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Hands-on technology projects, practical guides and real-world experiments across homelabs, networking, automation, self-hosting and AI.
Everything here is built, tested and documented in a real environment — including the bits that didn’t work the first time.
Latest from the Lab
Building a Web-Managed Active Directory Profile Picture System with PowerShell, GPO and Docker
Changing a Windows account picture on one computer is simple. Changing it reliably for multiple domain users, across multiple domain-joined computers, while retaining central control is…
Read more →Building a Web-Based Wallpaper and Lock Screen Manager for an Active Directory Domain
Managing wallpapers and lock screens through Group Policy is straightforward when every machine receives the same image. It becomes more interesting when you want individual users…
Read the notes →Deploying Custom Domain User Profile Pictures with Group Policy
I wanted domain users on my order.realm network to have their own Windows account pictures automatically applied when they log on to a domain computer. The…
Read more →Projects from the Lab
Things that started as an idea and somehow became actual working systems.
Publishing a Self-Hosted WordPress Site with Cloudflare Tunnel and Docker
One of the main goals behind Realm Labs is to run as much as possible on infrastructure I control. That naturally led to an interesting question: Could I…
Building a Centralized Home Control Panel: Recycling an Old Tablet with Home Assistant & Docker
I wanted to create a control panel for my home, so I decided to recycle an old tablet, host Home Assistant on my Docker engine, and connect my…
Building My Own Darts Scorer: From HTML to a Native Windows App
I have had some form of homemade darts scorer kicking around since 2021. Like quite a few of my projects, it started with a fairly simple requirement: I…
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It’s where real systems are built, broken, repaired, upgraded and documented — partly to remember how they worked, and partly so somebody else doesn’t have to spend three hours discovering the same obscure fix.
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