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Meet Alfred, the Server That Runs the House

Meet Alfred, the Server That Runs the House

For a while my setup was split across two machines. Home Assistant lived on my Synology NAS, alongside the Mosquitto MQTT broker and ring-mqtt, while Frigate ran on a separate custom rackmount PC. It worked, but two things kept nagging…
July 24, 2026Posted inComputers, Home Automation, Product Thinking
Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time

Nova: Building My Own Echo, One Weird Problem at a Time

I have wanted an Alexa that doesn't phone home for years. Every commercial voice assistant is a microphone in your house wired to someone else's computer, and the whole point of a homelab is that my stuff runs on my…
July 14, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Development, Home Automation
Ceres Update: From Empty Scaffold to a Garden That Talks Back

Ceres Update: From Empty Scaffold to a Garden That Talks Back

Seventy-four commits across one weekend took Ceres, the multi-agent assistant for Kim's garden, from a bare scaffold to a working assistant that transcribes voice notes, diagnoses plant photos, answers questions, plans the watering, and runs a scheduled daily briefing from an orchestrated roster of specialist agents.
June 15, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Development, Home Automation, Homestead
Ceres Update: Building the Schema, Then Tearing Half of It Out

Ceres Update: Building the Schema, Then Tearing Half of It Out

A week ago I introduced Ceres, the multi-agent garden assistant Kim and I are building for our raised beds. A week later there is, in fact, code — and a careful re-design that ripped out part of it within three days.
May 19, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Home Automation, Homestead
Managing a Homelab AI Project with Claude Code, Gitea, and the Gitea MCP Server

Managing a Homelab AI Project with Claude Code, Gitea, and the Gitea MCP Server

I am not a software engineer. I think in milestones, user stories, and outcomes. Kim wants a smart garden assistant that tells her when to water and when the blight risk is high. I want to build it. Solo homelab…
May 13, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Development, Home Automation, Homestead, Product Management
Building Ceres, a Multi-Agent Garden Assistant

Building Ceres, a Multi-Agent Garden Assistant

We are growing a lot of vegetables this year. Carrots, cauliflower, russet potatoes, Roma tomatoes, and more are all going into fourteen raised beds in our garden. We have done our research, but there are a lot of variables in…
May 12, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Home Automation, Homestead
Why I Swapped InfluxDB for TimescaleDB – The LLM Tax

Why I Swapped InfluxDB for TimescaleDB – The LLM Tax

For years, InfluxDB has been the data backbone of my Home Assistant setup. With the native Home Assistant integration and Grafana, I had my dashboards dialed in. While FluxQL was a bit of a learning curve, I was able to…
April 24, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Home Automation
AI-Powered Security Camera Reviews with Frigate, n8n, and Ollama

AI-Powered Security Camera Reviews with Frigate, n8n, and Ollama

Frigate is great at detecting objects. It will tell you a person showed up at the front porch, or that a car pulled into the driveway. What it won't tell you is whether that person is your neighbor waving hello…
April 17, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Home Automation, Security
From Coral to Hailo: Why I Finally Swapped My Frigate AI Hardware

From Coral to Hailo: Why I Finally Swapped My Frigate AI Hardware

I have been running Frigate for quite a while now. The Google Coral TPU has long been the "gold standard" for edge processing object detection. It’s efficient, cheap, and handles MobileNet models like a champ. But as my camera count…
February 26, 2026Posted inAI Projects, Home Automation, Security
Insulating the Chicken Coop – The Data

Insulating the Chicken Coop – The Data

Earlier this year, I took the time to insulate the walls of the chicken coop and cover the insulation with 1/4" plywood. I had hoped we could go without needing a heater in there in the deep winter, and luckily…
February 19, 2026Posted inCarpentry, Home Automation, Homestead

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PM by trade. Builder by nature.

 

Product manager. Microsoft, Tableau, Elastic. I’m on sabbatical, using the time to build AI systems end to end instead of reading about them: agent orchestration, vision, speech, tool use, evaluation harnesses, local and frontier models working together. Each project here comes with a deep dive into what I built, how it works, and why I made the calls I made.

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  • Rainier 2
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  • Synology 2
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