Everything on this site is tested in one real household: three 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.
Every machine on the LAN — the three servers, the router, two gaming PCs and a laptop — counted once.
Three boxes: an Intel two-GPU compute server with 192 GB, an RTX A5000 and an RTX 3090 for the camera AI, the subtitle generator and the experiments; a Strix Halo AI appliance whose unified-memory GPU holds a 30-billion-parameter model in RAM around the clock; and a 16-bay Unraid server with 231 TB usable that is also the busiest Docker host, the monitoring home and now the host for the household’s own virtual machines.
Every virtual machine nightly to Proxmox Backup Server, every container daily from a Btrfs snapshot without stopping anything, the machine history pulled offsite to Cloudflare R2 by a box that can only read, the container archives and the photo library mirrored to Dropbox behind six guards — and all 868 GiB offsite read back and matched, because a backup that has never been restored is a hope.
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, motorised curtains, 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 — about a hundred containers across four 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.