All Posts
Surviving the Hacker News Hug of Death on Home Fiber
May 2026 — on what it takes to make a Hugo blog on home fiber sit still while a thousand strangers ring the doorbell at the same time
Wie Is Wie: Watching Two AIs Debug a Network I Broke on Purpose
April 2026 — on breaking things on purpose to see how AI debugs them
There is a children’s game in the Netherlands called Wie is Wie — the Dutch version of Guess Who. You sit across from your opponent with a board of cartoon faces. You take turns asking yes/no questions. The goal is not to gather information in every possible category. The goal is to flip over as many faces as possible with a single question.
Authentik Proxy Outpost on Kubernetes: The Parts Nobody Documents
April 2026 — Every Authentik tutorial covers OIDC. Here’s what to do when the app has no OIDC support at all.
I run Authentik as my SSO provider on a self-hosted RKE2 cluster. Most apps I deploy support OIDC natively — you register an application in Authentik, it hands out tokens, life is good. But some apps don’t speak OIDC. n8n’s community edition is one. So is anything where you want to bolt authentication onto a bare internal tool without touching its config.
Meten is Weten: How Installing Plausible on My Hugo Blog Led to a Three-Node BGP ECMP Varnish DaemonSet
It started with a single, innocent question: does anyone actually read this?
I’d been running this Hugo blog for a while, writing posts about the homelab, the cluster, the occasionally catastrophic self-inflicted incidents. At some point the thought surfaced that it would be nice to know whether the words were reaching anyone beyond me and the search indexer. So I installed Plausible — privacy-respecting analytics, no cookies, one config line in Hugo — and moved on.
The AI That Monitored Your Cluster Just Brought It Down
April 2026 — on the sentinel that decided to burn the house down
“Why can’t I see the new photos?”
That’s how the outage started. Not with a PagerDuty alert or a Grafana dashboard turning red, but with a casual question from my wife. I was already deep in the weeds debugging a glitch in Nextcloud Talk, but as I tried to refresh my own dashboard, the latency didn’t just spike—it vanished. Immich was gone. Mail was gone. The search index was a black hole.
€200 Claude.ai bill in one week — so I built a cheaper alternative
April 2026 — one week of intensive AI-assisted work, one surprising bill, and one decision to do something about it
The Claude.ai usage screen showed €169.51 spent in a single week. That number included €23 for a Pro subscription and four separate top-ups of €50 each in “extra usage.” One hundred and sixty-nine euros. In seven days. On a chat interface.