery and the limits of rollback.
Read the article : Fedora COSMIC Atomic: a desktop with a recovery plan
Field notes
An Active Directory lab with Claude on TEST01 and Wazuh on the defensive side. The architecture, evidence workflow and first planned reconnaissance exercise.
Read the article : Building an AI-assisted security lab: from reconnaissance to detectionUpcoming project
A planned extension of the clickable portfolio guide: answers grounded in published projects, private inference, and a useful fallback when AI is unavailable.
Read the plan : Upcoming: a self-hosted AI guide for this portfolio
Field notes
A three-node Talos control plane built on repurposed Dell laptops. The cluster was the easy part — a duplicate config document, a label nobody mentions, an unpinned chart and a switch from 2012 were not.
Read the article : Talos on four laptops: the four things that actually brokeTry a different phrase or clear the filters.