Welcome to ScaleAtHome

I’ve always wanted to live in the future

I got my first taste of that future booting up SimCity on an old DOS PC in our childhood basement. “What do you mean I can build a whole city? This is magic!”

Over the years that magic slips away bit by bit into the routine. Every so often we get a jolt. In early 2026, I opened my first Claude Code session and found myself disoriented. It certainly feels like we’re exploring fresh territory with a whole set of magical new tools.

But a new normal creates new challenges: subscriptions stacking up, data living on someone else’s servers, and the nagging feeling that I was renting my own productivity. I wanted local control. I wanted privacy. And honestly? Building this stuff yourself is just fun and interesting in a way that clicking “subscribe” never will be.

“We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” — Douglas Adams

That quote nails it. These new tools pushed me toward a simple conclusion: we’re on a new track toward updated personal computing, and I want to own as much of it as I can. Local AI, local infrastructure, local data.

This site documents that journey and shares the hard lessons learned along the way.

The site

Not a review site. I’m not scoring products out of 10 or ranking the “7 best mini-PCs of 2026.” What I do is document my experience with the gear and software I actually run — what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d do differently.

Think of it as field notes from someone building and maintaining local infrastructure every day:

• DIY Data Collection - Weather, around the home, personal data to power life
• Refurbished hardware — enterprise gear at consumer prices.
• Local AI hardware — mini-PCs and GPUs for running LLMs locally with Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio.
• Storage — DIY builds with real-world reliability data.
• Networking — Tailscale and the other infrastructure that ties a homelab together.
• Self-hosted software — Linux, Docker, monitoring stacks, and the tools that replace cloud SaaS.
• Developer & AI tooling — coding against local infrastructure and running AI agents on your own hardware.

The bias

I have one, and I’m upfront about it: value-tier, refurbished, and self-hosted over mainstream cloud. If a $200 refurb OptiPlex does 80% of what a $600 new mini-PC does for your use case, I’ll tell you that.

The gear

Here’s a taste — one of the refurb SFF desktops that powers the setup:

The future

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