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…
hbahhur
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…
Portable Data Center in a Bag 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…
Building a Smarter hbtechsolutions: AI Chatbot, Recruiter Q&A, and Direct Meeting Booking
I recently completed a major update to hbtechsolutions focused on making the site more interactive, useful, and easier to navigate for visitors, recruiters, and anyone interested in my technical background. The biggest addition is a…
A new self-hosted status dashboard
I needed a clean, lightweight way to monitor my network and side projects. As builders, our first instinct is usually, “I can just code that myself”—so I decided to roll my own Uptime Monitor from…
Worst case, build your own.
One of the services I’ve been self-hosting is a live weather map, originally built from a Docker-based template I discovered a few years ago. Recently, an API change caused the application to break, and after…