How to Determine Which Old Drives Are Still Good — SMART Data, badblocks, and Homelab Hardware Longevity

SSH Honeypot Live — What Watching Bots Attack a Server Teaches CS Students About Network Security

The $20 Server — What Extreme Budget Computing Teaches CS Students

The CISA GitHub Leak: Homelab Security Lessons for Self-Hosters

Homelab Burnout: Sustainable Self-Hosting When the Hobby Starts Feeling Like Work

TLS Certificates for Internal Services: HTTPS Inside Your Homelab

Six arguing AI agents: what multi-agent debate teaches CS students about AI architecture

Beyond Ollama: 3 Homelab AI Tools Worth Trying Next

How to Ask for Help: Technical Communication Skills Every CS Student Needs

Linux Pipes and Redirection: The Missing CS Lesson That Powers Real-World Automation

Homelab Network Design: Building Your Own Miniature Data Centre at Home

Self-Hosted AI Security: What Every Ollama User Should Know

Right to Local Intelligence: Why Running AI on Your Own Hardware Matters

Cloudflare Self-Managed OAuth — What It Means for Your Homelab Security

Learning Docker by Building a Container Engine from Scratch

The Minimal Homelab That Actually Works

OpenCV 5 Computer Vision in Python for CS Students

Switch from pip to uv — Python's New Package Manager Guide

9618 Paper 1 Theory Fundamentals — AS CS Topic Guide

Debugging Python for A-Level CS — Tracebacks & Fixes

Self-Host Redis 8.8 with Docker Compose — Homelab Guide

Binary, Hex & Number Systems — Visual Guide for IGCSE CS

Python File Handling for IGCSE & A-Level CS — Examples

How to Set Up a Test Pipeline That Actually Catches Bugs

How to Set Up Hermes Agent on a Mini PC Home Server

🔒 0417/12 Paper 1 – Security, File Transfer & ATM Processing | June 2025

📝 0417/11 Paper 1 – Testing, Safety & Security | June 2025

📝 9618/12 Paper 1 – Databases, Data Structures & Algorithms | June 2025

📝 9618/22 Paper 2 – Records, Files & Programming Techniques | June 2025

📝 9618/22 Paper 2 – Algorithms, Data Structures & Sorting | June 2025

📝 9618/22 Paper 2 – Development Life Cycles, Maintenance & Testing | June 2025

📝 9618/12 Paper 1 – Assembly, Logic Circuits & Communication | June 2025

🖥️ 0417/12 Paper 1 – System Testing, Safety & Cybersecurity | June 2025

📝 0417/12 Paper 1 – Input Devices, Applications Software & Biometric Systems | June 2025

📝 9618/12 Paper 1 – Von Neumann, Number Systems & AI | June 2025

📝 0417/11 Paper 1 – Output Devices, Applications Software & Smartphones | June 2025

Why use indentation in Python

OSI Reference Model-Networking 101

Techie Mike — Tech Tutorials for Students & Homelab Enthusiasts

Practical tech tutorials for Cambridge CS/ICT students and homelab enthusiasts. I break down complex topics — VirtualBox, Proxmox, ethical hacking, Python, and exam prep — into clear, hands-on guides you can actually follow. No fluff, just real skills.

hardware • 9 min read

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How to Determine Which Old Drives Are Still Good — SMART Data, badblocks, and Homelab Hardware Longevity

# How to Determine Which Old Drives Are Still Good — SMART Data, badblocks, and Homelab Hardware Longevity Someone on r/homelab posted a photo of a pile of old drives and asked one simple question: how do I determine which of these are still good? Every self-hoster ends up in the same position. Dri…

Techie Mike • 20 Jul 2026

security • 7 min read

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SSH Honeypot Live — What Watching Bots Attack a Server Teaches CS Students About Network Security

# SSH Honeypot Live — What Watching Bots Attack a Server Teaches CS Students About Network Security Every internet-connected server lives in a shooting gallery. Open https://honeypotlive.cc/ for a minute and the point lands immediately. The screen fills with source IPs, login attempts, usernames,…

Techie Mike • 18 Jul 2026

Computer science • 8 min read

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The $20 Server — What Extreme Budget Computing Teaches CS Students

# The $20 Server — What Extreme Budget Computing Teaches CS Students The most educational server in the room is usually the worst one. Give students unlimited cloud credits and they can launch machines all afternoon without learning much about limits. Give them a battered $20 office desktop with 4…

Techie Mike • 18 Jul 2026

GitLost: How AI Agents Can Leak Your Code Through a Single GitHub Issue

security • 7 min read

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GitLost: How AI Agents Can Leak Your Code Through a Single GitHub Issue

# GitLost: How AI Agents Can Leak Your Code Through a Single GitHub Issue A public GitHub issue should not be able to pull text out of your private repositories. With a dangerously over-permissioned GitHub Agentic Workflow, that is exactly what Noma Labs demonstrated. Their July 2026 write-up sho…

Techie Mike • 17 Jul 2026

Linux Signals Explained — SIGTERM, SIGKILL and Process Control

linux • 7 min read

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Linux Signals Explained — SIGTERM, SIGKILL and Process Control

# Linux Signals Explained — SIGTERM, SIGKILL and Process Control Pressing `Ctrl+C` looks simple until the day it stops working. You hit it in a terminal. One Python script exits immediately. A Docker container hangs for ten seconds before disappearing. A runaway process ignores you completely unti…

Techie Mike • 16 Jul 2026

Proxmox VE in Production — What Running It 24/7 for Over a Year Actually Teaches You

proxmox • 8 min read

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Proxmox VE in Production — What Running It 24/7 for Over a Year Actually Teaches You

# Proxmox VE in Production — What Running It 24/7 for Over a Year Actually Teaches You The moment an outage interrupts something you actually use every day, your homelab has stopped behaving like a toy. That is the cleanest definition of production I know. I have been running Proxmox VE 24/7 for…

Techie Mike • 15 Jul 2026

security • 7 min read

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The CISA GitHub Leak: Homelab Security Lessons for Self-Hosters

# The CISA GitHub Leak: Homelab Security Lessons for Self-Hosters In May 2026, researchers discovered a public GitHub repository maintained by a CISA contractor containing credentials, deployment material, internal documentation, and cloud infrastructure details, as detailed in [Krebs on Security's…

Techie Mike • 14 Jul 2026

linux • 7 min read

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Homelab Burnout: Sustainable Self-Hosting When the Hobby Starts Feeling Like Work

# Homelab Burnout: Sustainable Self-Hosting When the Hobby Starts Feeling Like Work Browse [r/homelab](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/) for long enough and you will regularly find people questioning whether their homelab has become more work than fun. People are not tired of technology itself. Th…

Techie Mike • 13 Jul 2026

security • 6 min read

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TLS Certificates for Internal Services: HTTPS Inside Your Homelab

# TLS Certificates for Internal Services: HTTPS Inside Your Homelab Most homelab TLS setups stop at the front door. You put Caddy, Nginx, or Traefik in front, get a valid certificate for `app.example.com`, and call it done. From the browser to the reverse proxy, everything is encrypted. From the r…

Techie Mike • 12 Jul 2026

Computer science • 8 min read

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Six arguing AI agents: what multi-agent debate teaches CS students about AI architecture

# Six arguing AI agents: what multi-agent debate teaches CS students about AI architecture Most students meet AI through prompts. Type a question, get a paragraph back, move on. That framing is useful for five minutes and then it gets in the way. The more interesting lesson is what happens when y…

Techie Mike • 11 Jul 2026

developer tools • 12 min read

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Beyond Ollama: 3 Homelab AI Tools Worth Trying Next

# Beyond Ollama: 3 Homelab AI Tools Worth Trying Next Ollama is the tool I recommend when someone wants their first local model running tonight. It is simple, fast to understand, and good enough for a lot of homelab jobs. Pull a model, hit an API, wire up Open WebUI, done. I already covered that fu…

Techie Mike • 10 Jul 2026

Computer science • 8 min read

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How to Ask for Help: Technical Communication Skills Every CS Student Needs

# How to Ask for Help: Technical Communication Skills Every CS Student Needs A student shows me a Python program and says, "It doesn't work." That is the whole bug report. No error message. No explanation of what the program is meant to do. No clue whether it ever worked, whether they changed any…

Techie Mike • 09 Jul 2026

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Techie Mike

Computer Science teacher in Thailand. 10+ years Cambridge IGCSE, 4 years AS/A Level. BSc Computer Science & Engineering. Ex-Intel, Virgin Media. Practical exam prep, past paper walkthroughs and tech tutorials.

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