The Lab.

Lab 01 Jun 2026

Adding My iPhone to WireGuard

I already had WireGuard running on the server. My laptop was the only client, which was fine until I wanted to check something from my phone. The iPhone had the WireGuard app installed already, so this was mostly a peer …

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Lab 21 May 2026

Fibre Connector Confusion: SC/APC, LC/UPC, Green, Blue, Simplex, Duplex

Fibre patch leads look like they should be simple. One end goes into the patch panel, the other end goes into the switch, and light travels through glass. Nice. Clean. Almost suspiciously elegant. Then you actually need …

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Lab 27 Mar 2026

Building and Hardening My Spend Tracker

I built a personal spend tracker to answer one question quickly: where is my money actually going each month? The app ingests ASB statements, categorises transactions, tracks budgets, and runs a local AI assistant for …

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Lab 23 Mar 2026

Late Night in the Lab

There is something about a university computer lab at 11pm that feels different to working during the day. Everyone else has gone home. The building is quiet. You can actually think. Methindu, Mithila and I stayed back …

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Lab 22 Mar 2026

How I Self-Hosted This Blog on a Mini PC

I got tired of the free tier anxiety. Vercel and Netlify are solid until they change their pricing or disappear, and I did not want a recurring bill for a static site. I wanted a machine sitting in my house actually serving the files. The …

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Lab 19 Mar 2026

Getting PlainSight Off the Ground

This is my capstone project for Unitec, built in partnership with Netbridge. The idea is simple: instead of logging into three different vendor portals to check what is happening on the network, everything feeds into one dashboard that uses …

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Lab 15 Mar 2026

Setting Up a WireGuard VPN From Scratch

I run my own web server at home. It works fine when I am sitting next to it. The problem is when I am not. I wanted a way to SSH in and edit files on my site from anywhere without exposing everything to the open internet. The answer was a …

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