Things that broke before they worked.
Short posts on the friction points the docs skip. Reddit-thread answers, troubleshooting walkthroughs, the "I tried this and here's what actually happened" stuff that doesn't fit in a guide.
DMARC Reject, MTA-STS, and CAA: One Afternoon of Homelab Email Hardening
Move your domains to DMARC reject, add MTA-STS with a twenty line Worker, and set CAA records. Includes the external report authorization trap that makes DMARC aggregate reports silently disappear.
Give Your Printer an Email Address: Self-Hosted Email-to-Print
The email-to-print pipeline that hit #1 on r/selfhosted: CUPS, one container, a fail-closed allowlist, and every question from the thread answered.
Zigbee vs Z-Wave vs Matter in 2026: What to Actually Buy
Everyone asks which protocol wins. Wrong question: none do. What to actually buy for sensors, locks, switches, and plugs, and why the honest answer is all three.
Home Assistant Container vs HAOS: What Migrating Actually Costs
Moving HA from a Docker container to HAOS? What a backup actually restores, the add-on and Zigbee gotchas, the safe migration order: and when to just skip it.
Zigbee Drops? Your Wi-Fi Channel Might Be the Problem
Zigbee and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi crowd the same band. Find the overlap, place the coordinator right, pick a cleaner channel: and stop the dropouts.
Wyze Cameras Without the Cloud: Local RTSP That Holds Up
Wyze cams can stream local RTSP without a Cam Plus subscription. The firmware catch, the stream URL, and why go2rtc in front keeps it from falling over.
Docker Compose vs Portainer: It's Not Either/Or
Compose and Portainer aren't rivals: one defines your stacks, the other manages them. How to run both, drop the obsolete version key, and keep it all in git.
Cloudflare Tunnel: Reach Your Homelab Without Opening Ports
Remote access to self-hosted services with no port-forwarding, no public IP, and TLS at the edge: plus the Home Assistant proxy gotcha and how not to over-expose.
No posts yet: first one shipping soon.
In the meantime, the free references are where the practical content lives.