./techtipsy
I'm Herman Õunapuu. I write about all sorts of topics, including self-hosting, software development, playing around with hardware, Linux stuff and more!
- Posts
- 160 from 22 Jul 2020 to 23 Oct 2026
- Posting
- weekly (30 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- https://ounapuu.ee/index.xml
2026 23
- Building cool things for myself while the world burns
- Restoring my Fiat 126 BIS
- Faithfully reimplementing an obscure Estonian Flash game for modern browsers: GTA õppesõit
- Don't buy the transparent plastic version of the Makita DCL-180 vacuum cleaner
- Replacing the battery on a CyberPower UT650EG and UT850EG UPS
- Trying out open weights LLM-s on hardware that I can actually afford
- I guess I'm a cactus farmer now
- The 'free' server build
- These cheap USB-to-HDMI adapters are terrible, and yet incredibly useful
- My experience with LLM-assisted tools in software development
- You can run Forza Horizon 6 on an unsupported AMD RX 400/500 series GPU on SteamOS
- How I self-host this blog at home with a dynamic IPv4 address, IPv6 prefix, and a dash of Wireguard
- You can fake SSD-like disk speeds in any Linux VM, but it's unsafe (literally)
- The most unstable computer in my fleet is now the most critical one
- Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor
- Server room? No, I have a server pantry.
- I gave the MacBook Pro a try
- The cloud just stopped scaling
- BTRFS disk errors to fall asleep to
- SteamOS on a ThinkPad P14s gen 4 (AMD) is quite nice
- Meet the Garbage PC
- I built the worst Jellyfin media server
- Running cheap and crappy USB hard drives in RAID0 is indeed a very terrible idea
2025 34
- Drawing parallels between home renovation and software development
- Oops, I accidentally built a Steam Machine
- Every time I write about a single board computer, half the internet goes down
- LattePanda IOTA review: how does it perform as a home server?
- I found the best use case for AI
- The day IPv6 went away
- Why Nextcloud feels slow to use
- ./project2038: can I keep the Orange Pi Zero running until 2038 and beyond?
- Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a brand new one
- Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
- Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA SSD-s: how are they doing after 4 years of use?
- The unreasonable effectiveness of the pancake rule
- Those cheap AliExpress 18650 Li-ion cell power bank enclosures suck, actually
- The 'politsei' problem, or how filtering unwanted content is still an issue in 2025
- How to run Uptime Kuma in Docker in an IPv6-only environment
- 3D printing is pretty darn cool, actually
- PSA: part of your Kagi subscription fee goes to a Russian company (Yandex)
- How a Hibernate deprecation log message made our Java backend service super slow
- From building ships to shipping builds: how to succeed in making a career switch to software development
- My horrible Fairphone customer care experience
- Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Tiny: how does it fare as a home server?
- We get laptops with annoying cooling fans because we keep buying them
- Home is where the home server is
- The coffee machine ran out of memory
- About the time I trashed my mother's laptop
- Fairphone Fairbuds XL review: admirable goals, awful product
- I yearn for the perfect home server
- Turns out that I'm a 'prolific open-source influencer' now
- IODD ST400 review: great idea, good product, terrible firmware
- Feature toggles: just roll your own!
- I'm done with Ubuntu
- Why my blog was down for over 24 hours in November 2024
- Backing up another PC with a single Ethernet cable
- My very first Dungeons and Dragons campaign
2024 30
- The IPv6 situation on Docker is good now!
- How to build a fleet of networked offsite backups using Linux, WireGuard and rsync
- What I've learned running Linux and Windows off of USB flash drives
- You can use almost anything as a key file for your encrypted storage device
- Your Wi-Fi might be terrible because of Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS)
- The best laptop is the one somebody else had
- ThinkPad as a server: third time's the charm
- The Fedora Linux starter pack: everything you need for a smooth experience
- So you want to migrate to Kubernetes: observations from a software developer
- My blog successfully survived a scheduled power outage
- I encourage you to write a blog
- How to copy media off of an iPhone the hard way (using Linux)
- How I ended up working as a software developer
- Running my ThinkPad T430 with an eGPU in 2024
- No HDMI port on the ThinkPad T430? No problem!
- About the time my ThinkPad T430 ran with an external GPU
- This blog is running on a home server
- How to save an old printer from the e-waste pile with a Raspberry Pi
- They make USB-C cables with displays now!
- Steam Deck: I like it
- ThinkPad T40: it can still run modern Linux, for now
- OpenWRT, ISP modem and dynamic IP addresses: how to fix connectivity issues without rebooting your router every time
- The hidden media play/pause/stop keys on the Lenovo ThinkPad L390 Yoga
- Monitoring energy usage with smart plugs, Prometheus and Grafana
- Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen 4 (AMD): it doesn't suck under Linux
- How to take down production with a single Helm command
- Fairphone 5 long-term review: notes on 1 year and 3 months of use
- My very first career day
- Oops, I published my drafts!
- FOSDEM 2024: my experience, some notes and tech tips
2023 21
- My cat water fountain comes with a spicy USB power adapter
- The simplicity of the modulo operator: how I scaled an inefficient solution on a legacy system
- Control - how to make a game enjoyable for casual audiences
- The optimization treadmill: why I keep changing my computing setup all the time
- Zimaboard: the closest thing to my dream home server setup
- My trip to the 'Side ja laptopi muuseum' in Estonia (Communication and Laptop Museum)
- Steam local network game transfers are a game-changer
- The IKEA-powered homelab on a wall
- Why you might not want to publicly self-host a Wikipedia clone
- My experience at the k-space hackerspace hackathon
- How I blew up my backup server (Valve pls fix)
- I held a talk about my self-hosting adventure!
- Dell Latitude 5411: the Linux compatibility sweet spot
- Life is maintenance, maintenance is life
- Tiered storage: use the right tool for the job
- I looked at this site on the Wayback Machine
- TOMO M4: probably the coolest power bank I've owned
- LattePanda V1 - my experience with a Raspberry Pi alternative
- Shrinkflation, SanDisk style
- ThinkPad as a server: the follow-up
- Anything's a portable speaker if you're brave enough
2022 25
- About the time I used Google Drive as a CMS for a web app
- What changing the CPU on a laptop looks like
- HoloISO: the unofficial Steam Deck experience on your PC
- I have a 'Dall UD19PB ThundeRbglt Dock': my experience with the HP Elitebook 845 G9
- I finally found an use case for my Raspberry Pi Model B+
- Recovering a password-protected ThinkPad T60
- Testing a cheap ExpressCard to NVMe SSD adapter on my ThinkPad T430
- The minimum viable fan control script
- Accidentally turning the ASRock DeskMini X300 into a semi-passively cooled PC
- Overcoming hardware limitations: the time-to-sleep script
- This site will be offline on 2022-08-17 between 18:00-19:00 EEST
- I tried out the CyberPower UT650EG UPS
- btrbk is awesome
- The absolute state of Bluetooth audio in 2022
- Disabling the crappy Broadcom Bluetooth adapter in your ThinkPad T430 running Linux
- Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
- Trying out VR on an AMD Ryzen 4000 series APU
- Strangling your service with a Kubernetes misconfiguration
- Oversimplified guide into snapshots on the btrfs filesystem
- My self-hosting setup has an UPS now, here's my experience with it
- How I treat my urge to hoard data
- Surviving the front page of HackerNews on a 50 Mbps uplink
- ASRock X570M Pro4 motherboard overview
- ASRock DeskMini X300: the future form factor of desktop PC-s?
- Why I went back to using a ThinkPad from 2012
2021 19
- VR, VFIO and how latency ruined everything
- Self-hosting Wikipedia using Kiwix
- Tech rants: PC-s use way too much power in 2021
- DIY cloud gaming: NVIDIA and Moonlight
- DIY cloud gaming setup with VFIO, Parsec and AMD
- Testing GPU passthrough on AMD Ryzen 7 5700G APU
- Turning leftover PC parts into a decent gaming PC
- AMD Ryzen 7 5700G: first impressions on Fedora 34
- How to mess up a simple ThinkPad X230 BIOS flash and how to recover from it
- I've reached the self-hosting endgame
- Tech tip: eliminate HDD humming noise
- Whacky setups: seedbox on a wall
- How to start your self-hosting adventure: a high-level overview
- My server setups throughout the years
- My attempt at archiving nfscars.net
- Database optimization adventures on low-end hardware
- Things I've learned during my self-hosting adventure
- How to fix ZFS pool not importing at boot
- Quest towards energy efficiency part 1: the water heater