Homelab Burnout: Sustainable Self-Hosting When the Hobby Starts Feeling Like Work

TLS Certificates for Internal Services: HTTPS Inside Your Homelab

Six arguing AI agents: what multi-agent debate teaches CS students about AI architecture

Beyond Ollama: 3 Homelab AI Tools Worth Trying Next

How to Ask for Help: Technical Communication Skills Every CS Student Needs

Linux Pipes and Redirection: The Missing CS Lesson That Powers Real-World Automation

Homelab Network Design: Building Your Own Miniature Data Centre at Home

Self-Hosted AI Security: What Every Ollama User Should Know

Right to Local Intelligence: Why Running AI on Your Own Hardware Matters

Cloudflare Self-Managed OAuth — What It Means for Your Homelab Security

Learning Docker by Building a Container Engine from Scratch

The Minimal Homelab That Actually Works

OpenCV 5 Computer Vision in Python for CS Students

Switch from pip to uv — Python's New Package Manager Guide

9618 Paper 1 Theory Fundamentals — AS CS Topic Guide

Debugging Python for A-Level CS — Tracebacks & Fixes

Self-Host Redis 8.8 with Docker Compose — Homelab Guide

Binary, Hex & Number Systems — Visual Guide for IGCSE CS

Python File Handling for IGCSE & A-Level CS — Examples

How to Set Up a Test Pipeline That Actually Catches Bugs

How to Set Up Hermes Agent on a Mini PC Home Server

🔒 0417/12 Paper 1 – Security, File Transfer & ATM Processing | June 2025

📝 0417/11 Paper 1 – Testing, Safety & Security | June 2025

📝 9618/12 Paper 1 – Databases, Data Structures & Algorithms | June 2025

📝 9618/22 Paper 2 – Records, Files & Programming Techniques | June 2025

📝 9618/22 Paper 2 – Algorithms, Data Structures & Sorting | June 2025

📝 9618/22 Paper 2 – Development Life Cycles, Maintenance & Testing | June 2025

📝 9618/12 Paper 1 – Assembly, Logic Circuits & Communication | June 2025

🖥️ 0417/12 Paper 1 – System Testing, Safety & Cybersecurity | June 2025

📝 0417/12 Paper 1 – Input Devices, Applications Software & Biometric Systems | June 2025

📝 9618/12 Paper 1 – Von Neumann, Number Systems & AI | June 2025

📝 0417/11 Paper 1 – Output Devices, Applications Software & Smartphones | June 2025

Why use indentation in Python

OSI Reference Model-Networking 101

Techie Mike — Tech Tutorials for Students & Homelab Enthusiasts

Practical tech tutorials for Cambridge CS/ICT students and homelab enthusiasts. I break down complex topics — VirtualBox, Proxmox, ethical hacking, Python, and exam prep — into clear, hands-on guides you can actually follow. No fluff, just real skills.

linux • 7 min read

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Homelab Burnout: Sustainable Self-Hosting When the Hobby Starts Feeling Like Work

# Homelab Burnout: Sustainable Self-Hosting When the Hobby Starts Feeling Like Work Browse [r/homelab](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/) for long enough and you will regularly find people questioning whether their homelab has become more work than fun. People are not tired of technology itself. Th…

Techie Mike • 13 Jul 2026

security • 6 min read

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TLS Certificates for Internal Services: HTTPS Inside Your Homelab

# TLS Certificates for Internal Services: HTTPS Inside Your Homelab Most homelab TLS setups stop at the front door. You put Caddy, Nginx, or Traefik in front, get a valid certificate for `app.example.com`, and call it done. From the browser to the reverse proxy, everything is encrypted. From the r…

Techie Mike • 12 Jul 2026

Computer science • 8 min read

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Six arguing AI agents: what multi-agent debate teaches CS students about AI architecture

# Six arguing AI agents: what multi-agent debate teaches CS students about AI architecture Most students meet AI through prompts. Type a question, get a paragraph back, move on. That framing is useful for five minutes and then it gets in the way. The more interesting lesson is what happens when y…

Techie Mike • 11 Jul 2026

developer tools • 12 min read

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Beyond Ollama: 3 Homelab AI Tools Worth Trying Next

# Beyond Ollama: 3 Homelab AI Tools Worth Trying Next Ollama is the tool I recommend when someone wants their first local model running tonight. It is simple, fast to understand, and good enough for a lot of homelab jobs. Pull a model, hit an API, wire up Open WebUI, done. I already covered that fu…

Techie Mike • 10 Jul 2026

Computer science • 8 min read

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How to Ask for Help: Technical Communication Skills Every CS Student Needs

# How to Ask for Help: Technical Communication Skills Every CS Student Needs A student shows me a Python program and says, "It doesn't work." That is the whole bug report. No error message. No explanation of what the program is meant to do. No clue whether it ever worked, whether they changed any…

Techie Mike • 09 Jul 2026

linux • 8 min read

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Linux Pipes and Redirection: The Missing CS Lesson That Powers Real-World Automation

# Linux Pipes and Redirection: The Missing CS Lesson That Powers Real-World Automation A few weeks ago I was debugging why one of my Docker containers kept crashing. The logs were enormous — thousands of lines. I needed to find error messages, count how often they appeared, and figure out which ser…

Techie Mike • 08 Jul 2026

hardware • 13 min read

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Homelab Network Design: Building Your Own Miniature Data Centre at Home

# Homelab Network Design: Building Your Own Miniature Data Centre at Home My homelab started flat. One subnet. Every device — the Proxmox host, the Docker containers, the media server, the WiFi light bulbs — all splashing around in the same 192.168.1.0/24 pool. It worked. Until it didn't. The mome…

Techie Mike • 07 Jul 2026

security • 7 min read

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Self-Hosted AI Security: What Every Ollama User Should Know

# Self-Hosted AI Security: What Every Ollama User Should Know In May 2026, a GitHub issue reported that two production Ollama servers had been compromised by an attacker who pulled six malicious models onto them. No authentication check, no registry allowlist, no integrity verification. Just a curl…

Techie Mike • 06 Jul 2026

AI coding assistant • 8 min read

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Right to Local Intelligence: Why Running AI on Your Own Hardware Matters

# Right to Local Intelligence: Why Running AI on Your Own Hardware Matters A manifesto hit the front page of Hacker News last week with a title that stopped me mid-scroll: "[Right to Local Intelligence](https://righttointelligence.org/)." Around the same time, Jamesob's [guide to running SOTA LLMs…

Techie Mike • 05 Jul 2026

Self-Hosting Toolkit: 10 Apps I Actually Use Every Day

linux • 8 min read

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Self-Hosting Toolkit: 10 Apps I Actually Use Every Day

# Self-Hosting Toolkit: 10 Apps I Actually Use Every Day Every homelab goes through the same cycle. You start with one service. Then you discover three more. Then you're running 25 Docker containers and half of them haven't been touched in six months. I know because I did it. Last year I audited m…

Techie Mike • 30 Jun 2026

SSH Tunnels: A Practical Guide for Homelab Users and CS Students

linux • 10 min read

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SSH Tunnels: A Practical Guide for Homelab Users and CS Students

# SSH Tunnels: A Practical Guide for Homelab Users and CS Students There's a moment every homelab user hits. You're away from home, staring at a coffee shop Wi-Fi login page, and you need to check your Proxmox dashboard. Or you want to share your Jellyfin server with a friend, but it's behind your…

Techie Mike • 29 Jun 2026

Self-Hosted LLMs with Docker, Ollama, and Open WebUI

linux • 12 min read

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Self-Hosted LLMs with Docker, Ollama, and Open WebUI

# Self-Hosted LLMs with Docker, Ollama, and Open WebUI Cloud AI is convenient. Open a browser, type a prompt, get an answer. But it comes with three things that bug me: API bills that surprise you at the end of the month, rate limits that kick in when you're in the middle of something, and the know…

Techie Mike • 28 Jun 2026

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Techie Mike

Computer Science teacher in Thailand. 10+ years Cambridge IGCSE, 4 years AS/A Level. BSc Computer Science & Engineering. Ex-Intel, Virgin Media. Practical exam prep, past paper walkthroughs and tech tutorials.

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