Blackpool Cricket Club
Designed and installed a full LED scoreboard for the club — custom built to display live match scores, overs, wickets, and player stats in real time during games.
Personal Tech Journey
This is
ds2k Cloud Services.
Homelab tinkerer. Community builder. Gamer. Staff @ Midz-30.
A collection of things I've built, broken, fixed, and learned from — self-hosted infrastructure, real-world installs, automation experiments, and whatever else I've been pulling apart in my spare time.
Self-Hosted
Home Automation
LED Installs
Networking
AI & Automation
Dudley
About Me
A bit about
A bit about
the bloke behind it.
Based in Dudley, West Midlands. I spend most of my time either around cars or pulling apart servers — sometimes both at the same time if the project calls for it.
This site is a personal record of the things I've built and tinkered with over the years. From self-hosted infrastructure running on hardware in my house, to LED scoreboard installs at cricket clubs and football grounds, to setting up display systems at places like Wingstop — it's been a varied journey.
Outside the tech, I'm part of the Midz-30 car club community — a proper grassroots group of car people from across the West Midlands. I help out as staff and it's where a big chunk of my time and energy goes.
Midz-30
West Midlands Car Club Community
Region
West Midlands
Community
Car Enthusiasts
Meets & Events
Regular — local & regional
Staff Member
Behind the scenes, keeping things running
Self-Hosted Stack
The homelab.
Everything runs on hardware at home. Some of it's sensible. Some of it probably didn't need to exist — but here we are.
Automation & AI
Live
Home Assistant
Full home automation setup. Lights, sensors, heating, energy monitoring, presence detection — the works. Probably over-engineered for one person.
Active
Hermes AI Agent
A personal AI assistant built from the ground up. Handles tasks, talks to other services in the stack, and makes things a bit smarter across the board.
Live
n8n
Self-hosted workflow automation. Connects everything together — home events to notifications to data pipelines. Runs more of my day than it probably should.
Communication & Email
Live
Mailinabox
Self-hosted email server. Handles everything — SMTP, IMAP, spam filtering, SPF, DKIM, DMARC. Full control, no third-party dependency.
Live
3CX
VoIP phone system running on-premises. Full PBX with extensions, call routing, and softphone clients. Proper telecoms without the recurring costs.
Security & Surveillance
Live
Blue Iris + DeepStack AI
IP camera system with AI-driven object detection. DeepStack identifies people, vehicles, and objects — so alerts only fire when something actually matters, not every time a leaf blows past.
Infrastructure & Networking
Live
Coolify
Self-hosted PaaS for deploying and managing containerised apps. Currently hosting several sites built to accompany a friend's published books — giving them a proper online home without the hosting bills.
Live
Unifi Network
Full Unifi stack — managed switches, access points, firewall, and controller. VLAN segmentation, traffic monitoring, and a network map that's probably more detailed than it needs to be.
Live
RustDesk Server
Self-hosted remote desktop relay and rendezvous server. No data going through third-party infrastructure — full control over remote access across devices.
Live
PXE Boot Server
Network boot server for provisioning machines over the wire. No USB drives needed — boot into installers, live environments, or custom images directly from the network.
Document Management
Live
Paperless Suite
Paperless-ngx as the core document management system, with Paperless-AI and Paperless-GPT layered on top. Auto-tagging, OCR, AI-assisted filing, and GPT-powered search and summarisation. Inbox zero for documents.
Media
Media Servers
Self-hosted
Jellyfin
Current
Plex
Emby
Real-World Projects
Out in the wild.
Physical installs and builds — LED systems, display screens, and digital infrastructure for venues, clubs, and businesses.
Halesowen Football Club
Installed a combined LED scoring display and advertising screen. Live match scores sit alongside rotating sponsor and club advertising content — all managed remotely.
Wingstop
Fitted out digital menu boards, window displays, and LED display systems across Wingstop locations. Content management setup so menus can be updated centrally without an on-site visit.
Get In Touch
Say hello.
Whether you've got a question about something on here, want to talk tech, or you know me from Midz-30 — my inbox is open.