The state of homelab tech (2026) (Changelog & Friends #125)

43 snips

Jan 24, 2026

Techno Tim (YouTuber and homelab creator known for deep Proxmox, TrueNAS, and self-hosted AI dives) talks hardware scarcity and why 2026 is the Year of Self-Hosted Software. Short demos and tools pop up: unleashing Claude on a UDM Pro, Proxmox automation with PXM, and document OCR/RAG pipelines. He forecasts a return to one big homelab box and shares practical ZFS and networking trade-offs.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ADVICE

Feed Scans To Vision Models

Scan documents into Paperless-NGX and then feed them to vision-enabled LLMs for far better OCR accuracy.
Use Paperless-GPT or Paperless-AI plus Dockling/PaddleOCR to extract structured metadata and tables into Markdown.

ADVICE

Preserve Raw Scans For Reprocessing

Keep raw images as a bronze layer before transforming for RAG so you can reprocess as models improve.
Build a medallion ETL: raw images, cleaned/augmented silver, then gold production data or Markdown.

ANECDOTE

AI Fixed My VLAN Mess

Adam couldn't get DNS for a guest's Switch and blamed his new DNSHole project before finding the root cause was VLAN rules.
He used Claude via CLI/API to inspect and fix the UniFi VLAN rules, restoring connectivity in minutes.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Techno Tim joins Adam to dive deep into the state of homelab’ing in 2026. Hardware is scarce and expensive due to the AI gold rush, but software has never been better. From unleashing Claude on your UDM Pro to building custom Proxmox CLIs, they explores how AI is transforming what’s possible in the homelab. Tim declares 2026 the “Year of Self-Hosted Software” while Adam reveals his homelab’s secret weapons: DNSHole (a Pi-hole replacement written in Rust) and PXM (a Proxmox automation CLI).

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time.
Tiger Data – Postgres for Developers, devices, and agents The data platform trusted by hundreds of thousands from IoT to Web3 to AI and more.
Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.

Featuring:

Techno Tim – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

People

Techno Tim - Tim Stewart’s website, YouTube channel, and documentation hub
Crosstalk Solutions - Chris’s channel, mentioned for building custom Ubiquiti API tools

Virtualization & Infrastructure

Proxmox VE - Open-source virtualization platform for VMs and containers
TrueNAS - Enterprise-grade open-source storage operating system built on ZFS
HexOS - Consumer-friendly NAS OS built on TrueNAS (in development)
Proxmox VE Helper Scripts - Community-maintained scripts for easy LXC and VM deployment

Self-Hosted Software

Paperless-NGX - Self-hosted document management system with OCR
Paperless-GPT - AI-powered enhancement for Paperless-NGX using LLMs
Ollama - Run large language models locally on your own hardware
Open WebUI - Self-hosted web interface for interacting with local LLMs
Plex - Media server for organizing and streaming your personal media library
Home Assistant - Open-source home automation platform
Pi-hole - Network-wide ad blocking via DNS filtering

Document Intelligence & RAG

Dockling - IBM’s open-source document parsing library for AI/RAG pipelines
PaddleOCR - Multi-language OCR toolkit for document recognition

AI & Agents

Claude - Anthropic’s AI assistant, used for homelab automation in this episode
OpenCode - Open-source AI coding agent (mentioned as potential homelab tool)
Model Context Protocol (MCP) - Protocol for connecting AI models to external tools and data

Networking

Ubiquiti - Enterprise networking gear popular with homelabbers (UDM Pro, UniFi)
Tailscale - Zero-config VPN for secure networking between devices

Container & Orchestration

Docker - Container platform for packaging and running applications
Kubernetes - Container orchestration for managing containerized workloads
Fly.io - Platform for running containers close to users globally

Monitoring & Observability

Grafana - Open-source analytics and visualization platform
Prometheus - Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit

Security & Authentication

Bitwarden - Open-source password manager (self-hostable)
Authelia - Open-source authentication and authorization server

Databases

MariaDB - Community-developed fork of MySQL
Redis - In-memory data store for caching and messaging
PostgreSQL - Advanced open-source relational database

Hardware Mentioned

Intel Optane - Ultra-low latency storage drives (discontinued but prized for ZFS special vdevs)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 - GPU used for Plex transcoding and local AI inference

Concepts & Techniques

ZFS Special Vdevs - ZFS feature for accelerating metadata and small file operations
PCIe Bifurcation - Splitting a PCIe slot to support multiple NVMe drives
Medallion Architecture - Bronze/Silver/Gold data lake pattern discussed for document ETL

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!