Yes, we are still alive. My last post was over 3 months ago. It’s the longest break I’ve ever had between posting anything. I’ve been really busy, and perhaps also really absorbed in many other projects, so this blog hasn’t gotten as much of my attention.
I still have many things to write and share about. Too much, actually, but they are such a mess that I haven’t been able to come up with something coherent to write about. So, instead, I’ll just rant about a couple of random things in this post.
My last post was about my home lab developments. There’ve been more developments along the same front since. It’s funny that as a techie, you’d expect that I would already have deployed or at least played around with the recent things I just got around to work on. However, I hadn’t considered them terribly fascinating before, and maybe still so, and hence didn’t have much interest in them.
For example, many home labs include Plex or Jellyfin. I have Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, so neither of them is of interest to me.
Nevertheless, even the mundane utilitarian stuff can still be useful, important, and relevant. It just needs the right time and the right context.
Immich is one thing that I wasn’t interested in before, but am now suddenly quite keen to use. Immich’s first official stable release was only in October 2025, though it has been in development for several year prior. I had known about Immich, but as Google Photos user, I didn’t feel I need Immich.
However, now in April 2026, I’m rethinking about my dependence on Google. Google Photos is still great, but it’s not so great having to pay for extra storage. I currently am on a 200 GB plan with 120 GB already used up. Storage wasn’t that important to me earlier on because I was on the AI Pro plan that included 2 TB of storage. It was a promo offer, and hence free, but when the promo ended earlier this year, I downgraded to the AI Plus plan with 200 GB of storage. I don’t want to have to pay Google so much.
Now, that 120 GB used storage out of 200 GB capacity starts to worry me. I anticipate shooting more videos. My storage will grow faster than before. Self-hosting my own photo and video storage now becomes something quite relevant. I’ve found that Immich does pretty much everything Google Photos can do, with the main shortcoming in the area of advanced photo edits. Immich can do simple cropping, rotation, and some colour filtering, but not any of those AI-powered object removal or photo enhancement. I’ll write more about Immich another time.
Another major development I want to mention is about OpenClaw. I’m surely not the fastest, but I’ve gotten on the bandwagon, installing my own OpenClaw. OpenClaw isn’t the AI itself. It’s an agent that uses AI and requires connecting to an AI engine like Ollama. I don’t have good enough hardware to run Ollama with decently good LLM, so I elected to connect it to OpenAI/ChatGPT.
OpenClaw worked very well. Alright, it has to be since it basically runs off some other AI engine. I used it extensively on a recent holiday trip, one that not much planning was done beforehand apart from fixing the flights, cities, and hotels. I asked OpenClaw to find things to do, places to go, where to eat, and plan various travel routes. I set constraints such as time and locality.
It’s not anything I couldn’t have done myself with Google search, but I would have taken much more time digesting information and exploring options. OpenClaw behaved like a personal assistant, and that was nice.
You might ask, why not just talk to ChatGPT directly? Yes, perhaps, since in my case OpenClaw just leverages ChatGPT. However, the nice thing with OpenClaw is that I get more visibility into what information it knows, remembers, and uses, in order to work on my questions or tasks. There is a workspace of files I can read. I can put additional information into the workspace that OpenClaw can use. For example, I can separately script a 5-day calendar outlook and put it in a file for OpenClaw to use, without OpenClaw having access to my actual calendar. This makes it easy for me to contain OpenClaw in a standalone VM and use external systems to push data to it, ensuring the safety and security of my data.
This is the quick update I have for now, and hopefully, I will find myself posting on a more regular schedule again.
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