The Orange Pi 5 Plus is the better self-hosting board for Docker-heavy workloads thanks to its 8-core RK3588 CPU, up to 32GB RAM, and dual NVMe M.2 slots. The Raspberry Pi 5 wins for beginners and single-service setups with its superior software ecosystem and community support. Both boards draw under 18W, run Docker containers on ARM64 without issues, and can be purchased for under $200 in their mid-range configurations. The right pick depends on how many services you plan to run and whether hardware expandability or software polish matters more to you.
Hands-on experience with AI, self-hosting, Linux, and the developer tools I actually use
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Hands-on experience with AI, self-hosting, Linux, and the developer tools I actually use
Gleam for Erlang Developers: Type-Safe Language for the BEAM VM
Gleam is a statically-typed functional language that compiles to Erlang BEAM bytecode and JavaScript. It gives you OTP’s fault tolerance and distribution with Hindley-Milner type inference - the same type system family as Haskell and OCaml - without making you leave the BEAM ecosystem you already know. As of April 2026, the latest stable release is v1.15.3, and the ecosystem has matured to include a full HTTP server stack (Wisp + Mist ), database drivers, and a built-in language server. If you write Erlang or Elixir professionally, Gleam is worth your attention.
eBPF Tracing for Linux 5.15: Real-Time Kernel Monitoring
eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) lets you attach tiny sandboxed programs to kernel events: syscalls, network packets, scheduler decisions, and filesystem calls. You collect detailed performance data in real time. No kernel source changes, no custom modules, no service restarts. With bpftrace one-liners and the BCC toolkit, you can measure per-process disk latency, trace TCP connections, profile CPU hotspots, and find memory leaks on production Linux. Overhead is usually under 2%.
Everything here targets Linux 5.15+ kernels, with notes on newer features available in 6.x and later.
Multi-Monitor Linux Setup with Mixed DPI Displays
On Wayland with GNOME 46+ or KDE Plasma 6.1+, each monitor gets its own scale factor. A 4K center display at 200% and side 1080p monitors at 100% work without trade-offs. X11 still hurts here. The whole desktop shares one scale, so one display always looks wrong. If old Linux DPI pain has kept you on a single monitor, the 2026 Wayland stack has caught up.
Why Mixed DPI Is Hard
The typical developer setup pairs a 27" 4K center monitor (163 PPI) with one or two 24" 1080p side panels (92 PPI). That’s nearly a 2x pixel density gap. The OS has to draw UI elements at different sizes on each screen.
Automated AES-256 Backups: 500GB in 5 min for $3 a month
Pair Restic with Rclone and you get client-side AES-256 encryption, smart deduplication, and a backend that talks to 70 plus cloud providers. A systemd timer and a short wrapper script handle the schedule. The result runs unattended, prunes old snapshots on its own, and lets you swap clouds by editing one config line. A tuned setup backs up 500 GB in under five minutes and costs as little as $3 a month on Backblaze B2.
Multi-Sensor Weather Station with ESP32 Under $100
Yes, you can build a working outdoor weather station for under $100. You need an ESP32 running ESPHome (current stable: 2026.3.x), a Davis 6410 anemometer for wind, a tipping-bucket rain gauge, and a VEML6075 UV sensor. All of it reports live data to Home Assistant over WiFi. The result is hyperlocal weather data more accurate than any commercial forecast for your yard, roof, or field.
Hardware Selection and Sensor Wiring
The backbone of this station is an ESP32-S3 DevKitC (or the older ESP32-WROOM-32). The S3 variant has better WiFi range and BLE 5.0 support if you want to expand later. Power it with a 5V USB-C supply. For longer outdoor cable runs, use a 12V barrel jack feeding an LDO voltage regulator. The same board family fits other outdoor builds too. Our guide to tracking particulates with a PMS5003 node uses a similar power and enclosure setup.