A Jog, a Homelab, and the Cost of ‘Doing It Yourself’

Another day, another jog, another chance to talk out loud to myself. It’s Monday, December 8th, 2025. I haven’t listened to my audiobooks or the SANS podcast yet, but life moves forward, so I’m moving forward with this goal of just talking through what I’m working on.

Homelab Reality Check

Lately I’ve been fooling around with my home server and Homelab setup. One thing I’ve realized: Homelabs are the biggest oxymoron when you’re trying to “save money.” It’s exactly like camping—you can do it for cheap, but once you scale up, it’s absolutely not cheap anymore.

My Unraid server has multiple hard drives, and they fail randomly. Redundancy becomes a whole topic by itself. Before COVID, you could grab used 10TB drives for ~$80–100, which felt like a steal. Five drives, one parity? Boom—40 TB usable storage for ~$350.

But in reality, once you start actually hosting things locally, you realize you need:

multiple drives
parity
cache drives
backup strategies
and constant troubleshooting

Today’s issue: my cache drive stopped reading. I had just replaced the PSU with a Corsair unit and ran a parity check. Overnight one SSD just decided to quit. VMs broke, Docker broke, the whole thing went sideways.

The SSD is officially dead. Now I’m debating:

Do I buy a new Samsung 1TB for ~$109?
A cheaper brand for ~$50–80?
Reuse a failing 240GB SSD just to limp by?

It’s the endless Homelab question: fix it properly or patch it for now?

Audiobooks, Habits, and Time

It’s been weeks—maybe months—since I’ve opened Audible. When I lived in NYC, I listened constantly because I had an hour-to-90-minute commute on the R train.
At 2x or 3x speed, I could get through 1–3 audiobooks a week.

Now? With working from home and only driving the kids to school, finding listening time is tough.

My plan:

Cut down music during workouts
Turn on audiobooks when driving
Mix in Udemy and training materials
Follow Atomic Habits: make good habits easier by putting them “in reach”

It’s not impossible; I just need to build a new routine around my current life.

Upcoming Events & Goals

A few other things on my radar:

Anime Convention

It’s been almost 10 years since I last went to one. My kids want to go, so that’s going to be fun — a full throwback moment.

Fitness

I need to get back on track. I’ve been jogging again but want to rebuild consistency.

GitHub Actions on Raspberry Pi

This is my “because I can” project.
I run a lot of security scanning tools for work, and having many self-hosted runners speeds everything up.

Raspberry Pis:

aren’t power efficient
aren’t super powerful
but they’re tiny, quiet compute units I can scatter everywhere

They’re perfect for automating repetitive workloads. Combine that with faster building through AI tools and I can really speed up my workflows.

Short-Term Roadmap

Decide whether to buy the new SSD
Tighten up my Unraid setup again
Restart my audiobook habit
Prep for the anime convention
Deploy GitHub Action runners across a few Raspberry Pis
Keep working out consistently

A lot going on, but doable. The real goal: stop locking up mentally and figure out how to keep moving while I’m doing more.