Docker

The moment I moved my parents off Google Photos, the free 15 GB of Google One became 200 GB of headroom, and I got back the photos Google had been helping itself to. That part was easy. The part nobody mentions is that Immich is a real server, not a web app, and it has requirements Google quietly pays for on your behalf. Six gigabytes of RAM, a disk you will back up separately, and a public endpoint on your home connection — which is where most of the sharp edges live. Here is what actually happened for me when I replaced Google Photos with Immich, checked against the official documentation on 10 November 2026. I’ve run it on a Pi 5 and on an N100 box, and both taught me something different. ...

Most homelab beginners make the same mistake: they grab a Docker Compose template, paste it in, and then discover three months later that their “simple setup” is a sprawling mess of undocumented dependencies, a database with no backup, and ports wide open to the internet. I’ve been there. I still end up there sometimes. So I built a tool to catch it before it happens. ...

If you’ve been administering Linux servers for a while, you’ve probably developed a love-hate relationship with it. You know how to configure services, debug networking issues, and keep systems running. But somewhere deep down, you’ve wondered: what actually holds this thing together? I don’t mean “how does systemd work” (nobody truly knows). I mean: what happens between hitting the power button and seeing a login prompt? Today, we’re going to build our own minimal Linux system from scratch. And because I’m not a sadist, we’ll test it using Docker containers - spin it up in seconds, tear it down just as fast. ...