Short technical notes covering fixes, discoveries, configuration changes and troubleshooting from systems running inside Realm Labs.
Grafana dashboards became painfully slow even though CPU and RAM looked fine. The real cause was a duplicate Docker MAC address on a Synology-hosted bridge network — and the fix exposed a useful lesson about stale neighbour entries too.
How I added RabbitMQ to my Proxmox homelab to queue reliable KITT and KARR text-to-speech jobs between my local AI server and Piper TTS.
How I built a Knight Rider-inspired KITT smart home dashboard with Home Assistant controls, Piper TTS, wake-word voice interaction, a dedicated TTS server and a local Ollama AI fallback.
How I trained a custom KARR voice with Piper TTS, WSL and a GTX 1080 Ti, solved CUDA compatibility issues and exported it to ONNX.
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 to have different wallpapers, want to change images without editing scripts, and want a…
I recently revisited the lighting setup on my Executor model. The original system worked, but it had evolved into several separate Python scripts for turning the LEDs on, turning them off and running a breathing effect. It was functional, but…
This one looked like it should take about thirty seconds. My Synology NAS had moved to a new static IP address. One of my Proxmox storage entries still pointed at the old address. So I did the obvious thing: Proxmox…
MQTT is one of those services that quietly becomes more important the longer you use it. At first, I was only using it for a few simple messages. Then more things started depending on it. The Raspberry Pi used it.…
Some of the best home lab problems are the ones that look completely ridiculous once you finally understand what happened. This was one of them. During the earlier versions of my Raspberry Pi TARDIS project, Node-RED was responsible for triggering…
Publishing Home Assistant through Cloudflare Tunnel looked like it should be straightforward. I already had Cloudflare Tunnel working for other Realm Labs services, so the basic path was familiar: The tunnel connected. The hostname resolved. Cloudflare could reach the server.…