About

I’m Reg. For about twenty years I was the sort of computer user the industry loves: I paid for Windows, I paid for cloud storage, I paid for photo tools, and when something broke I paid someone to un-break it.

Then, not long ago, I stopped. The reasons were partly principle, partly budget, and partly sheer bloody-mindedness. The result is what this blog documents:

• Self-hosting — my files, photos, media and passwords now live on a humming little box in my own house, and I have opinions about every scar earned getting there.
• Linux — the desktop too. An Arch-based distro, chosen with the confidence of a man who had never edited a bootloader entry in his life.
• AI — the bit I didn’t expect. Local models, image generation on a laptop GPU, and AI assistants that write half my configuration files while I supervise with a cup of tea.

Every post starts free. The full articles — the actual commands, the actual configs, the honest account of what broke — are for subscribers. It’s priced at roughly half a pint a month, and it keeps the blog independent: no ads, no sponsorships, no “this post is brought to you by a VPN company”.

Reg Barker is a pen name. The mistakes, regrettably, are all real.

Questions? post@itworkedinmyhead.org