There’s something uniquely satisfying about building a station with your own hands—especially when that effort turns into a signal traveling thousands of miles across the globe. This past week, I finally got my HF setup fully on the air, and it paid off in the best possible way: my first contact into Africa—working D2UY in Angola on FT8.
Here’s how it all came together.
I recently upgraded my homelab storage to a new NAS, and like any good plan, it worked perfectly… right up until it didn’t.
What started as a straightforward data migration turned into a deep dive into Docker, PostgreSQL, and how modern apps actually store data. In the end, I recovered everything—but not before learning a few lessons the hard way.
One of the things I enjoy most about running a homelab is taking random pieces of technology and turning them into something genuinely useful (or at least really cool).
Recently, I set out to build a system that could answer a simple question:
“What aircraft is closest to my house right now?”
That question turned into a full-blown project involving:
Like many people running a homelab, I found myself with a growing collection of self-hosted services—Grafana for monitoring, Uptime Kuma for alerts, Portainer for container management, and more.
Each service worked well on its own, but there was one problem:
every service had its own login.
It wasn’t just inconvenient—it also didn’t scale. Managing users, credentials, and access across multiple applications quickly becomes messy.
Early in my career I worked as an intelligence analyst, a role that taught me how to work with incomplete information, evaluate sources, and build narratives from scattered data points. Over the years I’ve found myself applying those same skills in unexpected places. One of the most interesting examples has been genealogy — the study of family history.
My maternal grandmother developed a deep interest in our ancestry late in her life and passed that curiosity on to me. My original goal was simple: learn more about where my family came from and who my ancestors were. But as my research evolved, I realized I was approaching genealogy the same way I approached intelligence work — identifying patterns, validating evidence, and following threads wherever they led.