About

Mike Barta, NM8K

Six screens, too many keyboards, multiple ham radios, and not a single window. The HTs, Meshtastic nodes, and Raspberry Pis didn’t even make it into the shot. Welcome to the office.

Windows 11 told me my hardware was obsolete. I’d tried Linux a couple times over the years and bounced off it, but that was a decade ago. Turns out it’s come a long way — and so have I. Things kind of spiraled from there.

I’m not an expert — I’m a tinkerer with decades of programming experience who’s been into home automation and networking for years. I’d been dabbling with AI on the side, and a job change gave me the excuse to go deeper. Somewhere along the way, an old laptop became a server, and now there’s a small fleet of machines in my windowless basement doing things I never planned.

This site is the journal I wish I’d had when I started.

I write about: making old hardware useful again, running AI locally instead of paying cloud bills, automating my house with AI that won’t burn it down, and building dashboards to track the mess I’ve created.

Every Thursday I send a dispatch from the windowless basement. It’s free.

If something here saved you time or made you laugh, you can buy me a coffee.