Everything on this site is tested in one real household: two small server boxes in a cupboard, a smart home with sensors in every room, speakers and screens wired into a voice assistant that speaks three languages, a fleet of self-hosted services, and a gaming PC that boots into a retro arcade. This page is the map; each section links to a deeper dive.
Two compact hypervisor boxes and a NAS: one runs the household services in virtual machines, the other is a dedicated AI appliance whose unified-memory GPU holds a 30-billion-parameter model in RAM around the clock. Backups flow nightly to a backup server and offsite.
A pfSense router with static reservations for everything that matters, dual Pi-holes doing filtered recursive DNS, split DNS for the public demo pages, a Deco mesh for Wi-Fi and WireGuard as the only way in from outside.
Home Assistant ties together presence sensors that know you are there even when you are still, energy-metering plugs, climate control on every aircon, cameras with on-device face recognition, air-quality data and drive-temperature telemetry — with automations that act on all of it.
Room microphones feed a fully local trilingual voice assistant; music flows through Music Assistant to AV receivers, TVs and speakers in every room; the Apple TV takes Siri hand-offs. One sentence in any of three languages reaches any speaker in the house.
Photos, files, media streaming, camera AI, monitoring and dashboards — a few dozen containers across three Docker hosts, published carefully behind one reverse proxy, watched by Prometheus and Grafana, and updated deliberately rather than automatically.
A desktop gaming PC for the serious sessions, and a TV gaming PC that dual-boots CachyOS and Batocera — a variety of ROMs with the larger systems on the NAS over NFS and the smaller ones on local NVMe, so the retro collection survives distro hops, reinstalls and disk swaps untouched.
Three principles run through everything here. Local first: anything that can run inside the house does — voice, photos, cameras, music — and the cloud is an optional extra, not a dependency. Boring is a feature: services update deliberately, config lives in version control where possible, and everything important is monitored and backed up before it is clever. Write it down: the guides on the hobby page are the working notes from this exact setup.