When I first started exploring the world of homelabs, I thought it had to involve racks of hardware, blinking lights, and endless tinkering. I even wrote about my early experiments here. At that time, I repurposed an old desktop PC and dived head-first into virtualisation with Proxmox, containers, and self-hosted services. It was fun, but I quickly realised that what really interested me wasn’t the hardware - it was the software and services. I loved spinning up tools, learning how they worked, and making them accessible on my own terms. The hardware side, while interesting, left me feeling stuck in “decision paralysis”, what’s the perfect setup? What hardware should I buy next? Should I build a Kubernetes cluster? Instead of enjoying the process, I was constantly second-guessing.

I love using Projects to organise my chats. Aside from the organisational aspects of Projects, it is such a powerful way to interact with ChatGPT because it allows you to add custom instructions and files specifically related to the project. This is very important as it provides context for the model, and context is key when interacting with Large Language Models. Last weekend, I sat here trying to create the perfect custom project instructions and, despite my best efforts, I was not entirely satisfied with the output. I realised I was spending way too much time manually drafting custom instructions for my ChatGPT Projects. I kept running into the same problem: prompt structure. Then the penny dropped: I realised I could just use ChatGPT to help me build this, and so I built a Prompt Generator GPT. I worked iteratively with GPT-5, asking the model to ask me clarifying questions to help me design a prompt which will allow me to build project instructions for a wide range of subjects.

If there’s one AI tool I reach for every day without fail, it’s Perplexity. It has become my go-to assistant for staying up to date with the latest news and exploring new topics. I wanted to share how I use it, why I keep coming back to it, and a few features I think are genuinely worth exploring. My Two Main Use Cases: News and Learning I use Perplexity primarily in two ways:

In my previous post about Tailscale, I covered what Tailscale is and why it’s become a staple in my homelab toolkit. Today, I want to share a real-world example of just how handy it can be—specifically, how it helped me retrieve personal documents from my homelab while sat on a train, armed with nothing more than my iPhone and a 5G connection. The Situation: Needing Remote Access on the Go We’ve all been there: you need a file, but it’s tucked away on your home network, and you’re nowhere near your desk. For me, this happened while I was on a train, miles away from home. The documents I needed were only accessible from my local network—or so I thought.

Managing configuration files across multiple systems can quickly become a mess. From terminal preferences to shell settings, we all have a finely-tuned setup that we rely on day-to-day. But how do you keep those settings consistent across machines? And how do you avoid the chaos of losing them after a reinstall? That’s where a tool like Chezmoi comes in. What is Chezmoi? Chezmoi is a powerful dotfile manager designed to track, version, and securely deploy your configuration files across multiple operating systems. It helps you manage configuration files such as ~/.zshrc, ~/.gitconfig, ~/.config/ and more — all with a simple Git workflow.