HomeLab1

Here I am, writing a story in neovim. I’m working with a fresh install of KDE Neon, Linux. Everything is set to default, including Neovim. I do have Zsh and Kitty installed. I always install them along with Linux. So, I’m using Neovim, running in Zsh, running in Kitty, to write this story.

I’m working on building my HomeLab. A HomeLab is a set of computers that you set up in your home office to do whatever work you want to do in your home office. It is really good practice, for getting any kind of job in computer science or artificial intelligence.

It’s all about learning. I’m an old, slow learner. I expect my audience to investigate this technology and get a lot smarter than I am fairly quickly. I’ve been working on this for years and I’m still trying to figure out how to do it and make it a lot easier for you to do it.

Your Computer

I’m starting with this desktop. You can do the same thing. Get a desktop with as much Ram as possible and a reasonably fast CPU. I always get at least an Intel I7. This one has an Intel i7-10700F (16 cores) @ 4.800Ghz CPU and an NVIDEA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER GPU. I’m reading all this information off of Neofetch, which is a plugin I installed on Zsh that lists a lot of information about my computer whenever I open Zsh. I’m running KDE neon 5.27 x86_64 on the 6.5.0-14-generic Linux kernel.

Think about what you want to do with your homelab. I want to write stories, in books and websites. I like making documentaries using my Samsung S22 Ultra smart phone camera and Kdenlive.

You can do whatever you want to do. You can be a content creator or you can set your HomeLab up to develop code for developing all kinds of computer science and artificial intelligence.

NeoVim

Writing this story using Neovim is helping me develop muscle memory of using the vim keyboard. Be patient, you don’t have to learn everything all at once. Get started and learn how to do things a little by little.

Get in the habit of documenting all of your work. Write a log, describing how to do the work you do every day. Writing your log will help you learn how to do things. Recalling information from your short-term memory gets the memory installed, from your short-term memory, into your long-term memory. Information becomes knowledge. And you can refer back to your logs to refresh your memory whenever you need to.

Managing Files

I uploaded a few pictures of my home office from my smart phone to Microsoft OneDrive. I downloaded them onto my desktop computer and moved them into a directory for this story, using KDE’s Dolphin file manager.

Then, I use Gimp to scale images, so they will fit in the WordPress media library. I’ll save this story I’m writing into the directory with the pictures and move the directory from the pictures directory to my blog posts directory.

Keeping your files well organized is important. Take your time. Develop a system that works well for you. I have a directory for this website. I have a web pages directory and a blog posts directory. I put all the stories, photos and videos in the directory for that page or post.

Your Website

I’m writing a first draft of this story in Neovim. I’ll edit and polish the story in WordPress’ Gutenberg editor. Writing and website development is what I do in my HomeLab. I’m just getting started building my Lab. It is a long, slow process. I don’t have a ton of money to work with and I’m learning how to do it as I go.

WordPress is a great way to learn how to develop websites. It will teach you how to do web development. I use Bluehost to host my website and WordPress, with Kadence theme. I like the content management system because it does almost all of the HTML and CSS automatically and it enables me to rearrange my stories as I develop the content on my website.

Git Repository

Work on getting your GitHub or GitLab account set up, so you can have all your configuration files located in the same place and accessible from any computer.

You’ll be able to keep all of your computers up-to-date by updating the config files in your git repository, where ever you have it hosted. And, whenever you add another computer to your HomeLab, all you have to do to configure it is connect it with your git repository.

Akamai

I’ve been thinking about figuring out how much I can do with Akamai and Linode and how much will it cost. I’ve been trying to figure out if I can use Akamai for hosting a git repository. So far, my research is inconclusive. I’m pretty skeptical, because, if it was practical there would be a lot of videos and tutorials about how to do it. It may be too expensive. You can setup a GitHub account for free. The bad news is, Microsoft recently bought GitHub, so who knows what they are going to do with it.

I found a really good video from the YouTube channel, IT Career Questions, about setting up your HomeLab. It’s a few years old, but very well done. Have fun building your own channel of entertaining education. I use free and open source software every chance I get, but you don’t have to do that. Apple and Microsoft and Google are all into selling HomeLab technology.

Build your own private, free and open-source HomeLab to break free from the culture of dependence that our schools are teaching, big businesses are selling and big government is enforcing. Express your creativity. Create something no one else ever thought of.

Explore the world, on and off-line. Just think about how the global cloud of artificial intelligence is influencing the evolution of human consciousness. Imagine how it will do that for the rest of your life, or for hundreds, or thousands of years.

Oh, and make sure to mention that I’ve done all this studying, learning and gathering resources to put the system I have together, while working at a job, usually unrelated to my website. So, get a job. Show up on time and do a good job. Slowly get yourself an apartment and some decent equipment and start creating content and building your HomeLab.

Make sure you are adding value to the world economy. Make sure everyone you trade with gets a good deal. If you are profiting at the expense of anyone else, then that is corruption, not business.

Respect the earth. Do not worship nature, respect it. Do not harm anyone. Help everyone you interact with. Make sure everyone you trade with gets a good deal. And have fun doing it.