Thoughts & Life
5 min read
The Happiness Cure for Teens: Stepping Back From Anxiety
Why do anxiety and low moods happen? The Happiness Cure for Teens made me rethink how I respond to anxiety instead of being swept up by it.
Otama's Playground - Technical blog about Infrastructure, Kubernetes, AI, and more.
Technical blog about Infrastructure, Kubernetes, AI, and more.
Thoughts & Life
7 min read
Reading The Autistic Brain and Learning to Work With My Own Mind
Where do my everyday struggles and thinking habits come from? I used The Autistic Brain to sort through some of those questions.
Thoughts & Life
5 min read
The Scout Mindset: Stepping Back from My Own Thinking
Other people's problems are easy to judge. My own come with excuses. The Scout Mindset offers questions for stepping back from my thinking.
Thoughts & Life
3 min read
The ADHD Advantage: Rethinking What Helps Me Focus
Poor focus is not just a matter of willpower. The ADHD Advantage made me rethink reward systems, hyperfocus, exercise, and what helps me concentrate.
Productivity & Career
4 min read
Predictably Irrational: Why We Choose What We Do
Free shipping, anchors, and the endowment effect. Quick notes on all 15 chapters of Predictably Irrational, plus a few painfully familiar examples.
Thoughts & Life
6 min read
The Attention Fix in the AI Era: Protecting an Analog Brain
AI agents make work easier, but they also keep me glued to screens. Revisiting The Attention Fix helped me set a few rules for focus and mental health.
Series
Infrastructure & Engineering
6 min read
Autonomous k8s Debugging and Tuning with Claude Code Skills
Series: home-kubernetes-journal
Using Claude Code skills to automate k3s diagnosis and repair on my homelab, plus LLM inference tuning that pushed Hermes TPS from 21 t/s to 32+ t/s.
Series
Infrastructure & Engineering
3 min read
Reaching Homelab Services from GitHub Actions via ARC
Series: home-kubernetes-journal
How I put an ARC self-hosted runner inside my homelab K8s cluster so GitHub Actions workflows can reach internal services without tunnels.
Infrastructure & Engineering
2 min read
Local LLMs and ChatGPT on One Endpoint with LiteLLM
Using LiteLLM Proxy to unify Lemonade (AMD ROCm llama.cpp) and a ChatGPT subscription behind a single OpenAI-compatible API in my homelab.
Infrastructure & Engineering
2 min read
Routing Copilot Chat's Utility Model to a Local LLM
Commit message generation was quietly draining my Copilot free quota. Fixed by pointing the utility model at a local Gemma-4-E4B via LiteLLM.
Series
Infrastructure & Engineering
3 min read
LLMs on Strix Halo: Three Days Chasing the MES Firmware 0x83 Bug
Series: home-kubernetes-journal
Running llama.cpp on my k3s + AMD GPU cluster kept hitting memory access faults. The culprit: a bug in MES firmware 0x83 shipped with amdgpu-dkms-firmware.
Series
Infrastructure & Engineering
3 min read
I Tried GPU Passthrough in an Incus VM and Ended Up on Bare Metal
Series: home-kubernetes-journal
I set up Strix Halo as a k3s worker via Incus VM + VFIO, then hit a wall: once the GPU enters a dirty state, recovery is impossible without bare metal.