Larvitz Blog
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Welcome to Larvitz Blog! I’m Christian, a Senior Consultant by day and FreeBSD enthusiast by night, with over 20 years in enterprise IT. Here I write about FreeBSD jails, PF firewalling, self-hosting, Linux system administration, and anything that’s cleanly engineered. Most articles are hands-on guides born from running my own infrastructure, from dual-stack networking and Ansible automation to hosting a Mastodon instance on FreeBSD.

Have a question or want to discuss something? Find me on the Fediverse at @Larvitz@burningboard.net. I’m always happy to chat!

#self-hosting Articles

  • Sat 03 October 2026
  • Linux

Self-Hosted AI: Qwen 3.8 on a Rented Blackwell at 150 Tokens per Second

An open-weight Qwen 3.8 27B model, an RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell rented by the hour, and one shell command to start it. For most of my everyday coding it is good enough, it answers at roughly 150 tokens per second, and my prompts stay on infrastructure I chose. Some honest caveats about what “self-hosted” means on someone else’s GPU are included, along with the workflow that has worked best for me: a frontier model for architecture, and a fast open-weight model for the token-heavy implementation loop.

I Wanted an IPv4 Toast and Accidentally Built an IP Service

At 10:15 this morning I added a gently condescending toast for IPv4-only visitors to hofstede.it. It called ipify, which felt increasingly inappropriate for somebody operating an ASN. Three hours later I had written a Rust IP-information service, put it behind Caddy, given it three DNS names, and deployed it in its own dual-stack FreeBSD VNET jail. This is how a two-line dependency became infrastructure.

Building My Own TV Station: ErsatzTV in a FreeBSD Jail, With Intel Hardware Transcoding

Being ill for a week taught me that a large Jellyfin library is not entertainment, it is homework. ErsatzTV turns a media library back into linear television with real channels and schedules, but it only ships for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It is a .NET application driving ffmpeg, so I built it in a FreeBSD Bastille jail instead. One missing conditional was all that stood between FreeBSD and Intel VAAPI hardware acceleration.

Kollect: The Native KDE Link Collector I Built for Myself

Kollect is a small native Plasma 6 application I wrote to get interesting links out of browser tabs and into a durable collection. It uses Kirigami and C++ on the desktop, plain TOML files by default, optional multi-user server storage, OpenRouter-powered metadata, KWallet for secrets, and a proper Fedora RPM. The source is not public, but the design is worth documenting.

Leaving the Apple Ecosystem: One Fairphone Instead of Two iPhones

For years I carried two iPhones, a personal iPhone 12 and a work iPhone SE, and neither ever felt at home in my Linux and BSD centric life. I finally collapsed both into a single Fairphone Gen6 running Android with separate personal and work profiles. Here is why I picked the Fairphone, how Android slots into a desktop Linux workflow far better than iOS ever did, which apps I kept, which I swapped, why finally being able to read GPG encrypted mail on my phone is a real upgrade, and where the device falls short.