Field Notes
Real work. Documented.
Step-by-step guides from actual homelab builds, production incidents, and hands-on implementations. Not what's hot online. Not theory crafting. The work that happens in the lab, at work, or for a friend.
Learn AWS Without an AWS Account. Run the Official Emulator on Your Laptop
AWS now ships a free emulator of its own APIs. Point the normal AWS CLI at your laptop and practice S3, SQS and DynamoDB with no account and no bill. We ran it on our box and hit the four errors every beginner hits first. Each one tells you exactly what to check.
Your Smart Home Should Keep Working When the Internet Drops. Start With a Local MQTT Broker
A cloud smart home dies when the vendor's server does. A small MQTT broker in your house keeps devices talking locally. We ran one on our box with a fake garage sensor and a wall dashboard, then killed the sensor two ways. One way the dashboard found out in a fraction of a second. The other way it never did.
Check Your Chrome Version and Relaunch. CVE-2026-125350 Is Exploited in the Wild
Google patched a High use-after-free in Chrome's XML code and said an exploit exists in the wild. CISA added CVE-2026-125350 to the KEV catalog on Nov 10. Here is how to check your version, force the update and relaunch, and why that listing changes the triage.
Stringman Hangs a Gripper From Four Ceiling Lines. Run the Cable Math Before You Buy the Kit
Stringman is an open source room-scale gripper that hangs from four motors in the ceiling corners. Before spending $655 on the kit, we wrote the cable math in numpy, built a four-cable robot in MuJoCo from scratch, and ran both on our box. Here is where the lines go slack, why the top of the room is expensive, and the first command to try yourself.
Kimi K3.1 Pro Is Open Weights. Two Numbers Say It Won't Run on Your Box
Moonshot published the full Kimi K3.1 Pro weights. We pulled the Hugging Face API on our box and worked the numbers. The checkpoint is 1,561 GB, 104B parameters are active, and each token at batch 1 reads about 137 GB of weights. Here is how to size any model in two minutes before you download it.
WireGuard Site-to-Site in Three Network Namespaces, Then I Tried to Leak Around It
A working WireGuard tunnel tells you nothing about what happens when it stops working. I built a two-site lab on one Linux box, captured the wire in the middle, and tried five ways to get plaintext past the tunnel. Two of them worked until I wrote the right nftables rules.
When AI Handles the Easy Incidents, How Do You Keep Your Troubleshooting Skills Sharp?
When chat bots clear routine pages, the hard outage lands on a human who has had less stick time. Here is how an operator reasons through an incident by hand, why automation erodes that skill, and three drills you can run at zero cost.
WordPress upgrade-window RCE: check your version, then update safely
CVE-2026-119977 affects WordPress 4.7 through 7.1.3 for a few seconds while a full core update unpacks. Here is how to check your version, block the staging folder, update, and read your logs.
Your CPU Says 100%. It Might Be Waiting on RAM the Whole Time
A core at 100% can spend most of its time waiting on RAM. Here is how to tell the difference, the reasoning an operator uses to prove it, a 30-line benchmark you can build tonight, and the real output from our box.
Five Open Models Matched a Paid One at Hard Coding Problems. The Judge Was a Bash Script.
Five copies of an open-weight 27B model, working as a team, matched a paid frontier model on ten hard coding problems. What the result shows, what it doesn't, and the test I ran on the script that decides pass or fail.
Proxmox VE Node Hardening: SSH Lockdown and Non-Root Admin Access
Default Proxmox hands root SSH to anyone who can reach port 22. Three targeted layers close that gap: a non-root admin with sudo, root SSH disabled, and iptables restricting SSH to your bastion only.
Building a Zero-Trust Homelab with YubiKey PIV
Hardware-backed authentication for your homelab using YubiKey PIV smart cards, a private CA, SSH hardening, digital signing, and a Bastion server. No cloud dependencies. No subscriptions. Full control.
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