Blinkylights Blog

  • Why I left Medium for a WordPress I actually control

    Owning the pipeline, the CSS, and the database turned out to matter more than the editor. This site now runs on WordPress at the root of blinkylights.com, with the theme managed as code and a Let’s Encrypt certificate that renews itself. The short version: I wanted control. Fonts, layout, redirects, backups, and the freedom to…

    read more →

  • Running Ollama on a $40 Radeon

    The RX 580 is ancient by GPU standards, but with the Vulkan backend it does genuinely useful local inference. The gist of getting a model running: Tokens per second will not win any benchmarks, but for a card that costs less than a nice dinner, it is hard to complain. Use ollama ps to watch…

    read more →

  • A Raspberry Pi status board for the rack

    Actual blinkenlights: a small panel driven by a Raspberry Pi that shows what is up and what is not. Green is good, amber is thinking about it, dark is asleep. It reads from the same Prometheus the rest of the homelab uses, so the lights never disagree with the dashboards.

    read more →