About Me & This Lab

# Origin Story

I am an IT internal auditor who is always looking for the next hobby but technology has always been a passion. I graduated with an information systems degree and my career path has been away from hardware since I was computer hardware support intern in college. That means in my spare time I love tinkering and working on my own hardware as well as voluneerting at free geek in Minneapolis recycling old technology just to be more hands on with tech.

In 2024 I got into 3D printing and shortly after the youtube rabbit hole brought me to home labbing. I started off with my old highschool laptop, eventually upgrading to my college laptop, and then once more to a more powerful laptop motherboard I 3D printed a case for combining two of my hobbies. Now it is 2026 and I upgraded once more and now am having fun learning and exploring local AI and learning more about networking while building out my new smart home.

# The New Home

As I write this I am one week away from moving into my new home with my girlfiend and I am extremely excited to setup our home to a locally hosted smart home. I have lived in apartments since college and never had the ability to truly customize my setup to make it to my liking. Luckily I have an extremely loving girlfiend who supports my interests, as long as they look good.

I plan on documenting my successes and failures of setting up and making this our perfect smart home. Follow along to see all of the updates!

# Philosophy

I was lucky enough to graduate college one year before Chat GPT was released and was able to complete my degree fully AI free. However ever since signing up for the beta Chat GPT in 2023 I have always been interested in what it can do. I would consider myself an AI realist and am skeptical of a lot of the AI headlines and projections.

Saying that, I do enjoy using it for certain tasks. It has been extremely helpful in troubleshooting issues with my home lab as well as creating this website. I prefer to use my local hardware whereever possible but there are limitations to what can be done affordably on local hardware. I hope in the near future local AI will become smarter to the point where I can fully move away from using frontier models from the large AI labs and I am excited by all of the reasearch coming out making local AI more available to everyone.