Personal blog of Lee Teong Hoe (Mr Hoelee) — full-stack engineering, DevOps & self-hosting, AI automation, and Web3 experiments.https://blog.hoelee.com/enhttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/replacing-rdpguard-with-ipban/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/replacing-rdpguard-with-ipban/I migrated from paid RDPGuard 7.8.7 to open-source IPBan 4.1.0 — and hit three undocumented traps, including an uninstaller that would have silently unbanned 12 attackers.Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopswindowssecurityrdpipbanrdpguardbrute-forcefirewallself-hostinghttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/self-hosted-speech-to-text-api/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/self-hosted-speech-to-text-api/I run a self-hosted speech-to-text API on a single GPU PC. Dictation works from Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android — private, unlimited, and about 5x faster than typing.Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studieswhispercudasttn8nnginxself-hostingaihttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/n8n-v1-to-v2-upgrade-gotchas/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/n8n-v1-to-v2-upgrade-gotchas/My self-hosted n8n 1.x to 2.40.1 upgrade surfaced seven silent breakages at once — a telemetry schema rejection, deprecated webhook vars, and a DB override that quietly disabled the AI sandbox.Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopsn8ndockerupgradeself-hostingdebuggingautomationhttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/running-tts-as-a-service-with-token-sidecars/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/running-tts-as-a-service-with-token-sidecars/A reading app needed TTS. Cloud free tiers expire tokens in 10 minutes and 1 hour. Here's the sidecar pattern that kept Azure and Google voices working for a year with no secrets in any workflow.Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTain8nttsazuregoogle-clouddockerautomationsidecarhttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/self-healing-digital-goods-entitlements/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/self-healing-digital-goods-entitlements/How I built a five-workflow entitlement system that grants, expires, and continuously repairs customer file access — with a build-time code-sharing trick and a public endpoint designed to leak nothing.Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studiesn8nnocodbalistaccess-controldockerautomationdigital-goodshttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/shipping-an-ai-photo-editor-as-a-wordpress-plugin/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/shipping-an-ai-photo-editor-as-a-wordpress-plugin/From a single HTML file to a shipped WordPress plugin: the fal.ai async queue, a watermark that must never silently fail, optional lead capture, and five bugs that only appeared in production.Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studieswordpressphpfal-aidockerai-imagejavascripthttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/the-cause-was-trim-not-the-ssds/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/the-cause-was-trim-not-the-ssds/Two weeks after a btrfs RAID1 pool corrupted on healthy-looking NVMe drives, the same all-zero checksum reappeared on a different drive stack. The culprit was queued TRIM (NCQ) on Seagate IronWolf 110 SSDs — a firmware bug FreeBSD blacklisted but Linux never did. How I caught it and the fix.Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopsunraidbtrfstrimssdraiddata-losssmarttroubleshootingseagatehttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/self-hosting-mem0-memory-stack/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/self-hosting-mem0-memory-stack/A private, self-hosted memory layer for AI agents — mem0 API + LiteLLM + PostgreSQL with pgvector on a Synology NAS. Semantic memory under your control, not a third party's.Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studiesmem0dockerpostgrespgvectorlitellmaisharinghttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/that-dying-ssd-was-just-a-bad-sata-cable/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/that-dying-ssd-was-just-a-bad-sata-cable/A Seagate IronWolf 110 SSD threw WRITE FPDMA timeouts, failed mkfs with 'superblock magic doesn't match', and went silent — a textbook dying drive. I swapped one SATA cable and it formatted clean with zero errors. How to test before condemning a drive.Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopsunraidsatassdstoragetroubleshootingsmartfiocablehttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/when-smart-says-healthy-but-your-raid-is-corrupting-data/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/when-smart-says-healthy-but-your-raid-is-corrupting-data/A btrfs RAID1 pool on two healthy-looking NVMe drives quietly corrupted a Windows VM. How I caught it with a checksum forensic — and why the root cause (M.2 riser link fault vs batch defect) is still uncertain, with both drives now testing clean.Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopsunraidbtrfsnvmeraidstoragedata-losstroubleshootinghttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/unraid-stop-array-hangs-on-swapfile/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/unraid-stop-array-hangs-on-swapfile/My Unraid array stop hung forever at unmounting disks because an 8 GB btrfs swapfile pinned /mnt/cache. Root cause, the /boot/config/stop trap, and two User Scripts that fix it.Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopsunraidswapbtrfszramdockeruser-scriptshttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/passbolt-hang-three-failure-modes/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/passbolt-hang-three-failure-modes/My self-hosted Passbolt returned 504s for weeks: a null GPG fingerprint stalled email delivery, a container recreate wiped the fix, and ssl.force behind a proxy caused a redirect loop.Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopspassboltdockergpgsmtpreverse-proxyportainerhttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/scraping-bot-walled-marketplace-warm-browser-session/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/scraping-bot-walled-marketplace-warm-browser-session/Scraping bot-walled marketplace listings for a client's used-electronics business: warm CDP session, fail-fast health checks, split-wait rendering.Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTengineeringscrapingcdpheadless-chromeanti-botshopeepythonhttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/best-ai-video-generators-2026/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/best-ai-video-generators-2026/Compare the best AI video generators in 2026 — free vs paid plans, real pricing, local open-weight models, and my hands-on LTX-2.3 test.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTaiai-videovideo-generationltxopen-weightspricingveohttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-i-made-my-own-songs-with-suno-ai/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-i-made-my-own-songs-with-suno-ai/I wrote the lyrics, tuned the prompts, and shipped seven songs with Suno AI — folk ballads, a kids' tune, an anime-style Heart Sutra. Full workflow + the tracks.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studiessunoai-musicmusiclyricspromptingaihttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/ai-furniture-compositing-with-flux-kontext/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/ai-furniture-compositing-with-flux-kontext/Compositing furniture photos into styled room scenes with fal.ai FLUX.1 Kontext — the multi-image endpoint, the tainted-canvas fix, and why prompt enhancement had to go.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studiesfal-aifluxai-imagejavascriptcanvasecommercehttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/syncing-a-self-improving-ai-agent-across-machines/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/syncing-a-self-improving-ai-agent-across-machines/How I sync my Hermes agent's skills, config, and cron jobs between two PCs with a git-backed profile distribution — and why I sync manually instead of on a cron.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studieshermesgitgiteaai-agentsdevopssynchttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/using-chinese-llm-apis-from-malaysia/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/using-chinese-llm-apis-from-malaysia/Using Chinese LLM APIs (GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4) from Malaysia: how I paid in RMB, handled phone verification, and which providers actually work.Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTaillmapideepseekglmalipaymalaysiahttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/the-nocodb-attachment-that-wouldnt-update/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/the-nocodb-attachment-that-wouldnt-update/Two small gotchas from backfilling 300 rows: NocoDB ignores a path change when the attachment keeps its id, and a lookahead regex silently skipped URLs without a file extension.Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTnotesnocodbbackfillpythonregexdata-pipelinehttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/why-your-headless-browser-cant-scrape-everything/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/why-your-headless-browser-cant-scrape-everything/Two second-hand marketplaces, two very different walls: Goofish blocks a headless browser with 'illegal access' while Carousell keeps serving data. The lesson is to read how a page delivers data before you reach for Playwright.Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studiesscrapingplaywrightbrowserlessdockergoofishcarousellanti-bothttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-i-vetted-20-vps-providers-with-parallel-subagents/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-i-vetted-20-vps-providers-with-parallel-subagents/A case study in orchestrating parallel AI subagents to run due diligence on 20 hosting providers — WHOIS, AUP, and reputation checks — collapsing a multi-hour research task into a structured, verifiable vendor scorecard.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studiesai-orchestrationsubagentsdue-diligencehostingdevopshttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/hardening-a-tor-onion-service/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/hardening-a-tor-onion-service/Out of curiosity I mirrored my portfolio and git server onto the darknet. Here's the hardening that held, the parts that silently broke, and whether it's worth offering to clients.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopstordockersecurityself-hostingnetworkinghttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/automating-cyberpanel-without-the-ui/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/automating-cyberpanel-without-the-ui/CyberPanel v2 killed the documented JSON API and left only the Angular UI's own session+CSRF endpoints. Here's the exact auth flow and how I found the real functions behind the pages.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopscyberpanelapireverse-engineeringautomationdjangoself-hostingcurlhttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/authentik-major-upgrade-gotchas/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/authentik-major-upgrade-gotchas/A year's worth of authentik major-version upgrade pain: storage mount changes, RBAC session cleanup, trusted proxies, and the authorization_flow vs authentication_flow mix-up that broke SSO.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopsauthentikssodockerportainerself-hostingoidcupgradehttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-to-verify-a-hosting-provider-before-you-buy/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-to-verify-a-hosting-provider-before-you-buy/A reusable checklist for separating real hosting claims from marketing: check the domain age against the 'since' claim, read the AUP for silent disqualifiers, and cross-check reputation on third-party sources.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTtutorialshostingvpsdue-diligencewhoisdevopshttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/why-telegram-bot-notifications-die/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/why-telegram-bot-notifications-die/A debugging story: a Dockerized telegram monitor whose sendPhoto calls returned 400 from nginx/1.30.1 while getMe worked fine — an IPv6-only DNS answer, a wrong extra_hosts IP, and a multipart join that corrupted JPEG bytes.Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTdevopsdockertelegrampythondnsipv6debuggingportainerhttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-i-built-the-digikedai-telegram-bot/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-i-built-the-digikedai-telegram-bot/A customer-support AI bot that answers questions and provisions free-trial accounts over Telegram and WhatsApp — TypeScript, grammY, a Cloudflare tunnel webhook, and a self-hosted LiteLLM gateway.Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studiestelegramdockercloudflarelitellmtypescriptaihttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/hello-world/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/hello-world/What this blog is for: technical writing, self-hosting experience, and a record of what I build and learn.Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTnotesintrohttps://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-i-host-this-blog/https://blog.hoelee.com/posts/how-i-host-this-blog/A walkthrough of the end-to-end pipeline that builds and serves this site — git-as-CMS, a self-hosted runner on my unRaid server, and Cloudflare in front.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMTcase-studiesastrogiteaci-cdself-hostingdockercloudflare