C1‑LAB · field notes

Everything here was measured on running hardware.

A small Proxmox estate, a second-hand desktop with a 6GB GPU, and a set of agents doing real jobs every day. No theory, and no benchmarks in a vacuum — the numbers, the failures, and the settings that actually fixed them.

39,662DNS lookups silently dropped by one default rate limit, with nothing in any log
9,133emails a bot marked as read in one pass, by fetching them the wrong way
~4,400scheduled runs that reported success while doing precisely nothing
£1.39a month to run every agent on the estate, measured rather than estimated

Start here

The Homelab Box

Everything, in one download, for less than half of buying it separately — all three guides and both cheat sheets. What running agents actually cost, why jobs stop without telling you, and what changed in the Spotify API.

£29 Get the box →

Guides

Six-page PDFs, A4. Written to be followed, not admired — plain English, every term explained the first time it appears.

Jobs That Actually Run

A job that fails loudly is an annoyance. A job that stops running is invisible. Four ways one dies while the logs still look fine — and how to verify by effect instead.

£18 Read more →

The Spotify API, After the Break

February 2026 renamed and removed parts of the Web API, which is why almost every tutorial you will find is now wrong. What moved, what vanished, and how to read the errors it returns instead.

£18 Read more →

Cheat sheets

Two pages of A4. The reference card version of the guide above it — for pinning up, not reading through.

Jobs That Actually Run — cheat sheet

The four silent failures, what to check for each, and how to verify a job by its effect rather than its logs.

£4 Read more →

Spotify API — cheat sheet

Every rename side by side with what you were taught, and how to read 403, 404 and 429 correctly when the path is the real problem.

£4 Read more →

Pay what you want — including nothing

Field notes and packaged copies of work that is open source anyway. Take them for free; pay if they saved you an evening.

Fail Loudly

Five trading bots that reported every action as a success while doing almost nothing — and what rebuilding them taught me.

Name your price →

Security First, Honestly

One identity provider in front of a whole self-hosted estate: what worked, what broke, and the zero-cost mistake that undid most of it.

Name your price →

One Home Per Secret

Moving scattered credentials into one self-hosted secrets manager — the one-home principle, and scoped machine identities.

Name your price →

ZimaBlade GPU Guide

Fitting a GPU to a ZimaBlade: the slot's undocumented limits, the driver trap, and how to diagnose it when the card crash-loops.

Name your price →

ZimaBlade Server Recipes

Nine files on running a ZimaBlade like a server rather than an appliance — including backups that include your certificates.

Name your price →

Get the next one

New field notes, when there are some

Only when something has actually been measured and written up. No schedule, no newsletter cadence, and nothing forwarded from anybody else.

Thank you — you are on the list.

C1‑LAB About & refunds Code on GitHub Bought something that did not help? Say so and you get your money back.