About

Homelab Notes is a working notebook about one Mac mini.

It runs local language models, hosts a Discord bot around the clock, generates subtitles and narration, and publishes this blog. Everything here comes from that machine.

What you will find

  • Local LLMs on Apple Silicon. Which model sizes fit in which memory, what the running context length actually is, and what breaks when you run a model alongside other work
  • Keeping things running 24/7. Autostart, supervision, and the failure that supervisors miss — a process that is alive but has stopped working
  • Audio and video on your own machine. Subtitles, voice cloning, narration, and what the output really sounds like
  • The parts that went wrong. Silent process kills, a watchdog that broke before the thing it was watching, a counterfeit SSD

How the numbers are produced

Every time and size in these posts was measured on the same machine and pasted in from the terminal.

When something was not measured, the post says so. When a result was worse than expected, that is the result you get. A post that says a tool was slow or not worth installing is a post about a tool we stopped using.

Who it is for

People running a small machine at home and wanting it to do real work. You do not need to be a developer, but you should be willing to open a terminal.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, leave a comment on that post. Corrections get folded into the article rather than buried in a thread.

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