Home Lab & Builder Web Tools

Formatting Modes:

• Markdown Table Formatter: Converts unaligned pipe tables, comma-separated values (CSV), or tab-separated spreadsheet clips into neat GFM tables with customizable text alignment (left, center, right).
• YAML Frontmatter Properties: Validates key-value metadata blocks (e.g. title:, tags:, date:, aliases:) and wraps them cleanly in standard triple-dash blocks (---) required by Obsidian and static site generators like Astro or Jekyll.
• Smart Obsidian Note Helper: Standardizes header hierarchies, repairs bullet list indentation, strips redundant whitespace, and cleans up tag formatting.

Obsidian Dataview Tip:

Using consistent YAML properties enables powerful dynamic queries in Obsidian with the Dataview community plugin, such as TABLE file.mtime AS "Updated", tags WHERE type = "homelab".

Quick Workflow:

1. Select a Hardware Preset or Enter Measurements: Click any preset chip (e.g. Intel N100 Mini PC, ThinkCentre Tiny, or 2U Enterprise Server) to load baseline measurements, or slide to your exact wall draw.
2. Adjust Load Hours: Enter how many hours per day your server is transcoding video, backing up data, or running games. Homelab servers spend 80 to 90% of the day at idle.
3. Set Your Local Electricity Rate: Enter your $/kWh rate (US average is ~$0.16/kWh, European rates often range from €0.25 to €0.35/kWh).
4. Evaluate TCO & Payoff: Check the Payoff Comparison Card to see how quickly a modern mini PC pays for itself by replacing older enterprise hardware.

Homelab Energy Optimization Tips:

• Wall Draw vs. TDP: Processor TDP (Thermal Design Power) indicates cooling capacity under synthetic torture, not actual wall draw. A 65W Core i5 can idle under 15W at the wall.
• Hard Drive Spin-Down: 3.5" enterprise SATA/SAS drives draw 6W to 9W continuously spinning. If your storage array is accessed infrequently, configure spin-down timers in TrueNAS or with hdparm -S.
• Tune Linux C-States: Install PowerTOP on Proxmox or Ubuntu (apt install powertop && powertop --auto-tune) to allow PCIe lanes, NICs, and CPU cores to drop into power-saving C6/C8 package states.

Quick Workflow:

1. Configure Your Proxmox Host Hardware: Enter your physical CPU core count, physical host RAM (e.g. 16 GB, 32 GB, or 64 GB), and storage pool capacity.
2. Select Desired Services: Toggle the checkboxes for the workloads you plan to host. Adjust allocated cores, RAM (MB), and disk (GB) to match your workload needs.
3. Monitor Resource Gauges: Watch the live RAM commitment meter, vCPU overcommit ratio, and disk consumption indicators.
4. Generate Proxmox CLI Command: Select any container from the bottom CLI generator to produce a complete unprivileged pct create command ready to paste into your Proxmox terminal.

Proxmox Sizing Rules of Thumb:

• LXC vs. QEMU VM: Always prefer lightweight LXC containers for standard Linux tools (Pi-hole, Gotify, Uptime Kuma, Nextcloud). LXCs share the host kernel, eliminating hypervisor virtualization overhead and idling at ~30MB of RAM. Reserve full QEMU VMs for non-Linux OSes (Windows) or systems requiring dedicated kernel modules (Home Assistant OS, TrueNAS).
• Safe CPU Overcommit: Homelab workloads typically idle 95% of the time. Overcommitting vCPUs up to 2.5:1 or 3:1 (e.g. 24 vCPUs on an 8-core CPU) is standard and safe. Avoid overcommitting cores on heavy database or game server hosts.
• Proxmox & ZFS Memory Reserve: Never commit 100% of host RAM to guests. Proxmox VE requires ~2 GB for hypervisor services, plus ZFS ARC cache. If physical memory is exhausted, the Linux Out-Of-Memory (OOM) killer will terminate container processes.