Ollama – Jason Burns

Eden, a Yard Agent Built on LangGraph

Ceres has been running the raised bed garden for a while now. It has specialists for watering, planting, pests and phenology, and it puts together a morning briefing every day. Kim raves about how much it has helped her understand…

September 6, 2026AI Projects, Homestead

The LLM Tax, Revisited: Cost, Latency, and Where to Run the Model

Quality, cost, and latency. You can usually have two. Here is the framework I use to pick which two on purpose, with a voice assistant, an RSS scorer, and a Frigate box as the worked examples.

August 12, 2026AI Projects, Product Thinking

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, 2026AI Projects, Development, Home Automation

Introducing Cruxwire: a personal news digest that runs on your own hardware

I read too much news, badly. A dozen RSS feeds, three "read it later" apps I never went back to, and the creeping sense that the algorithm-driven version of all this was optimizing for someone else's goals, not mine. So…

June 24, 2026AI Projects, Development, Updates

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, 2026AI Projects, Development, Home Automation, Homestead

I Stopped Doom Scrolling By Building My Own News Feed

A few weeks ago I stopped using Reddit. Not because the content was bad. There's genuinely useful stuff there, but because I had no control over it. I was just overwhelmed with irrelevant content, negative content and constant suggestion of…

May 7, 2026AI Projects, Development, Productivity

From Smart Bulbs to Skynet: The 2026 State of my Home Automation

When I left Elastic, one of my goals was to dive deep into home automation and finally "level up" my setup. Looking back at where I started when we first moved to Graham, it’s almost comical. Back then, "Home Automation"…

January 1, 2026AI Projects, Computers, Home Automation, Security

Nova’s Fast dev API

Today's been about getting this thing set up properly. I'm not a developer by trade, but I've always been a coder. That being said, I consider myself a prototype developer, so my projects tend to be loosely managed. I wanted…

July 3, 2025AI Projects, Home Automation, Python

Network & Home Automation Apps

In all, I have quite a few components keeping my home automation system running. Some are apps I use every day, some are for managing different parts of the infrastructure and a few are for entertainment. Nearly everything here runs…

January 19, 2025Home Automation

Shop Server Rack – Tower 2

Always trying to improve organization and make things tidy. Moved all of the network and server hardware in my shop to a studio rack I was no longer using. Formally, Tower 2. Top to Bottom AI Docker Server i7-12700KF, 64GB,…

December 14, 2024Home Automation