Taming a PoE switch with Home Assistant: a debugging story
Every PoE port on my switch powers on by default. Making Home Assistant switch them off over SNMP took five bugs, and the last one was a data-model mistake, not a syntax error.
Notes on embedded Linux, audio hardware, and the homelab.
Hi, I’m James. I write embedded Linux software for audio hardware: kernel drivers, board bring-up, and the build systems that hold it all together. This is where I keep notes on that work, plus the homelab I run at home. This page is mostly an AI generated experiment to create a homepage based on previous projects.
Latest posts
A small VPS for a few static sites
Caddy, nftables, and Cloudflare in front of a handful of static sites on a 2 GB VPS, with Hugo builds deployed from GitHub Actions through a deploy key that can only write one directory.
Local AI inference on hardware I already had, and then a bit more
Running local LLMs and a RAG stack in a Proxmox VM: starting on a 6 GB GTX 1660 Ti, moving to a passed-through GTX 1060, and finally upgrading to an RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, plus what changed at each step.
Renaming a media library from Plex's own database
Plex already knows what every file is. A small Python script reads that knowledge straight out of its SQLite database and renames files to match, without fighting Plex while it runs.
Chasing coil whine into the CPU idle states
An old gaming laptop running Proxmox as an always-on server ticked like a broken clock. The cause was the CPU’s deepest idle states, the fix was in cpuidle, and the price was 10 to 15 W.