I guess I'm a cactus farmer now
Send help. Or at the very least clay pots and cactus soil, I'm running out.
./techtipsy
Recent content on ./techtipsy, a blog written by Herman Õunapuu.
Latest posts
The 'free' server build
Man takes old computer, turns it into a home server again. Man happy.
These cheap USB-to-HDMI adapters are terrible, and yet incredibly useful
5 EUR well spent.
My experience with LLM-assisted tools in software development
It's been an incredibly exciting time to work in software engineering, and at the same time I feel completely burnt out.
You can run Forza Horizon 6 on an unsupported AMD RX 400/500 series GPU on SteamOS
Compatibility layers can work in more ways than I thought.
How I self-host this blog at home with a dynamic IPv4 address, IPv6 prefix, and a dash of Wireguard
I think I've finally figured it out. For now.
You can fake SSD-like disk speeds in any Linux VM, but it's unsafe (literally)
Ka-chow!
The most unstable computer in my fleet is now the most critical one
No way that this can go wrong. Not at all.
Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
Thoughts on an experiment that I've been running for about a month.
Server room? No, I have a server pantry.
Who needs AI data centers when you can have this?
I gave the MacBook Pro a try
Dancing with the devil.
The cloud just stopped scaling
Future post on this blog: why my home server is 'production' now.
BTRFS disk errors to fall asleep to
Inspired by a true story.
SteamOS on a ThinkPad P14s gen 4 (AMD) is quite nice
This is the year of the Linux (gaming) desktop. Or laptop.
Meet the Garbage PC
It's garbage. Extremely good looking garbage, but garbage nevertheless.
I built the worst Jellyfin media server
This experiment is brought to you by absurd memory prices.
Running cheap and crappy USB hard drives in RAID0 is indeed a very terrible idea
I know, shocker.
Drawing parallels between home renovation and software development
I had a lot of time to think during an apartment renovation and how it's eerily similar to what I do at my day job.
Oops, I accidentally built a Steam Machine
I was longing for a Steam Deck that had more oomph. Guess Valve felt that way, too.
Every time I write about a single board computer, half the internet goes down
Coincidence? Maybe.
LattePanda IOTA review: how does it perform as a home server?
I received a review sample of the LattePanda IOTA, here's what I did to it.
I found the best use case for AI
I've been pushing the limits of LLM-based tooling at work, with amusing results.
The day IPv6 went away
Well, that's a first.
Why Nextcloud feels slow to use
No amount of tuning the backend service performance helped, and then I learned why. Oh no. Oh no no no no.
./project2038: can I keep the Orange Pi Zero running until 2038 and beyond?
Only one way to find out!
Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a brand new one
Having a home server and a few smart plugs leads to interesting data points like this one. Well, interesting to me, at least.
Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
It has been 0 days since the last change to my home server.
Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA SSD-s: how are they doing after 4 years of use?
How much damage can a self-hosting enthusiast do to a quartet of Samsung SSD-s after 4 years?
The unreasonable effectiveness of the pancake rule
Having problems with your team being late to the daily stand-up? Try this!
Those cheap AliExpress 18650 Li-ion cell power bank enclosures suck, actually
I tried out three different 18650 Li-ion battery bank enclosures that I ordered for very cheap and ended up throwing them all out, here's why.
The 'politsei' problem, or how filtering unwanted content is still an issue in 2025
Filtering profanities is ducking hard.
How to run Uptime Kuma in Docker in an IPv6-only environment
When you're too cheap to pay for an IPv4 address but you'd really like to monitor your services.
3D printing is pretty darn cool, actually
Out of all the technological hype cycles over the last decade, there is one that stands out the most to me.
PSA: part of your Kagi subscription fee goes to a Russian company (Yandex)
Unacceptable.
How a Hibernate deprecation log message made our Java backend service super slow
Add that to the list of reasons to avoid Hibernate.
From building ships to shipping builds: how to succeed in making a career switch to software development
A big career change is scary, but I've seen it happen successfully, twice. Here's what I've observed.
My horrible Fairphone customer care experience
How a few bad experiences turned me from a brand evangelist to someone who has sworn off of Fairphone products in the foreseeable future.
Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Tiny: how does it fare as a home server?
I was itching for a new project, so I got one.
We get laptops with annoying cooling fans because we keep buying them
We can fix this, but it will require some effort on our part.
Home is where the home server is
It was moving day, but for my home server.
The coffee machine ran out of memory
Words that I never expected to say.
About the time I trashed my mother's laptop
This is what happens when you know just barely enough to be dangerous.
Fairphone Fairbuds XL review: admirable goals, awful product
I gave the Fairphone Fairbuds XL a go to see how well they stack up in real life. Unfortunately, not that well.
I yearn for the perfect home server
I've thought a lot about the performance, cost and power consumption trade-offs of home servers. Maybe too much.
Turns out that I'm a 'prolific open-source influencer' now
I'm not sure if I should take it as a compliment or an insult. Probably the latter, given the circumstances.
IODD ST400 review: great idea, good product, terrible firmware
I bought and tested a Ventoy-like device that allows you to boot all sorts of installation media and operating systems, all on one device.
Feature toggles: just roll your own!
It's one of those build-vs-buy discussions where the build option is genuinely better in 99.99999% of the cases.
I'm done with Ubuntu
A few busted upgrades and the heavy-handed push of a software packaging solution has ruined Ubuntu for me.
Why my blog was down for over 24 hours in November 2024
Everything I learned from an incident that made me consider switching careers. It was a close one!
Backing up another PC with a single Ethernet cable
If all you have is an Ethernet cable, then everything looks like a temporary storage device.