root@labs:~$ make something

After hours: homelab, printing, electronics, news and software.

We build things and write down what actually happened, including the parts that went wrong. Sometimes the result is worth giving away.

./myrgb ↓ download cat blog/latest

new MyRGB 0.4.0, one app for every brand of RGB on your desk. Free, Windows, open beta.

root@labs:~$ ./status.sh
✓ site rebuilt and online
✓ latest post: Why I stopped hand-writing my homelab dashboard
… in progress: MyRGB 0.4.0 beta
✓ forum: Home networking: what’s actually running your network?

readme

Root Labs is where the fun stuff goes. No clients, no tickets, no invoices. Nothing here is billable and nothing is a pitch, which is the whole reason it stays interesting to work on.

Most of what gets written up is whatever broke that week, or a piece of news worth more than the headline it arrived with. Occasionally something turns into software we give away.

blog --latest

2026-10-25 Uncategorized Why I stopped hand-writing my homelab dashboard My Homepage config had grown to about 40 hand-written service entries and over 1,000 lines of custom CSS and JS.… read → 2026-10-25 news MyRGB 0.4.0: fan control, minus the admin app Fan control and CPU temperatures without running the whole app as administrator. One permission prompt sets up a small helper… read → 2026-10-25 homelab A certificate authority had a private key that was the number 4 A certificate authority generated private keys that were single and double digit integers. One was 4. Browsers blocked them in… read → 2026-10-25 homelab Your NAS runs PHP. Synology patched it, QNAP has no date. Synology shipped fixes for PHP2Shell. QNAP listed its products as Fixing with the version To be announced. Stopping the QNAP… read → 2026-10-25 guides Stop forwarding ports: remote access to your homelab without exposing it We keep telling people not to forward ports and never explained the alternative. Tailscale, subnet routers, exit nodes, what the… read →