This post documents the process I went through to provide a way to manually sync my most important folders on my laptop to an external drive so that if I ever changed Linux distribution, I could easily copy them all back and they would be up to date to the last rsync I ran, which is weekly.

There is an older, shorter version of this process on Pontifex.site but the process keeps getting refined as I acquire more information about best practices,and improved documentation methods, and this post documents the most up to date version of that process.

In my home lab, most of my Docker apps run in their own VMs on Ubuntu servers, which are on Proxmox hypervisors. As a continual test, I have one VM that contains 22 Docker containers, which I believe is seven or eight individual applications. I was looking for a simple way to check this particular VM for any Docker container updates, and I ran across DockPeek, I believe, on one of the Reddit boards for self-hosting. This post details the steps I went through to install DocPeak on this particular Ubuntu VM with all these Docker containers, and TL:DR - it works great for what I needed it to do.

This tutorial shows how to set a static IP address on Ubuntu 24.04 servers using netplan, and on Linux Mint desktops using the NetworkManager GUI or command line.

The project goal was to be able to stream YouTube videos that were downloaded using MeTube, over a tailscale connection where the player streaming the video was minimized, so just the audio could be listened to instead of having to watch the video as well. The videos were downloaded to an external SSD attached to a proxmox server, and the whole thing was turned into a network Samba server for file storage. The videos were the first item put on it.

This guide documents how to install and set up AI HedgeFund from GitHub and requires an API key that must be purchased for a small amount. Since we were using Claude, we bought our API key from Anthropic. AI Hedgefund takes stock symbols input and then allows you to pick from one or more or all of 18 investors to analyze your stock picks and recommend buy, sell, short, or hold strategies.

This guide documents how to install and set up BookLore, after using the more widely known Calibre-web for almost a year. There was nothing wrong with Calibre-web, other than the setup was wonky with having to install Calibre first to create the database, then moving the whole thing to a server, etc. BookLore may not be as feature-rich as Calibre-web, but I may never know since I just want to be able to stream my books to my phone or iPad wherever I am over tailscale. Simple usage

This guide documents how to install and setup MeTube after fully evaluating the more popular alternative, Tube Archivist. MeTube downloads YouTube videos to my network storage for streaming later in a minimized app (phone or pc) so just the audio portion is used.

This guide documents how to configure Windows machines to access the Samba network storage server

This guide documents setting up a centralized Samba network storage server on Proxmox using an external SSD