Techpad — Tech News, Tutorials & Personal Notes

Finally Ditching Google Photos for Immich

How I finally migrated 41,000 family photos off Google Photos onto a self-hosted Immich server, including the metadata mistake that cost me a full re-import.

April 30, 2026·4 min read

TechpadinTutorials

Deploying With Nothing But Git Push (Finally)

A weekend spent rebuilding my side project's deploy setup around plain git push, why the bare-repo trick still works, and where it fell apart.

April 24, 2026·4 min read

TechpadinPersonal

The Domains I Forgot I Owned

A Sunday-night cleanup of twenty-two hoarded domains turns into a small confession about buying domains instead of finishing projects.

April 22, 2026·4 min read

TechpadinTutorials

Finally Automated the Backups (Only Took Fourteen Years)

After a near-miss deleting my only backup folder by hand, I finally set up real automated backups for this blog — restic, nightly cron, and a weekly restore test.

April 14, 2026·4 min read

TechpadinTutorials

The Status Page I Built Instead of Paying For One

I got tired of paying for uptime monitoring SaaS, so I built a stupidly simple one myself with a cron job, curl, and one plain HTML file.

April 6, 2026·4 min read

TechpadinTutorials

Quitting the Doomscroll: FreshRSS Instead of Twitter

How I set up FreshRSS on a home server to replace my Twitter doomscrolling habit, with the docker-compose config and the one trick that actually made it stick.

March 27, 2026·4 min read

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

TechpadinPersonal

Sixteen Chargers and Not One I Need

A long-overdue cleanout of the kitchen junk drawer turns into an inventory of sixteen old charging cables and one very dead Fitbit charger.

March 17, 2026·3 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