Hello World! Documenting my tech journey

Welcome to 00l.uk, an online space where I can dump all the stuff rattling around in my head about homelabbing, networking, self-hosting, and the general chaos of building things that may or may not work. Consider it my digital notebook. The good ideas, the bad ideas, and everything in between.

Who am I?

I’m Andy. Based in the UK, working in medicine, and somehow also a dad, which means my tinkering time is precious and usually happens after everyone’s gone to bed. I’ve been called a lifestyle nerd, and honestly, I’m not going to argue with that. Zero Zero Lab is where my technical rabbit holes and real life occasionally crash into each other.

Why this blog?

Mainly because my knowledge is currently spread across roughly a thousand .MD files, browser bookmarks I’ll “come back to,” and half-finished documents I can’t find when I actually need them. This blog is my attempt to fix that. My plan is to:

Keep things in one place: a reference I can actually use, and hopefully one that’s useful to others going through the same challenges.
Capture the “why”: not just what I did, but why I did it that way.
Show the whole journey: the bugs, the dead ends, the troubleshooting at midnight, and the satisfaction when something finally works.

How I built Zero Zero Lab

I’ve been using the WordPress ecosystem long enough to know what works. For this project, I built a minimalist bespoke theme using WordPress and Kadence. I skipped Elementor in favour of Kadence Blocks for performance, using custom-coded plugins for integrating off the shelf plugins like Top 10 and WP Armor. Under the hood it’s running on a LiteSpeed / Redis / Cloudflare stack to keep things snappy. The goal was a clean, maintainable build that won’t fall apart when the next major WordPress update lands (…famous last words, I know!).

The First Big Project: The Proxmox rebuild

One of the main reasons I’m starting this blog now rather than “eventually” is that I’m in the middle of a pretty significant homelab overhaul. Right now I’m working on:

Rebuilding my Lenovo M720q Proxmox/OPNsense router: moving on from a six-year-old setup that’s done well but is well past due a rethink.
Starting up a low-power Proxmox cluster: going from a single node to a three-node HA setup, so my main services stay up during maintenance rather than going dark while I poke around.
Migrating TrueNAS CORE to SCALE: long overdue, and finally happening.

What to expect

Moving forward, I plan to post detailed guides, hardware reviews, and “lessons learned” from my homelab. Expect Going forward I’ll be posting guides, hardware writeups, and honest “here’s what went wrong” posts from the lab. Topics will probably include:

Proxmox & Networking: cluster configs, OPNsense, the usual rabbit holes.
Software & Automation: self-hosting, containerisation, scripting, and some AI integration projects I’ve been quietly working on.
Making & Hardware: 3D printing, functional builds, and reviews of gear I actually use day to day.
Lifestyle: the occasional photography or travel post, because not everything has to be a VLAN diagram.

Glad you’re here. It’s early days, but that’s kind of the point – to document this whole thing from the ground up, bugs and all.