Guides on building things, step by step. With optional AI assistance.
Plex raised prices and put remote streaming of your own server behind its paywall, so here is the honest replacement: Jellyfin in a Proxmox LXC on the backbone you already built. It serves the media you already have, not your streaming subscriptions, and this guide is upfront about exactly that: where a legal library actually comes from, why direct play beats transcoding until the moment it doesn't, what a media library on another box costs you in bandwidth and latency, and the GPU-passthrough path you only take if you opt in. No *arr, no piracy tooling.
One old PC, one hypervisor, and a backbone you build once: Proxmox plus host-only Tailscale, a local CA, and deduplicating backups, then pick your services. The narrative is the plan-vs-reality friction every other tutorial skips: the 401 wall that locks you out of a fresh install, the wizard toggle that silently leaves Gitea's SSH dead, the backup-token error that lies about why it fails, the restored container that fights the original for its IP, and the one HTTPS header on one service that quietly breaks a sibling on a shared tailnet name.
The official "netboot.xyz on Merlin" path hands you stale curl-ed binaries and a routine update detonates three independent, mutually-aliasing faults at once. This is the build that routes around all three: a self-built iPXE that trusts the live rolling menu with no private key, the snponly-for-UEFI requirement nobody documents, and an atomic router deploy you can roll back.
Most MCP guides assume a server running locally over stdio. This is the remote version: arxiv, Scrapling, and SearXNG hosted on a hardened Tailscale VPS, reachable from any client machine, with the transport, binding, and verification choices that local guides never have to make.
Take a fresh Debian 13 VPS to a Tailscale-only base box you can drop any container workload onto. Zero public ports, hardened sysctl, UFW done right, Docker installed safely, and an Ansible playbook so the next box is one command away.
How to stand up a small private e-signature service on a $7/month VPS that rivals DocuSign in principle, with Cloudflare Tunnel, encrypted backups, and zero open ports.
Funnel, curate, and distribute news automatically — with optional AI augmentation.
Going from nothing to an uploaded TikTok video clip, step by step with AI assistance.
How I added text-to-speech audio to the SSD Basics guide, from preprocessing to integration.