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loweffortlabs: a journey

Ive always had a knack for hacking things together when I really wanted a thing to do something. But staying motivated to learn something new for the sake of learning has been tough for me, so let me introduce this project, loweffortlabs.




The written goal here is to make money. Not even kidding, thats at the top of the list. But the implied goal is tricking myself to stay motivated and learn, and the consequences of that means I'll make some cool (and hopefully useful) stuff along the way.




One half cludge plus one half overengineer, automate as much as I can, purposefully get lost on technical tangents, flesh out stupid ideas, implement things poorly and watch them catch on fire, and then learn why and build version n+1 better.




The current blueprint involves a handful of both hardware and software. I'll have to gather up more specifics later:




physical hardware:

  • main desktop (windows 10):
    • used for most of the programming (and stuff like gaming, netflix, etc)


  • laptop (windows 11):

    • used for some programming, and making sure I can replicate my dev environment (github, scripts, heroku-cli, etc)


  • current homelab, my old desktop (windows 10):

    • sitting in the corner of my office, currently acting as my homelab. it has jellyfin and the *arr suite among other things, and has some services exposed via reverse proxy (caddy).

    • it has a public vpn (Cyberghost) as well as a private vpn (tailscale). I typically only remote into it locally using windows remote dekstop connection


  • future site of the homelab, Dell R730xd server

    • talk about a new side project. the goal is to have proxmox hyperviser, truenas nas, debian docker, and a bunch of random vms for testing and other stuff.

    • its quite loud so i'll have to figure out where to put it in the near future. currently its sitting on the floor in my loft, and Ive been having all sorts of trouble just getting started and installing proxmox (tried both ventoy and unetbootin). that'll be a post for a different day hah




virtual:

  • this site

    • flask, waitress, hosted in heroku with a postgres db




the todo list:

its a mess. it represents a glimpse into the current "ooh shiny", added to the survivors of the todo lists of the past. if I owned a magic wand I would have the time and motivation to methodically work through each and every item, but thats not how this works. thats not how any of this works.


  • learn + build website log in functionality
  • google adsense
  • ecommerce, one time and recurring payments
  • chatgpt integration projects
  • homelab
    • put rest of HDDs in
    • install proxmox, truenas, debian, docker
    • start learning ansible/terraform

...