I’m Michael. I’m a computer engineer and embedded firmware developer by trade. Most of my day job involves reading specifications, writing code, and figuring out why something breaks on a customers vehicle.
I’m also cheap, stubborn, and I like to tinker in Linux environments more than I probably should.
Most of the time there is a faster, cleaner, more efficient commercial solution available. And most of the time I ignore it. Building things myself, even when it makes no sense, gives me hours of frustration and just enough moments of fun to keep going.
Because buying the solution is boring.
This site is where I write about the results of that mindset.
I run DIY setups for things like Plex, NAS storage, Radarr, Sonarr, and media automation, usually routed fully through a VPN. A lot of this could be handled by Docker containers or existing open source stacks, and often it is. But I like understanding how things actually work, where they break, and what happens when you push them further than you probably should.
Sometimes that means success. Sometimes it means rebuilding the same system multiple times because I refused to do it the easy way.
I write about both.
This site is not polished and it is not focused on best practices. It is closer to a running lab notebook mixed with practical guides and the occasional tech rant, like trying to make sense of why RAM suddenly costs so much or why a perfectly reasonable setup falls apart under real world load.
If you are a tech enthusiast or a DIYer who enjoys experimenting, breaking things, and learning the hard way, you will probably find something useful here. Or at least relatable.
If you finish reading something and think, “There was obviously a better and easier solution, but this was a fun read,” then the site did what it was supposed to do.