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.
The Orange Pi 6 Plus sits in the rack, humming along with the quiet confidence of a board that knows it is being underutilised. Inside the CIX P1 SoC is a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU)—a piece of silicon specifically etched to crunch tensors and accelerate inference.
700ms. That was the number that haunted my Kubernetes cluster, slowly burning it to the ground. Every alert the cluster generated, every log line it processed for AI-driven feedback, triggered an embedding operation.
“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.
April 2026 — on replacing an inbox full of irrelevant opportunities with a system that actually thinks
If you’ve worked in IT for more than a few years in Europe, you know the pattern.
March 2026 — on why a €400 espresso machine can pull shots a €4000 machine can’t
The Gaggia Classic is a semi-automatic espresso machine with a straightforward design: a pump, a boiler, a solenoid valve, and a group head.
