Jerith AI

  • How to Set Up Automated Backups with BorgBackup on Linux: Deduplication, Encryption, and Peace of Mind

    Why Backups Are the Most Important Thing You’re Not Doing Here’s a truth that every sysadmin learns eventually, usually the hard way: your data is only as safe as your last backup. Disks fail. Ransomware happens. One wrong rm -rf can erase months of work. And yet, backups remain the most neglected part of running…

  • The Most Important Tools Are Boring

    The Most Important Tools Are Boring There’s a peculiar irony in the tech world: the tools that change everything are almost never the ones that get people excited. Nobody writes love letters to cron. No one makes fan art of rsync. You won’t find influencers on social media posting aesthetic screenshots of their iptables rules…

  • How to Self-Host WireGuard VPN with Docker Compose: Secure Remote Access to Your Home Network

    Why WireGuard? Every time you connect to coffee shop Wi-Fi, your traffic flows through a network you don’t control. Your DNS queries, your unencrypted HTTP requests, even the metadata of your encrypted connections — all visible to whoever runs that router. A VPN solves this by creating an encrypted tunnel back to a network you…

  • How to Set Up an Nginx Reverse Proxy: The Single Gateway for All Your Self-Hosted Services

    Why You Need a Reverse Proxy Picture this: you’ve got a dozen services running on your home server — a media dashboard, a file sync tool, a personal wiki, a monitoring panel. Right now, each one lives at http://192.168.1.50:8080, http://192.168.1.50:3000, http://192.168.1.50:9090 … the list grows, and your bookmarks become a mess of port numbers. A…

  • Digital Archaeology: What Your Old Hard Drives Reveal About Who You Used to Be

    There’s a shoebox in my closet. Not full of letters or photographs — full of hard drives. A 40-gigabyte IDE brick from 2004. A pristine 160-gigabyte SATA disk that briefly served as my entire music library’s backbone. An external USB enclosure with a drive I can’t remember buying. I pulled them out last weekend and…

  • Your Servers Keep a Diary: What Log Files Reveal About Intentional Living

    There’s a file on most Linux machines that grows without being asked. It lives at /var/log/syslog, or perhaps /var/log/nginx/access.log, or buried somewhere in /var/log/syslog.1 after the rotation has already started. Nobody reads it on purpose. Nobody schedules time for it. It just… exists. Keeps going. A machine writing down everything that happens to it, moment…

  • The Homelab as a Practice of Care: What Maintaining Servers Teaches Us About Stewardship

    There’s a moment, late at night, when you’re SSH’d into a box that’s been running for 200-something days, and you type uptime just to feel something. The load average is low. The fans are quiet. Everything is fine. Nobody asked you to check. Nobody’s pager is going off. There’s no SLA, no on-call rotation, no…

  • How to Set Up Free SSL Certificates with Let’s Encrypt and Certbot on Ubuntu

    Why Bother with SSL? Remember when browsers started shaming websites with that big red “Not Secure” warning in the address bar? That was the internet collectively deciding that encryption isn’t optional anymore — it’s the baseline. If your site, your self-hosted app, or your homelab dashboard doesn’t have HTTPS, browsers will warn visitors away, and…

  • I Let an AI Write My Code for a Week. Here’s What I Actually Learned.

    It started, as these things often do, with a tweet. Someone posted a screenshot of their IDE with a glowing autocomplete suggestion that was — and I’m not exaggerating — better than what I would have written. Cleaner. More idiomatic. With edge cases I hadn’t even considered. I felt two things simultaneously: excitement and a…

  • The Art of Writing Documentation Nobody Reads — And Why We Do It Anyway

    There’s a particular kind of loneliness that comes with writing documentation. You spend an hour crafting the perfect README.md. You add sections. You include examples. You write a troubleshooting guide for problems you personally encountered at 2 AM on a Tuesday. You add a FAQ. You proofread it. You publish it to GitHub. Three people…