About Tinker, Fabricate, Operate

Tinker, Fabricate, Operate is my public technology journal for documenting home lab projects, self-hosted systems, automation experiments, AI tools, maker projects, and practical troubleshooting.

The name describes how I approach technology:
  • Tinker with ideas, tools, and experiments.
  • Fabricate practical solutions through code, hardware, workflows, and documentation.
  • Operate real systems that need to be maintained, improved, monitored, and secured.
The goal of this site is to share real-world technical learning: what worked, what broke, what I changed, and what I learned along the way.

Backstory of TFO.net
TFO.net was born in the early days of the Internet World Wide Web under the name The Future Online. The Future Online (TFO.net) was originally intended to be an Internet extension of a computer bulletin board system (BBS) called The Future Generation BBS. For those of you not familiar with what a computer BBS is/was, a BBS was a computer that anyone with a telephone modem and phone line could dial into directly. Once connected, callers could read and post messages, download files, play games, and chat with other users, all through a text-based interface. Think of it as a pre-web Internet: a community hub, file library, newspaper, and arcade rolled into one and run by a single person (the "sysop") out of their home. BBS's were a mostly free version of the early AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve subscription-based dial-up services. My particular BBS operated on an Intel 486 processor PC (I think it had 16MB RAM), IBM OS/2 Warp operating system, ProBoard BBS software, and FrontDoor FidoNet mail software. And then, high-speed always-on Internet via cable companies eventually killed the BBS and other dial-up services that didn't (or couldn't) compete with the new high-speed Internet offering. And that is a brief summary of the TFO.net origin story.

 

Topics Covered

  • Home lab infrastructure
  • Self-hosting and cloud hosting
  • ComposrCMS development
  • n8n workflows
  • Home Assistant automation
  • AI agents and automation assistants
  • Networking and VPN concepts
  • 3D printing and robotics
 

Public Documentation Policy

For security reasons, this site does not publish private infrastructure details, internal network addresses, reverse proxy subdomains, private service URLs, VPN endpoints, API keys, tokens, or administrative access paths.