The state of homelab tech (2026) (Friends)
Techno Tim joins Adam to dive deep into the state of homelab’ing in 2026. Hardware is scarce and expensive due to the AI gold rush, but software has never been better. From unleashing Claude on your UDM Pro to building custom Proxmox CLIs, they explores how AI is transforming what’s possible in the homelab. Tim declares 2026 the “Year of Self-Hosted Software” while Adam reveals his homelab’s secret weapons: DNSHole (a Pi-hole replacement written in Rust) and PXM (a Proxmox automation CLI).
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Featuring:
Techno Tim – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
People
Techno Tim - Tim Stewart’s website, YouTube channel, and documentation hub
Crosstalk Solutions - Chris’s channel, mentioned for building custom Ubiquiti API tools
Virtualization & Infrastructure
Proxmox VE - Open-source virtualization platform for VMs and containers
TrueNAS - Enterprise-grade open-source storage operating system built on ZFS
HexOS - Consumer-friendly NAS OS built on TrueNAS (in development)
Proxmox VE Helper Scripts - Community-maintained scripts for easy LXC and VM deployment
Self-Hosted Software
Paperless-NGX - Self-hosted document management system with OCR
Paperless-GPT - AI-powered enhancement for Paperless-NGX using LLMs
Ollama - Run large language models locally on your own hardware
Open WebUI - Self-hosted web interface for interacting with local LLMs
Plex - Media server for organizing and streaming your personal media library
Home Assistant - Open-source home automation platform
Pi-hole - Network-wide ad blocking via DNS filtering
Document Intelligence & RAG
Dockling - IBM’s open-source document parsing library for AI/RAG pipelines
PaddleOCR - Multi-language OCR toolkit for document recognition
AI & Agents
Claude - Anthropic’s AI assistant, used for homelab automation in this episode
OpenCode - Open-source AI coding agent (mentioned as potential homelab tool)
Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Protocol for connecting AI models to external tools and data
Networking
Ubiquiti - Enterprise networking gear popular with homelabbers (UDM Pro, UniFi)
Tailscale - Zero-config VPN for secure networking between devices
Container & Orchestration
Docker - Container platform for packaging and running applications
Kubernetes - Container orchestration for managing containerized workloads
Fly.io - Platform for running containers close to users globally
Monitoring & Observability
Grafana - Open-source analytics and visualization platform
Prometheus - Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit
Security & Authentication
Bitwarden - Open-source password manager (self-hostable)
Authelia - Open-source authentication and authorization server
Databases
MariaDB - Community-developed fork of MySQL
Redis - In-memory data store for caching and messaging
PostgreSQL - Advanced open-source relational database
Hardware Mentioned
Intel Optane - Ultra-low latency storage drives (discontinued but prized for ZFS special vdevs)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 - GPU used for Plex transcoding and local AI inference
Concepts & Techniques
ZFS Special Vdevs - ZFS feature for accelerating metadata and small file operations
PCIe Bifurcation - Splitting a PCIe slot to support multiple NVMe drives
Medallion Architecture - Bronze/Silver/Gold data lake pattern discussed for document ETL
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The state of homelab tech (2025) (Friends)
Techno Tim joins Adam to catch up on the state of Homelab for 2025, the state of AI at home and on-prem (AI Homelab) and where that’s heading, building a creator PC, choosing the parts for your build, GPU availability, Windows being user hostile, and why Tim is happy to be using Windows, Mac AND Linux.
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Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Featuring:
Techno Tim – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Building My ULTIMATE Linux Workstation
Homelab Services Tour 2025 - What am I Self-Hosting
HomeLab Hardware Tour (Early 2025)
Building a Low-Power, Fully Loaded Plex Server
MacWhisper by GoodSnooze (Gumroad)
Mel Robbins: Let Them Theory
Changelog News - Everyone knows your location
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
The state of homelab tech (2024) (Friends)
Techno Tim is back with Adam to discuss the state of homelab in 2024 and the trends happening within homelab tech. They discuss homelab environments providing a safe place for experimentation and learning, network improvement as a gateway to homelab, trends in network connection speeds, to Unifi or not, storage trends, ZFS configurations, TrueNAS, cameras, home automation, connectivity, routers, pfSense, and more.
Umm, should we make these conversations between Adam and Tim more frequent?
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Featuring:
Techno Tim – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Ubiquiti and Unifi
Cisco Meraki
pfSense
TrueNAS
Proxmox
Intel Core i9-13900K
Plex
Home Assistant
OCuLink Interface
OpenZFS
Changelog & Friends #7: Dear Red Hat… (w/ Jeff Geerling)
(Byte My Bits) Intel 13th Gen + Unraid + Plex = OMG4K!
YouTube Channels
Byte My Bits
Crosstalk Solutions
Tom Lawrence (Lawrence Systems)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Homelab nerds, unite! (Friends)
Ok Homelabbers, it’s time to unite! Join Adam and his new friend Techno Tim for 1.5 hours of homelab goodness. From networking and WiFi, virtualizing Ubuntu running Docker containers, to Home Assistant and automation, building a Kubernetes cluster, to gutting a perfectly good machine just to build exactly what you need to run the ultimate Plex server — that’s what homelab is about. Let’s do this.
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Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!
Featuring:
Techno Tim – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Subscribe to Techno Tim on YouTube
Ubiquiti / Unifi
Proxmox
Ubuntu
Rocky Linux
45drives - Storinator AV15
Docker
Portainer
Kubernetes
Plex
Pi-Hole
Tailscale
ZFS (OpenZFS)
Changelog Interviews #475: Making the ZFS file system (with Matt Ahrens)
Protectli
Sysracks
Rackstuds
ASUS ProArt Z790
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!