4 posts tagged with "Homelab"

In "The Birth of My Homelab" I mentioned a new project called Mowa, short for MacOS Web API, and said more would come in a follow-up post. That was August 2025. This is the follow-up.

I was putting Home Assistant OS on a spare Raspberry Pi 4, booting off a USB SSD, with an HDMI capture card plugged into the board so I could watch the boot on my main monitor. I powered it on, console output started scrolling, and about four and a half seconds in the screen went to NO SIGNAL and stayed there. Every boot attempt did the same thing.

I've been working on ARM images lately. They are not application containers, but a distro-style image built from ubuntu:22.04 that installs large package sets, runs post-install scripts, enables services, and pulls NVIDIA repositories. It's much closer to OS assembly than a typical app container.

I wasn't surprised that building these images natively on ARM would be faster than doing it from an x86 machine using emulation. That part was expected.

What surprised me was how much faster it was.

Seeing a Raspberry Pi 5 consistently outperform a 3-year-old high-end Intel laptop by almost 2x forced me to re-evaluate some assumptions I had about build performance, hardware specs, and what "powerful enough" actually means when you're building ARM software.

Last week, the open-source team at Spectro Cloud held a Hackweek. If you haven’t heard of the format, it’s basically a week where we don’t focus on the highest-priority tickets. Instead, we work on things we want to work on, whether it’s for fun, exploration, or finally giving some love to that neglected project in the corner. I find Hackweeks incredibly valuable. In fact, I’ve written about them before, once in 2020 and even earlier back in 2015. They spark ideas, rekindle curiosity, and sometimes result in something genuinely useful.