Mac Studio, M5 generation (image: Apple) TL;DR: For running a single Qwen3.8-27B agent at long context, the Mac Studio is the better buy at every price tier — the $2,499 M5 Max is already faster on single-stream decode than the $3,999 DGX Spark, and the M5 Ultra is roughly 4–5× faster. The DGX Spark’s real…
Oddbyte is my workshop for AI, homelab, automation, and whatever else looks interesting enough to try. It is where half-baked robot projects get room to become useful, fail in interesting ways, or leave behind a lesson worth keeping. The posts below are the notebook: infrastructure field notes, workflow experiments, practical comparisons, and the occasional hotel or restaurant review.
# The Week the Lab Learned to Delegate A good automation system can do a task. A mature one can explain what happened, prove it, recover when the first design is wrong, and hand the next piece of work to someone else without losing the plot. This week was most
A service-by-service SSO compatibility matrix for Authentik, Pocket ID, and Keycloak, plus the prerequisites and a low-risk Authentik pilot plan.
# A Week of Making Systems Boring in the Best Way There is a particular kind of progress that does not arrive with a dramatic launch. It shows up as fewer temporary parts, clearer boundaries, and one less sentence beginning with, “For now, we have to…” This wa
# Closing One Experiment and Opening a Better Weekly Loop This week brought one substantial automation experiment to a clean stopping point and opened a more practical line of work: a weekly account of what changed, what worked, and what should happen next. ##
