Many Changes in the Past few months…##
Welcome back to the cafe! Any good barista knows that a perfect cup of coffee isn’t just about the beans—it’s about the tools. The grinder, the espresso machine, the tamper—every piece of equipment plays a role in creating a smooth, efficient, and delightful experience.
Behind the counter of this digital coffee shop, I’ve been busy upgrading my toolkit. It’s time for a little “shop talk” to show you what’s been brewing under the hood. From improving the daily grind to adding brand-new services, here are the new tools I’ve added to the workbench.
A Sleeker Grind for PDFs
My first stop was the digital document grinder. For a long time, StirlingPDF was my go-to workhorse for handling PDF files—it’s powerful and incredibly versatile. However, the project recently moved to a commercial model, and in the world of self-hosting, the best-tasting coffee is the one you don’t have to pay a subscription for.
This sent me on a search for a new grinder, and I landed on Bento. Honestly, the switch feels like a complete upgrade. Bento offers a stunningly clean UI and consolidates a huge number of file-handling tools into one beautiful, fast, and joyful interface. It’s a perfect example of how a change forced by necessity can lead to an even better discovery.
Brewing Our Own Mail
From streamlining daily tasks, I moved on to a much bigger project: taking full control of my digital correspondence. I’ve finally stopped relying on third-party providers and am now brewing my own email in-house for hobokenchicken.com using Mailcow. This powerful, all-in-one mail server suite is running in its own virtual machine on my trusty Dell R720xd homelab server. It’s like roasting my own beans—more work, but the final product is tailored exactly to my tastes with complete control and privacy.
A Better Filter for a Cleaner Brew
This theme of control and privacy extends to the very foundation of my network. You can’t make good coffee with bad water, and for years, Pi-hole has been my network’s water filter. Recently, however, I swapped it out for AdGuard Home. The upgrade gives me a more modern interface, built-in support for DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), and easier per-client filtering. It’s the same great-tasting, ad-free internet, just with a more advanced filtration system.
Keeping the Delivery Fleet Tuned Up
While most of these tools keep the digital side of things running, some projects are for the physical world. To better maintain my cars, I’ve spun up an instance of LubeLogger. This self-hosted service is fantastic for logging oil changes, tire rotations, and every other bit of vehicle upkeep. No more forgetting when I last checked the tire pressure—it’s all logged and ready.
A New Flavor of AI Espresso
Back on the digital counter, my local AI setup, powered by Open-WebUI, is like a high-tech espresso machine. To expand its capabilities, I’ve just integrated Google’s Gemini family of models. Having access to Gemini is like adding a new single-origin bean to experiment with. It offers a different “flavor” of response and excels at different tasks, making my AI toolkit that much more versatile.
The New Digital Recipe Book
With all this new information being discovered and generated, keeping track of it became the next challenge. My browser bookmarks were getting out of control, so I’ve implemented KaraKeep, a clean, self-hosted bookmark manager. It’s a simple, tag-based system that acts as my new digital recipe book, keeping all my best finds neatly organized.
The Mission Control for the Cafe
Of course, what’s the point of having all these wonderful machines if you can’t manage them effectively? With over 50 Docker containers now running across 3 different hosts, I needed a better command center. That’s where Portainer comes in. This container management UI has become my mission control, giving me a bird’s-eye view of everything. It lets me deploy, manage, and troubleshoot from a clean web interface, ensuring all the other tools run smoothly.
So there you have it—a peek at the new and improved setup behind the scenes. These tools are all about improving efficiency, security, and capability. After all, a happy barista with great tools makes for a better coffee shop for everyone.
Stay tuned to see what we brew up next.