Rereading this week’s notes, I realized it was the busiest one since I opened the site. In six days:

  • October 28–30: I wrote Aether TV, a new Home screen for my Google TV. It’s the one I actually use today.
  • October 30: I moved Eon and HNCC from the Mac mini to Little Hub, my old laptop turned home lab.
  • October 30–31: HOMEVERSE was born, the digital twin of my home, using HNCC as its network sensor and Eon as its analyst.
  • November 2: I connected Obsidian to Claude and redesigned the Journal you’re reading.

Why the move matters

As long as everything ran on the Mac mini, my projects were programs on my computer. On Little Hub they became services: they run in containers, listen only where they should, talk to each other through tokens and APIs, and the Mac is back to being just the place where I write code.

I learned more from this move than from many hours of theory:

  • A program that “works on my computer” hides a lot. HNCC read the network with commands that only exist on macOS; on Linux I had to rewrite them with ip.
  • A container doesn’t see your home network unless you tell it to. For a network scanner, network_mode: host isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.
  • Without a dedicated GPU, models have to be chosen with numbers in hand. Eon’s chat moved to a 4B model, and a compressed cache I expected to save resources turned out almost three times slower.
  • As soon as a service opens up to the network, you need explicit rules: who can call it, from where, with which token.

These are exactly the things I’ll need to know as a Cloud Engineer, just small and inside my house.

What’s missing

Little Hub doesn’t stay on 24/7 yet, HOMEVERSE shows an example house instead of mine, and I still have to pick a VPN to get in from outside. That’s the next step: turning it into a real server, not just a laptop that’s sometimes on.

Bye.