My $0 AI Assistant Now Talks, and Watches My Server
Phase 2 of my “JARVIS OS” project: a read-aloud morning brief and a server health check that only speaks up when something is new. In Phase 1 I built a daily brief that lands in…
Data Center in a Bag Part 7: Adding Kali Linux to the Travel Kit
One of the questions I got after sharing the Data Center in a Bag project was whether Kali Linux could run from the travel kit. That sounded simple enough. The original thought was just to…
Data Center in a Bag Part 6: When Port Forwarding Wasn’t the Answer
What started as a portable Proxmox server has officially become my Data Center in a Bag project. For Part 6, the goal sounded simple: make the Minecraft Bedrock servers behind pfSense accessible to devices connected to the…
I Built a $0 AI Morning Briefing on My Homelab
Phase 1 of the “JARVIS OS” project: a scheduled daily brief, built from real data, delivered into a notes vault. I wanted an assistant that could start my day for me: check my calendar, scan…
My CCNA Journey: Four Years, Multiple Attempts, and Finally Passing
October 8, 2026 After four years of on-and-off studying, multiple exam attempts, labs, practice tests, rescheduling, and more subnetting than I care to admit, I can finally say it: I passed the Cisco CCNA 200-301…
Portable Data Center in a Bag — Part 5: The First Real-World Field Test
Until this point, every major test of my portable Proxmox environment had happened inside my home lab. The network topology worked. The virtual machines worked. Firezone provided remote access. AdGuard handled DNS. pfSense separated the…
Built Enterprise-Style SSO in My Home Lab
As I reached my one-year anniversary with Orion, I found myself looking back at how much my home lab has changed. My projects used to focus heavily on individual systems: building servers, hosting applications, configuring networking,…
Portable Data Center in a Bag — Part 4: Building a Proper Network Edge
The first few stages of my portable homelab project were mostly concerned with getting services running. Proxmox was installed on an older HP laptop, containers and virtual machines were created, Firezone provided remote access, AdGuard…
Part 3: Turning an Old Laptop Into a Portable Data Center
For Part 3 of my travel server project, I made a pretty significant change to the original design. The project originally centered around using Raspberry Pi-style hardware and an older Netgear Nighthawk router. That setup…
Self-Hosting the Enterprise Agent Design Lab and Migrating It from OpenAI to Gemini
I recently came across the Enterprise Agent Design Lab, an AICC 2026 workshop application created by Vetitek. The project is designed to help users reason about how much authority an AI system should have in…