The Dispatch
Homelab builds, creative hobbies, and making things for fun. · View all
Hero Kids: Running a DND-Style Game for Young Players
Tried running Hero Kids with the family. It's a lot of fun, but you have to throw out any attachment to a rigid script and let the kids steer. Loose story, ad-lib everything, and enjoy the chaos.
Musical Instruments: Fun (Noisy) Times Ahead
We took the kids to Guitar Center, dug out the old trumpet and keyboard from storage, and now we're looking into lessons. The house is about to get significantly louder, and I'm genuinely looking forward to it.
Building a Bartop Arcade Cabinet: A Pandemic Project Revisited
I was digging through old photos and found the progress shots from my bartop arcade cabinet build. A pandemic project from early 2021 that I never properly documented here. Time to fix that.
Blast Radius: Why Infrastructure Teams Build Tools
Infrastructure teams build tools because their blast radius is enormous. When your work touches every application in the organization, the leverage of a good tool (or the damage of a bad one) scales differently than it does for an application team.
Work From Home Ergonomics: The Office I've Built Over Time
I didn't build my home office all at once. It evolved piece by piece over a few years, driven by actual pain points rather than aspirational Pinterest boards. Here's what I'm running, what I'd buy again, and what I'm still evaluating.
The Homelab as Creative Outlet: Why I Keep Building Things Nobody Asked For
The homelab isn't about saving money on cloud hosting. It's about having a space where I can build, break, and iterate without a ticket, a timeline, or a stakeholder.
Palworld 1.0 Dedicated Server: A Docker Homelab Build on Ubuntu 26
Palworld hit 1.0 this week and I wanted back in. A Proxmox VM, an Ubuntu 26 template, Docker Compose, and about an hour of troubleshooting DNS quirks later, I had a dedicated server running in the basement.
Keep Your Hobbies Unmonetized
The moment you start thinking about ROI on a hobby, you've turned something you love into something you owe. I've watched it happen with photography, copywriting, and smoking meat, and the pattern is always the same.
Minecraft, Hackathons, and the Case for Unstructured Creativity
My kid builds redstone contraptions with no spec and no deadline. My engineers build their best prototypes under the same conditions. The pattern isn't a coincidence.