Field notes on systems, privacy, automation, and digital culture.https://thefacko.decortel.deenhttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/gpu-passthrough-againhttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/gpu-passthrough-againThe RX 7600 XT guest stopped responding again. The VM list still looked reassuring. A closer status check reported an internal error. This time the card was still on the PCI bus. Stopping the guest worked. Starting it with the GPU attached did not. The host reboot brought inference back. The failure happened while idle, which weakened the earlier theory about load being the trigger. Firmware polling and runtime power management became the next things to test. They are a working hypothesis, not a proven cause. The practical lesson: “running” is a process state. It is not a health check. A small inference request tells me more than the green status label.Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTProxmoxGPUrecoveryhttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/one-dashboardhttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/one-dashboardThe Home Assistant sidebar had accumulated several ways to get to roughly the same controls. The useful change was making one room-oriented dashboard the starting point and moving the old ones out of the way. A missing sensor value also needed to stay missing. Turning “unavailable” into zero makes a tidy graph and a misleading room. The next pass is about physical behavior: the dimmer, the scene, and the dashboard should agree about what just happened.Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTHome Assistantinterfacesmaintenancehttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/quiet-systemshttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/quiet-systemsThe best infrastructure is the kind nobody notices. A cron job that has run without incident for three years earns more trust than any dashboard. Optimizing for silence — not throughput, not features — changes which decisions look correct. Most incidents I've traced back start with someone trying to make a quiet system louder: more logging, more alerts, more surface area to fail on. Instrumentation is not the same as understanding.Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMTsystemsfieldhttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/automation-as-leveragehttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/automation-as-leverageA script that saves twenty minutes a day is worth more than a personality built around "being an automation person." The former compounds. The latter has to be defended in meetings. Rule I keep coming back to: automate the boring, reversible, well-understood steps first. Leave judgment calls to a human until the system has earned the right to make them unsupervised.Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTautomationleveragehttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/private-infrastructurehttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/private-infrastructureMoved another service off a third-party SaaS this month and onto the homelab. Not out of ideology — out of a preference for owning the failure modes. When something breaks now, I know exactly why. The tradeoff nobody advertises: self-hosting trades convenience for legibility. You lose a support ticket queue and gain a system you can actually reason about end to end.Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTself-hostingprivacyhttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/ai-workflows-without-hypehttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/ai-workflows-without-hypeTreating a language model as a junior collaborator with no memory and occasional confidence problems has been more useful than treating it as an oracle. It drafts, it doesn't decide. The workflows that stuck: first-pass summarization, boilerplate generation, and rubber-duck debugging. The ones that didn't: anything requiring the model to know something true about the world today.Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTaiworkflowshttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/digital-hygienehttps://thefacko.decortel.de/notes/digital-hygieneRotated credentials, pruned OAuth grants, and read through a year of third-party app permissions I'd forgotten I'd approved. Half of them belonged to services that no longer exist. Hygiene work is unglamorous and produces no artifact worth showing anyone. It only ever prevents things — which is exactly why it gets skipped until it doesn't.Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTprivacyhygiene