I run Kubernetes in my homelab and use the (now classic) Prometheus/Grafana stack for monitoring everything. In my experience, the thing that Prometheus does not do well is long-term storage. Prometheus’ own database is fine for a few days storage, but performance and reliability quickly degrade. There are quite a few solutions to this problem, but I choose to use Thanos, partly because Kube Prometheus Stack has very good support for it.

Recently, I decided to jump on the latest AI bandwagon. While cloud-based large language models are powerful and convenient, I wanted complete control over my data, plus the satisfaction of running everything on my own infrastructure. Enter OpenClaw — a personal AI assistant that runs locally and integrates with messaging platforms you already use.

By Chris Cowley

As I have mentioned previously I have been been gradually Home Assistant-ifying my home. Of course, part of that means having a some control panels around. I have tried an old tablet, but was not really happy with the results. At some point I leaned about the so-called “Cheap Yellow Display” (CYD). This is a small TFT display bolted directly to an ESP32 microcontroller.

There are a few things that make this interesting: