https://www.phllaps.net/tags/home-lab/ Recent content in Home Lab on PhllapsNET Hugo en-gb Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.phllaps.net/blog/proxmox-on-a-second-hand-workstation/ Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.phllaps.net/blog/proxmox-on-a-second-hand-workstation/ <p>The machine running most of my home lab is a Lenovo ThinkStation P700 that cost less than a mid-range mini PC. It has a Xeon E5-2699 v3 in it — eighteen cores of 2014-era server silicon that nobody wants any more — and it has been more useful than anything else I have bought for the lab.</p> <p>This is not a build guide. Proxmox installs itself in about ten minutes and the official documentation is good. It is about the decisions that turned out to matter, most of which I got wrong first.</p> https://www.phllaps.net/blog/self-hosted-image-and-speech-generation/ Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.phllaps.net/blog/self-hosted-image-and-speech-generation/ <p>I generate images, short video clips and narration at home, on one graphics card. Most of what I have learned is not about model quality — the models are all astonishing and they all get better every few weeks. It is about the boring constraints around them: how long things take, how much memory they need, and whether you are allowed to use the output.</p> <h2 id="the-gpu-decides-everything-and-it-decides-it-by-vram">The GPU decides everything, and it decides it by VRAM</h2> <p>The single number that determines what you can run is video memory. Not the core count, not the generation. A card with 24GB will run things a faster card with 16GB simply cannot load.</p> https://www.phllaps.net/blog/lessons-from-automating-things-that-run-unattended/ Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.phllaps.net/blog/lessons-from-automating-things-that-run-unattended/ <p>Most of what I run at home runs without me. Jobs fire on timers, do work, publish results, and tell me only if something interesting happened. That is the point of automation and it is also the danger of it: a job nobody watches can be broken for two weeks before anyone notices.</p> <p>These are lessons that cost me something. None are clever. Most are the kind of thing that reads as obvious and is not obvious until it has happened to you.</p> https://www.phllaps.net/blog/video-as-code-remotion-and-an-llm/ Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.phllaps.net/blog/video-as-code-remotion-and-an-llm/ <p>Remotion lets you describe a video as React components and render it frame by frame to a file. You write a composition, every component gets told which frame it is on, and a headless browser draws each one in turn.</p> <p>It is a genuinely different way to think about video, and the difference that matters is not that it is programmable. It is that video becomes <strong>text in a repository</strong>: diffable, reviewable, and — this is the part that changes what is possible — generatable.</p>