TechpadinTutorials Getting a Local Coding Assistant Working for the Train A practical writeup on setting up a local AI coding assistant with Ollama and Continue for VS Code, why it beats dead train wifi, and where it still falls short of cloud models. March 25, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials Finally Automating My Backups With Restic and B2 How I finally set up automated, encrypted, off-site backups for my home server using restic and Backblaze B2, after a scary drive noise pushed me to stop procrastinating. March 19, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials Ditching iCloud Sync for Obsidian and Syncthing I moved my Obsidian vault off iCloud sync and onto Syncthing instead, running between my own devices with no cloud company in the middle. Setup notes, a router mess I had to untangle, and why I'd still hesitate to recommend it to everyone. March 13, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials Fixing My Embarrassing Backup Situation After years of half-assed manual backups, I finally set up automated, encrypted, off-site backups for this blog using restic and a cron job. Here's exactly how. February 23, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials Switching My Homelab From Cloudflare Tunnel to Tailscale Funnel Swapping Cloudflare Tunnel for Tailscale Funnel on my homelab after one too many dashboard-induced 11pm outages, with the actual commands and the gotchas nobody mentions. February 8, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials Fixing My RSS Reader Problem for the Third Time in a Decade After years of bouncing between dead RSS services and half-abandoned apps, I finally self-hosted Miniflux on a $6 VPS. Here's the setup, the gotchas, and why it stuck this time. January 27, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials Finally Making 14 Years of Posts Searchable I spent a slow week after the holidays bolting real full-text search onto this blog's 14-year archive using Pagefind, and it took about an hour once I stopped overthinking it. January 9, 2026·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials My Annual January Server Cleanup (And Why I Still Dread It) A walkthrough of the janky little server-cleanup ritual I do every January, from pruning Docker cruft to finally reading my own cron jobs. January 3, 2026·3 min read
TechpadinTutorials Backing Up My Dotfiles Before Midnight A New Year's Eve ritual: finally fixing my dotfiles backup with a bare git repo instead of the Dropbox folder chaos I'd been living with for a decade. December 31, 2025·3 min read
TechpadinTutorials Migrating My Photo Library to Immich (Finally) I finally moved my photo library off Google Photos onto a self-hosted Immich instance running on an old Dell under my desk. Here's how the migration actually went, panicked moment included. December 13, 2025·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials The Boring December Server Cleanup I Do Every Year My annual December ritual of checking domains, testing backups for real, and killing off forgotten VPS instances before the year ends. December 6, 2025·4 min read
TechpadinTutorials Blocking the Bots Without Blocking Google My nginx logs were full of GPTBot and ClaudeBot hammering old gallery posts, so I finally set up proper server-side blocking and rate limiting instead of trusting robots.txt. December 4, 2025·4 min read
