Hello World

This is awkward. I’m starting a tech blog, but I’ve never actually written a blog post before. Unless you count that LinkedIn rant about Burger King’s Pfand system where none of the staff knew they were supposed to take back reusable cups because apparently everyone just uses paper cups - which, let’s be honest, was peak content and deserved more engagement.

So here we are. My first real post. Ever.

Why Am I Doing This?

Good question. I spend way too much time tinkering with selfhosted services, Docker containers, and automation setups. Currently running way too many containers across various services - I stopped counting after #47, but my electricity bill hasn’t. Honestly, most of this happens in isolation - me, a Dockge interface, and an increasingly complex TrueNAS setup that probably uses more electricity than it should.

I figured: why not document this chaos? Maybe someone else is on the same journey. Maybe not. Either way, at least I’ll have a record of all the times I broke my setup and somehow fixed it at 2 AM.

The “Console Quest” Name

Yeah, it’s a bit dramatic. But it captures what this actually is - an ongoing quest. Not towards some perfect endpoint, but the journey itself. The tinkering, the next interesting project, the “I wonder if…” that leads to VLANs you didn’t plan to have.

It’s the quest that’s the point, not the destination.

Plus, “My Dozens of Containers Homelab Adventures” was too long for a domain name.

Why English?

But Juri you ask, you are german, why do you write in English, did you feel fancy today? Actually, there is more than one reason for this. First and foremost, my brain thinks in english at the moment it comes to tech. 90% of what I read, watch or hear regarding tech is in english. Be it official documentation, Hardware Haven or Two and a Half Admins. Second, I want to hone my english skills. Reading is good, but actually putting out something will hopefully do me some good in that regard. Last but not least, if I actually want to have a glimpse of hope at least someone is reading this, I better write it in some kind of “universal language”. And like it or not, that has to be english.

But you’re using AI, right?

Yeah, of course I am. I also use autocorrect. And a computer. I’m not gonna write my posts by hand, like a caveman. But while you’re asking: I write my posts myself, but heavily use AI to correct, structure and overall iterate over the posts. I also use it for research and for analysis.

What This Blog Will Be

Honestly? Documentation of my ongoing homelab journey:

Infrastructure Deep Dives: How I actually set things up → The choices, trade-offs, and why it works (or doesn’t)

Home Automation Reality: Automations that save money and ones that… exist → Home Assistant’s messy truth

Half-Finished Projects: Network segmentation plans, storage migrations, the things I started → Progress updates and lessons learned

“This Broke at 2 AM” Stories: Real troubleshooting → What went wrong and how I fixed it

The Ambitious Ideas: Logging, monitoring, security → Projects that sound enterprise but it’s just my basement

No promises on posting schedule. Things will get documented when they’re ready - or when they break badly enough that I need to write it down.

Why Publii (And Not Ghost)?

Speaking of services - this blog is powered by Publii, which is ironic since I literally have Ghost running in my homelab. But after spending my nights managing containers and configs, sometimes you just want a desktop app that generates static files and doesn’t require a database.

Don’t judge me! Doing it this way dramatically increases the likelihood of this staying up.

Current Setup

Since we’re talking infrastructure, here’s what’s currently running this whole operation:

Blog Platform: Publii static generator → Desktop app, no database drama

Hosting: GitHub Pages → Free, reliable, plays nice with custom domains

Domain: consolequest.net → Because “MyContainersAreMultiplying.com” was taken

Theme: Mono → Clean, fast, doesn’t get in the way of the content

Homelab: TrueNAS Scale + Dockge → Where the real magic (and chaos) happens

What’s Next

I’m planning to document my current stack - hardware, network, the services that work, the projects I started and abandoned. Maybe explain why certain choices made sense (like Dockge over Portainer). Probably write about the things that broke and how I fixed them.

We’ll see how long this lasts. My track record with “I’ll definitely document this properly” projects is a mixed bag.

But hey, at least I finally started.

Since I have literally zero readers right now, I’ll just say: if you somehow found this, hello! What’s running in your homelab? I’d love to hear about your own console quest adventures.