Why self-host AI? Whether you love or hate AI it is a big thing right now. I try to take a pragmatic approach: use it for the boring bits because I want to save the interesting bits for myself. But you don't need frontier models for these boring
Let’s be honest: managing a Linux system used to feel like herding cats - except the cats were configuration files, and they kept rearranging themselves every time I updated something. I used to tinker with Ubuntu, Arch, and even Fedora in my spare time. All of them had their
I'm a big fan of self-hosting my online services. It's something I've always tried to achieve but often failed, either because the maintenance time cost was too high, or the technology simply wasn't mature, or both. I've always been drawn
TL;DR; Here's the running application. 10 years ago I built a Minecraft clone, but with a twist. At the time I was doing a lot of STEM activities, introducing children to programming for the first time. The Raspberry Pi was in full swing and was popular as
Imagine plugging an ESP32 into your computer’s USB port - and suddenly, your OS detects a brand-new MIDI device. You connect your phone to the WiFi network the ESP32 is hosting, open your browser, and - boom - a web keyboard appears. You play notes on it, and they’
Demo video of the console in action The CH32V003 is an interesting little chip - not just because it’s based on the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture, or because it comes in a tiny package, but mostly because you can buy it for $0.09 in bulk. Hard to believe this
About two years ago, I bought my first N100 Mini PC for little more than £100. At the time, the N100 was a brand-new chip - quad-core, all “E” (efficiency) cores borrowed from Intel’s Alder Lake architecture, with a mere 6W TDP. It competed with Raspberry Pis but delivered
This is my blog, a new site by Chris Dell that I'm self-hosting on an N100 Mini PC. Expect posts on NixOS, Rust, embedded devices, and renewable energy!