Uses

The stack behind the site, the lab, and the rest of it. A colophon, not a recommendation — these are the things I actually run, kept short and current.

This site

Astro, static output, content collections in TypeScript — every page compiles to flat files.
Cloudflare Pages for hosting: push to main, it builds and deploys, nothing to babysit.
Cloudflare for DNS, DNSSEC, and TLS; Namecheap stays the registrar.
Google Workspace for mail, with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC doing the anti-spoofing.
sharp image pipeline to webp; Fraunces and Inter, self-hosted.
Source is public at github.com/kerbe42/jlwhite-ca.

The longer story — the DNS move, the email fix, the security posture — is in building jlwhite.ca.

The lab

A four-node Proxmox cluster doing the job a rack of appliances used to.
pfSense as an active/passive HA pair, fronting a dual-WAN edge (fibre + Starlink).
Redundant Pi-hole for DNS; UniFi for wireless.
Wazuh, Zabbix, and Graylog for monitoring and home-scale detection.
Ansible and n8n for automation — including an LLM ops agent on a short leash.

Breaking things

Kali Linux as the working box; nmap, gobuster, and curl for the basics.
Hashcat for password work — on the host GPU, not inside a VM (a lesson learned).
An intercepting proxy and the browser dev tools when a web target needs a closer look.
TryHackMe for hands-on practice; the writeups are what comes out of it.

Making

A shelf of FDM and resin printers turning out parts, jigs, and the occasional sea creature.
A Raspberry Pi 5 + Hailo-8 for edge inference; PlutoSDR and LibreSDR for RF.
ESP32 and Pico W microcontrollers publishing sensor data over MQTT.

The bench is written up in edge-AI and RF; the prints in the print farm.

Growing

Vertical hydroponic tower gardens under LED bars in a grow tent.
pH / EC / water-level sensing, watched by the homebuilt PicoPH monitor.

The garden is over in greens, tower to table.