From How-to

How to Skip All Claude Code Permission Prompts

In a more closely controlled environment with less risk, say, in a home lab of an enthusiast, the risk of Claude Code accidentally wiping the drive or destroying another repo is minimal. Not that it cannot happen, but a reasonable amount of backup or git versioning practice could mitigate most of the risks from accidental or non-malicious actions. In such a scenario, Claude asking for permissions only slows down making your idea come true.

How to Remedy SERVFAIL during Caddy + DuckDNS Certificate Challenge

Caddy is a tool I use for home lab HTTPS management. However, the tool is not bulletproof. It’s not a simple GUI tool to add services and forget. One such problem Caddy can introduce with HTTPS is during the challenge to obtain a certificate. Because the certificate has to be renewed periodically, even if it succeeded at one point, it may fail or give out an error tomorrow.

How to Band-aid Fix Seerr “Movie Not Found” Error

My Seerr started acting up after the migration. In the web UI, it threw “Movie Not Found” errors — not on everything, but, evidently, only on some of the movies in the library and some of the entries in trending. Both LAN and WAN were working fine. The errors weren’t persistent. They came and went, and the number of films affected kept changing.

How to Disable Auto-Lock in Pythonista

Pythonista, coupled with LLM for vibe coding, is a great way to play around with making your apps come true quickly. No need to pay for a developer account or register it. However, being an iOS Python IDE, there are limitations on what it can mimic. One such limitation was disabling Auto-Lock while a script is running. I’d asked LLMs to fix it more than once, only to crash Pythonista every time.

How to Stop All Docker Containers with Single Command

In a home lab environment, the server is bound to go through more changes than conservatively-run enterprise counterparts. It is, after all, part of the experience. And one core difference in approach between the two environments is downtime. In the corporate world, server downtime is lost revenue. In the home lab world, well-architected downtime is yet another small project finished.

How to Migrate Docker Containers from Synology

Synology DSM has been shipped with a Docker Engine for a while, but it failed to keep up with the latest version of Docker Engine, let alone stay within the EOL life cycle. DSM was given an updated 24.0.2 of Docker Engine in February 2025, the version already declared EOL in June 2024. At the time, the latest version of Docker Engine available was 27.5, at least 3 major versions past what Synology offered. In short, running multiple Docker containers as part of a home lab on the DSM platform is unreliable.

How to Scan Local Network for Reserved IP

While routers are becoming ‘smarter’ day by day, some of the rather basic features are pushed back to the “Professional” department. One such feature is LAN management, specifically, static IP reservation. Single-source-of-truth dictates one authority for IP assignment — routers could be that authority. However, practically speaking, none of the consumer-level routers I’ve encountered have managed to ship a proper static IP management. Hence per-device static IP.

How to Change Apple ID Region

Region-changing on old systems has become something of a quiet craze — remote work and streaming have made it a growing necessity that cannot be ignored anymore. Apple was relatively late to the game; as far as I know, the region-change program didn’t gain real traction until 2020. Now in 2026, the documentation is conflicting, even from Apple itself, on where the program actually stands.

How to Upgrade NVMe on Unsupported Synology NAS

Synology is known for making reliable HDD network storage, not NVMe. The few articles I found often recommended building your own NAS for NVMe, given the general reliability of SSD and price to performance ratio. While I agree on the principle, for those of us who already own a Synology branded NAS, there is no reason to avoid using M.2 slots on Synology NAS. There are scripts to enable a pool creation for this very purpose. And this is the part where I could not find documentation on. How do I go about upgrading a storage from 512 GB to…

How to Band-aid Fix macOS Music App Freezing on Launch

The app in question is the Music app bundled with every Mac, not to be confused with the streaming service from the same company. And unfortunately, I was not able to narrow down what causes the issue. Upon opening the app, none of the UI is working. The only recourse, even though the app is not “unresponsive”, was to quit it.

How to Set Complex Repeating Pattern on iOS Reminders

It was always possible to set more complex repeating pattern using Shortcuts. However, at least from my experience, Shortcuts automation do fail horrendously, when it needs to run in the background. These are some edge cases that I have the latest Reminders could not handle on its own:

How to Run Python Script from iOS Home Screen

On iOS, Pythonista is likely the go-to Python environment runtime for many script writers. I, for one, recommend using Pythonista for any projects that need some horsepower. As I have shared many times, one such problem was generating passwords. It is completely doable on Shortcuts, only that it would be so cumbersome to make it happen.

How to Auto-Switch Proxies on iOS using PAC

This one is mostly for documentation and proof of concept. I was able to get it to work, but it was never reliable enough. The iOS feature itself does work. But even at the basic home lab level, it doesn’t have any interface to speak of. For instance, I want to know if traffic is actually going through the designated proxy, but there is no notification of any kind. For day-to-day operation, I don’t think it fits the bill.

How to Load Lazy-Load Images in Background

I have an assumption about average internet speed — it’s fast enough for most parts of the world to have streaming services. But somehow, some websites still do use lazy loaders on their images and assets. Mad Tea Party is one of them, due to server’s resource issues. But for websites that have larger traffic, for the life of me, I don’t understand why they would want to have users wait for each image to load in-between the reading session.

How to Pass Brackets in URL Query for Komga

One of the reasons why I am still in the process of writing a piece on Komga is its weird quirks like this. As a comics and graphic novels manager, Komga has what I would consider Calibre has for graphical publications: lots of metadata managements, different lists that handle series and books, and more. But Komga has its own limits. One such limit, I have seen so many times, is that the web UI uses brackets in the URL for query. It often confuses browsers beyond limit.