Kicking off something new: weekly updates. A way to keep track of what I’m building, learning, and sharing across projects, homelab experiments, and community.
This week: KCD Bay Area, a LocalAI Appliance, Kairos Ubuntu 25.10, Proxmox experiments, and a packed CNCF Belgian Meetup.
KCD Bay Area (and other conference news)#
This week was KCD Bay Area. I was supposed to deliver a presentation on running AI workloads at the edge. I couldn’t be there for a good reason, but I was still bummed—San Francisco is still on my bucket list. I also missed the chance to talk about how amazing Kairos is and to share the stage with William Rizzo.
Even so, I was working behind the scenes—helping William with slides and testing our model of how we think AI workloads should be run at the edge.
On the broader conference front: my talk proposals to OSS South Korea didn’t get accepted, but I’m honestly a bit relieved since it would have overlapped with KCD Porto 😅.
I also sent in a proposal for a workshop at CfgMgmtCamp 2026, and I’m planning to submit one for the Kubernetes track and one ignite talk. I’m especially excited about the ignite—my first exposure was at DevOpsDays Antwerp and I thought they were fantastic. I already have a title in mind: “The Mental Trick That Changed My Life.”
A LocalAI Appliance#
What I was building behind the trenches for that presentation is a LocalAI Appliance. The early version now lives in my homelab under the code name noos.
The idea is simple: a LocalAI OS you install on a box. Boot it, then hit http://ai.local in your network, and you’ve got your own private ChatGPT.
The PoC is already working. Next step: get mudler’s blessing, figure out how to make it air-gapped, and hopefully share it with the LocalAI community. I’m happy with how close it already feels to zero-touch.
Kairos Ubuntu 25.10#
Ubuntu 25.04 has been out for a while, and we don’t have a Kairos release for it. I had started working on it, but ran into a kernel issue that prevented the LiveCD from being mounted (except in RAM).
Itxaka tracked down the root cause, and since 25.10 is around the corner, we decided to skip 25.04 and focus on 25.10. After some fixes in kairos-init, and the SDK I got it working, but the PRs still need team review.
Proxmox in my homelab#
This one took me by surprise. While testing Ubuntu 25.10 with UEFI + TPM, my setup just wouldn’t cooperate. Cockpit’s version was too old, no update candidates, and qemu couldn’t access the OVMF UEFI file for secure boot.
I almost gave in to installing the “popular rolling distro of the week,” but instead decided to repurpose my LocalAI machine (solid RAM) into a Proxmox server. And I couldn’t be happier.
This setup feels like what I should have had all along for testing Kairos. Everything just works within my home network, and I can access it remotely via VPN. Now I just need to make sure I don’t spiral into collecting too many boxes—recovering homelabbers anonymous, anyone?
CNCF Belgian Meetup#
Next week’s CNCF Belgian Meetup in Leuven is fully booked! Excited for the talks and for catching up with the community.
Slow but steady, it feels like we’re growing something really cool. Leuven is such a nice city too—I might head there early to work from a café and walk around if the weather is good.
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That’s a wrap for this week. Let’s see if I can keep the momentum going with weekly updates.
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