Tech - Life in Iterations | Health, Tech & Self-Hosting

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AI Tools

Best SEO MCP Servers: The Free Stack I Actually Run

The SEO MCP servers worth running, including the free Search Console and Analytics pair that audits my site every morning before I have had coffee.

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AI Tools

MCPs(Model Context Protocol): Peripherals for the AI

I used to think of AI as one big brain typing back at me. Then I plugged in an MCP(model context protocol) server and understood, these are peripherals, and they change everything.

Tech

RAG on a Raspberry Pi: Building a Private Assistant with pgvector + Ollama

I finally gave my local Pi assistant something to actually know. Here's how pgvector and Ollama turned a chatbot into a private assistant with real answers.

Tech

Running a Local LLM on a Raspberry Pi 5 (or Home Server)

Everyone assumes local AI needs a GPU. Here's how I got a local LLM running on a Raspberry Pi with Ollama, what speed to actually expect, and where the limits are.

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Tech

RAG: AI Gets a Personal Touch

RAG (retrieval augmented generation) is how AI answers questions about your own data. Here's how it works, why chatbots on websites use it, and why it beats fine-tuning.

Tech

OpenCode for AI Coding: Evade Vendor Lock-In

OpenCode is the open source, model agnostic coding agent that lets you plug in Claude, GPT, Gemini, or your GitHub Copilot subscription without rewriting your workflow. Here's the full setup guide.

Illustration of a reusable AI skill file (SKILL.md) used across different AI coding tools

Tech

AI Skills: How to Build Reusable Prompts

AI skills are reusable instruction files you create once and use everywhere. Here's how to write one, load it into Claude, and drop the exact same file into Cursor without changing a thing

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Tech

Configuring Alerts on pi Server

Watching a dashboard is not monitoring. Real monitoring is when your server emails you the moment something goes wrong. Here is how I wired Netdata to Mailgun to make that happen.

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Tech

Netdata Raspberry Pi Monitoring: You Can't Fix What You Can't See

I spent months running my self-hosted blog completely blind. No dashboards, no alerts, no idea what my Pi was doing at 2am. Here is how I fixed that with Netdata, Nginx, and Cloudflare Access in about 20 minutes.

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Tech

Automating Backups to Google Drive (No S3 Bill )

Why pay for S3 when you have Google Drive and cron skills? Here is the exact rclone setup I use to back up MySQL for $0 a month.

Illustration representing a silently failing cron job on a Linux server

Tech

Debugging a Cron Job

Your cron job shows up in the logs. Session opened, command called, session closed — neat as a pin. And yet nothing actually happens. Here is the exact debugging trail that cracked mine open, from burned mail to a permission error on line three.

Illustration of a Cloudflare Tunnel connecting a home server to the internet without a static IP

Tech

Configuring server without a Static IP

No static IP. No port forwarding. Just a domain and a daemon running on your machine. Here is how Cloudflare Tunnel makes self-hosting from home actually work.