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Notes from the home lab

Home-lab infrastructure, AI-driven automation, and full-stack projects — what I'm building, what broke, and what I learned fixing it.

What hemiplegic migraines mean to me

I was diagnosed with hemiplegic migraines in 2012. This is the story I finally sat down and recorded — the stroke-like attacks, a head injury at sixteen, and the fourteen years it took me to find my single biggest trigger hiding in plain sight: Red 40.

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I needed an SSH refresher, so I built a sandbox

Four fake computers in a browser tab — practice real ssh, ssh-keygen, scp and ~/.ssh/config without touching a real machine. Plus the copy-paste setup guide I kept re-Googling.

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Seed to jar, in three minutes

Four months of my first grow — germination to cured jars — compressed into a three-minute timelapse, stitched from the tent camera that watched the whole thing.

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A dashboard for my first grow

My first time growing a plant, so — naturally — I built it a self-hosted Raspberry Pi dashboard: sensors, VPD, a daily journal with AI photo analysis. The Pi's coming down, so I froze the whole thing into a browsable demo.

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My go-to prompt starter: Rewrite for Clarity

How I use Prompt Composer's Eval "Rewrite for clarity" mode to turn a messy, typed-as-I-think prompt into a clean structured frame — before/after screenshots and the one rule I never skip.

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Prompt Composer: a sneak walk-through

An early two-minute screen recording of the Prompt Composer — building a structured prompt from blank frame to finished, copyable output.

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Why prompt composing is the skill that actually moves the needle

The model is rarely your bottleneck — your prompt is. Why composing prompts as reproducible artifacts, not throwaway chats, is the skill that scales your work.

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AI is an engine. You drive the car.

A year of sloppy prompts taught me the model is rarely the problem — the framing is. What changed, and the composer it turned into.

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