speare.org

Note — Jul 22, 2026

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The UPS held for four minutes. Long enough to learn the NAS shuts down last, which is precisely backwards.

Note — Jul 19, 2026

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Squash vine borers won again. Third year running. Next season: row cover until the first female flower, then hand-pollinate.

What I Got Wrong Building My First Homelab

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first version lived on a garage shelf in July, which in Texas is its own kind of decision. It ran six weeks. What killed it was not the heat. What killed it was that I could not remember, four weeks later, why I had opened port 8443 or what was actually listening on it. The hardware was fine. The record of my own reasoning was gone. Three rebuilds later the machine is boring, and boring is the entire point. Here is what I would hand to myself at the start. ## Write down the why, not the what Configuration files record what you did. They are perfectly silent on why, and why is the only part you need at eleven at night with something down. Every service now has a plain-text file beside it saying, in one sentence, what it is for and what breaks without it. ``` services/ jellyfin/ compose.yml WHY.txt <- "Movies for the living room TV. If down: nothing else cares." ``` It takes ten seconds to write and it is the only documentation I have never regretted. > The homelab is not the hardware. It is the set of decisions you made and can still > explain. ## Power before performance I spent months on drive layout and roughly ten minutes on what happens when the power blinks. Then it blinked. Everything below is downstream of that afternoon. - A UPS sized to outlast the outage, not merely survive the transient. - Shutdown order that *ends* with storage rather than beginning with it. - A test you actually run — pull the plug on a Saturday, never a Tuesday. None of this is advanced. All of it is the part I skipped, and skipping it is the reason there were three rebuilds instead of one. ## What I would do differently Start smaller than feels satisfying. One machine, two services, written down. The urge is to build the rack you want in three years, and the result is a rack you cannot explain in three weeks.

Note — Jul 11, 2026

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nine french cleats out of one sheet of ply. The wall now holds more than the floor ever did.

Gardening in Texas Is Mostly Planning Around August

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every gardening book I own was written for somewhere else. They describe one long season that starts in spring and ends in fall. Here there are two short ones with a furnace in between, and pretending otherwise cost me three years of dead tomatoes. The useful reframe: **August is not part of the growing season. It is the thing you plan around.** ## Two seasons, not one Spring runs from the last frost to roughly the end of June. Fall runs from late September until the first frost. What sits between them is survival, not production. - **Spring:** everything that fruits. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans. Planted early enough that they set fruit before night temperatures stop them. - **August:** shade, water, and low expectations. Okra and southern peas genuinely do not care. Everything else is being kept alive, not harvested. - **Fall:** the better season, and the one most people skip. Brassicas, greens, root crops, all going in while it still feels far too hot to plant anything. The fall planting date is the one that feels most wrong and matters most. Seeds go in during the last week of August, in soil hot enough to be unpleasant to touch. > Plant for the heat you are going to get, not the spring you are standing in. ## What actually survived Three years of notes, compressed: - Okra, southern peas, sweet potatoes, and peppers make it through unaided. - Tomatoes stop setting fruit above about 92°F at night and resume in September, so spring varieties want to be determinate and early. - Anything in a container needs twice the water you estimate and probably afternoon shade by July. ## The part I still get wrong Shade cloth. Every year I put it up two weeks after I needed it, and every year I lose something I did not have to. The calendar reminder now says the first week of June, which still feels early, and is not.

The Garage Rule: Nothing Touches the Floor

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The garage had filled the way garages do — not all at once, but one reasonable decision at a time until the truck lived outside. The fix was not a purge. It was one rule. **Nothing touches the floor.** If it cannot hang, stand on a shelf, or go in something that hangs, it does not stay. ## The audit Before buying anything, I spent an evening writing down what was actually in there, by wall. Four columns: what it is, how often I use it, what it weighs, and whether it has a home. The last column was empty for most of the list, which was the entire problem. Roughly a third of the contents had not been touched in two years. That third left. ## French cleats do almost everything One sheet of plywood, ripped into strips with a 45° bevel, gets you nine cleats and a wall that reconfigures in seconds. Everything hangs on a matching cleat: shelves, tool holders, brackets, the shop vac. ``` ┌──────────────┐ │ ╲ │ 45° bevel, cleat fixed to studs │ ╲ │ └─────╲────────┘ ╲ ╲ mating cleat on the back of ╲ ╲ whatever is hanging ``` The point is not the cleat. It is that rearranging costs nothing, so you actually do it, and the wall improves for years instead of being wrong permanently after one Saturday. > Vertical space is free real estate you already paid for. ## What went where - **Wall 1** — long tools, ladder, anything awkward. One cleat run at head height. - **Wall 2** — the workbench and everything used at it, within arm's reach. - **Wall 3** — seasonal and bulk. Highest shelf, least convenient, correctly so. - **Ceiling** — flat, light, rarely needed. Overhead racks above where the truck sits. ## The measurement that mattered Before hanging anything on the wall the truck parks against, measure the mirror height and the door swing, then subtract four inches. I did this second, after replacing a mirror, which is a good way to learn it.