Hardware - Tag - vo.rs

The Home Lab Upgrade Trap: When Good Enough Should Be Good Enough

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

There’s a particular flavour of evening every home-labber knows. The lab is running fine. Everything you actually use is up. And yet you find yourself three tabs deep on a marketplace, comparing the second-hand price of a faster CPU, a bigger NAS, more RAM you do not need, against the box you already own that is, by every honest measure, sufficient. This is the upgrade trap, and it has cost me more money and more weekends than any actual technical failure.

eGPU via OCuLink: Adding a Desktop GPU to a Mini PC

Tue, 19 May 2026 16:00:00 +0000

For years the external GPU story was a sad one: Thunderbolt enclosures that cost as much as a mid-range card, ate a third of your bandwidth in overhead, and dropped the link if you breathed on the cable. OCuLink quietly changed that. It’s an external PCIe connector — no protocol translation, just raw PCIe lanes on a cable — and a growing number of mini PCs now ship with a port. I’ve been running a desktop GPU off a palm-sized machine for a few months, and it’s the first eGPU setup I’d actually recommend.

3D Printing Functional Parts: Hinges, Brackets, and Things That Actually Get Used

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Everyone’s first month with a 3D printer produces a graveyard of Benchys, articulated dragons, and desk trinkets that go straight in a drawer. The printer earns its keep when you stop printing toys and start printing parts — the bracket that holds a sensor exactly where you need it, the hinge for a custom enclosure, the spacer that turns “almost fits” into “fits.” Functional printing is a different discipline from decorative printing, and most of the difference is in understanding that the part has a job to do and the physics of FDM are working against you.

YubiKey for Everything: SSH, GPG, FIDO2, and the Paperweight Drawer

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:00:00 +0000

I own four YubiKeys. Two are in active use; two live in what I’ve come to call the paperweight drawer, retired because I changed my mind about how to use them. That drawer is the honest part of this post. Hardware security keys are genuinely excellent, but the path to using them well is littered with dead ends, and the marketing won’t tell you which features are worth the bother. Here’s what actually earns its keep on a self-hoster’s keychain.

UniFi for the Home Lab: Where It Shines and Where It Doesn't

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 09:00:00 +0000

UniFi is the gateway drug of home networking. You buy one access point because your ISP router’s Wi-Fi is a disgrace, you marvel at the clean app and the pretty graphs, and eighteen months later you own a gateway, a couple of switches, a rack-mount UPS you didn’t strictly need, and you refer to your hallway cupboard as “the rack.” Ubiquiti has built something genuinely good here — prosumer gear with an enterprise feel at a price that doesn’t require a purchase order. But it is not the right answer for everyone, and the places it falls down are worth knowing before you spend the money.