Recent teardowns.

Archive — 47 reviews

What we run.

Lab notebook · Updated weekly

Our editorial machine in production — the tools we trust with our own publishing pipeline. If we recommend it elsewhere, it earns a row here first.

Tool Category Why we use it Last reviewed
n8n v1.94 Workflow runtime Self-hosted on a $6 VPS. Survived 1.4M executions last quarter. 2026-05-18
Ollama v0.6.2 Local inference Local model serving for drafting and classification. CPU fallback works. 2026-04-12
Gemma 3‑12B Model Default local model for editorial drafts and rewriting. 2026-05-11
PostgreSQL 16.3 Storage Article store + vector store via pgvector. Boringly reliable. 2026-03-22
Caddy 2.8 Edge TLS, reverse proxy, and rate limiting in one config file. 2026-02-09
Mac Mini M2 Pro Inference box 32GB unified memory. Quiet enough to live under the desk. 2026-04-27

Frequencies.

Short-form · Editor's notes
2026 · 05 · 22 — Fri

Make.com just changed their pricing tiers.

Operations now metered separately from "polls." For solo operators on the Pro plan, the math gets worse below ~8k ops/mo and better above it. Full breakdown →

2026 · 05 · 20 — Wed

Reasonable defaults for a self-hosted n8n.

We've stopped recommending the official Docker compose. Three flags do the work of a separate ops team. Notes coming this weekend.

2026 · 05 · 17 — Sun

Gemma 3 27B on consumer hardware is closer than you think.

Quantized to Q4_K_M, runs at 11 tok/s on a 4090. Not fast — but fast enough that we're rewriting our model-choice rubric for next month's issue.

2026 · 05 · 14 — Thu

A reader asked about data sovereignty in Singapore.

Short answer: hosting in SG1 doesn't make you compliant; processing terms do. Long answer: a piece is forming on this.

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