Smarthome & Home Lab

Even beginners can now code with Windsurf Cascade

When Hunter Irving picked up a dusty Macintosh Plus at a local thrift store, he knew he wanted to get it online, but didn’t expect today’s web to be so unfriendly toward vintage machine…

Persistence and long-term memory enable AI agents to handle long-running processes, support human-in-the-loop workflows, and maintain state.

Announcing OLMo 2 - the best open-source models yet - and some of the things I've been learning about training good language models.

A little scripting to get around the limitations of a health-tracking app.

Don't make this hard

You know how people recommend prompting with “Act as a writer”? Here’s why that doesn’t work — and why it’s dangerous.

It is fun to download Ollama and run an AI model locally on your laptop or desktop computer, even without an Internet connection. It teaches us to think about model selection even in cloud AI.

Plex can work without an internet connection, but you'll want to set it up ahead of time.

I developed an application using Python and Streamlit to organize my reading habits and achieve my goals in a planned way.

Master prompt engineering with these 10 best practices. Learn how to craft effective AI prompts for accurate, creative, and efficient responses in your projects.

We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

We built a(nother) house optimized for LAN Parties.

The gaming PCs alone cost about $75,000.

There’s more than one garage opener with a not-quite-open ecosystem. That’s why an Ars writer installed an OpenGarage unit.

After the Internet Archive breach, I built my own private Internet archive using a Raspberry Pi and ArchiveBox. Here's how I did it.

We show you three crucial enhancements to make your AI agents more sophisticated and effective: instructions, tasks, and conversation memory.

LocalStack allows convenient testing against a live AWS service; its mission is to emulate AWS API functionality. We take it for a test drive.

So you've decided you want to livestream your event and run the server yourself instead of relying on Twitch? Neat! Here's the recipe I used for my wedding…

ReflectOS is the approachable, configurable, and extensible Open Source Operating System for your Raspberry Pi smart mirror project.

Using an open-source GitHub project, I created a wireless Android Auto dongle in my car using Raspberry Pi at one-fourth of the cost.

How can you tell if your software is doing what it’s supposed to? Write some tests and run them every time you change anything. But what if you’re making hardware? [deqing] has your bac…

What is ratgdo? ratgdo is a WiFi enabled control board invented by Paul Wieland, sold by ratcloud llc that gives you local ESPHome / MQTT / HomeKit or dry contact control plus full status feedback for virtually any garage door opener including Security + 2.0 Chamberlain/Liftmaster openers. Security+ 2.0 uses an obfusca