Posts on Rusty Bower

How K3s Silently Grew a 40 GB SQLite Database and Took Down My Cluster

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My cluster — a single-node K3s instance running about 60 ArgoCD-managed applications — had been slowly dying for months. Pods crash-looped with “context deadline exceeded” errors. Leader elections failed. The metrics server stopped working entirely. I assumed it was resource pressure and tuned probe timeouts. The real problem was underneath all of it: K3s’s SQLite datastore had silently grown to 40 GB.

Fleet-Managing Fire Tablets from Kubernetes

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have three Amazon Fire tablets mounted around the house running Fully Kiosk Browser as Home Assistant dashboards. They’re cheap ($35-50 each during sales), they have decent screens, and Fully Kiosk turns them into locked-down kiosks that show a dashboard and nothing else.

Whole-Home Audio with Music Assistant: Kubernetes Gotchas and a Silent Raspberry Pi

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My music setup had accreted into a mess. Across two Kubernetes clusters I was running Navidrome, Lyrion Music Server (LMS), beets, and my own AI radio station (SUB/WAVE) - plus a Raspberry Pi running piCorePlayer wired into a Dayton DAX66 matrix amp for whole-home audio. Four things that all “played music,” none of which talked to each other, and no single place to control any of it from Home Assistant.

The LoadBalancer That Never Worked: Migrating MetalLB from L2 to BGP

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I started the day asking why one of my Frigate cameras was using more CPU than the others. I finished it having moved every LoadBalancer in my Kubernetes cluster onto BGP-routed addresses, because along the way I found a service that had been silently unreachable for two years.

Teaching Security Cameras to Describe What They See

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A notification that says “person detected on doorbell” is useful. A notification that says “a delivery driver in a brown UPS uniform placed a medium-sized box on the porch and is walking back to the truck” is significantly more useful — especially when you’re in a meeting and trying to decide whether to get up.

Mac Studio as a Kubernetes Compute Satellite

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My K3s cluster runs on six Intel NUCs. They’re great for the 50+ containers that make up my homelab — Plex, Home Assistant, Frigate, Paperless, the usual suspects. But they’re terrible at machine learning. Four Skylake cores and 32 GB of RAM per node doesn’t get you far when Immich wants to classify 80,000 photos or Frigate wants a vision model to describe who’s at your door.

Automating a Smart Bird Feeder's Photo Archive with Kubernetes and Immich

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My Bird Buddy smart feeder takes a photo every time a bird visits. Over a few months, that adds up to thousands of images — all sitting in Bird Buddy’s cloud app with no good way to search, organize, or back them up. I wanted them in Immich, my self-hosted photo library, organized by species and properly timestamped.

Unit-Testing Home Automations That Run in Kubernetes

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Home automations are code that controls physical things. When they break, the consequences aren’t a 500 error — they’re a garage door that won’t close in a snowstorm, or window shades that open at 3 AM, or a tablet that charges to 100% and stays plugged in for months until the battery swells.

Fixing 10,000 Upside-Down Scanned Slides with a Local Vision LLM

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My grandfather had about 10,000 35mm slides. I rented a SlideSnap X1 and spent a weekend feeding them through — 33 boxes worth, organized into folders by box. The scanner itself was great, but when you’re pushing through thousands of slides in a weekend, some inevitably go in upside down or backwards. No metadata, no EXIF orientation flags — just thousands of JPEGs, some right-side up, some not, sitting on a NAS.

Finding Fraud in $1 Trillion of Medicaid Data with DuckDB

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

CMS recently published provider-level Medicaid spending data from T-MSIS — every fee-for-service, managed care, and CHIP claim from 2018 through 2024, aggregated by billing provider, procedure code, and month. 227 million rows. $1.09 trillion in payments. I wanted to see what falls out when you run some basic fraud heuristics against it.

Building a Home Assistant Dashboard with Whole Home Audio Control

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My Home Assistant dashboard has evolved significantly over the past year. What started as the default auto-generated cards has become a carefully organized interface that my whole family actually uses. Here’s how I built it, with a focus on the whole home audio system that ties everything together.

Auto-Populating Pi-hole DNS from Kubernetes Ingresses