Homelab

Building Interactive Trainers From My Audiobook Library I listen to a considerable number of business and leadership audiobooks, yet retain very little of their content a month later. Listening is passive; useful frameworks blur together with time; and “I read that one” readily becomes “I think I read that one.” I wanted the retention without replaying seven hours merely to recover the one idea I needed. I therefore built a compact production process that converts an audiobook into an interactive trainer, in which each concept and example becomes a card supporting three modes: Browse, Flashcards, and Quiz. Each book receives its own self-hosted site on my internal network; during a single afternoon, I applied the process to seven titles. ...

Politics Dashboard: A Self-Hosted, AI-Summarized News & X Feed Reader I built and open-sourced a self-hosted news dashboard that aggregates political news from RSS or FreshRSS, summarizes individual articles with a configurable large language model (LLM), generates a 24-hour thematic digest, and presents X posts with per-account summaries through a self-hosted Nitter instance. The repository is github.com/RobertDWhite/politics-dashboard; it is MIT-licensed, and multi-architecture images are available at ghcr.io/robertdwhite/politics-{api,ui}. The production image is the same image GitHub Actions builds from main. ...

Weather Dashboard: A Self-Hosted, NWS-Grade Weather Operations Console Bottom line up front. I built and now open-sourced a self-hosted weather operations dashboard built around the US National Weather Service api.weather.gov and a stack of other free public sources (NOAA SPC, AviationWeather Center, NDBC, USGS, RainViewer, IEM). For fun, I also pull in APRS stations from my SDR rig. It renders active alerts with VTEC parsing and polygon overlays, NEXRAD and MRMS radar with time-machine playback, severe-weather products from SPC including ProbSevere v3 and GLM lightning, aviation METAR/TAF/AIRMET/SIGMET, marine buoys and tides, USGS earthquakes, AirNow AQI, and a 7-day NWS forecast. It speaks CAP 1.2 to other systems, fans out severe alerts to Slack/Discord/generic webhooks, and supports VAPID web push for the browser. Repository: github.com/RobertDWhite/weather-dashboard. License: MIT. Multi-arch images at ghcr.io/robertdwhite/weather-dashboard-{api,ui}. The image I run in production is the same image GitHub Actions builds from main. ...

Introducing GrafLens Whether you operate a production Kubernetes cluster or maintain a homelab sustained by determination and YAML, if Grafana is part of your observability stack, you recognize the frustration of consulting dashboards on a mobile device. Navigating to a Grafana instance via a mobile browser is an exercise in frustration. You encounter compact text, unresponsive panels, and an interface that was never designed for smaller displays. So I decided to create something better. ...

Overview In this post, I will detail how I run my Matrix Server with Docker-Compose, how I use my Matrix Server as an encrypted notifications hub, and how I federate my Matrix Server over a Cloudflare tunnel (using Cloudflare’s Zero Trust interface). Short Cybersecurity Note Matrix Servers can be a part of your cybersecurity stack in your homelab or business. The component pertinent to cybersecurity related to Matrix Servers is encryption. If you’re pursuing a CISSP, you will want to be highly familiar with encryption and the process by which it is achieved. ...