Cygan Labs
Practical computing for real life.
A practical home for self-hosting, systems, AI, useful tools, projects, and media-server fixes, written for people who want technology to be understandable and useful.
Start with what you need
Cygan Labs is organized by practical lanes. Pick the area closest to what you are trying to understand, fix, or build.
Projects
Public builds, utilities, experiments, and infrastructure pieces, including DriftLoom, SimpleQR, ShittyQR, Plex Requests, CyberChef, and more.
Self-Hosting
Field-guide pages for getting started, maintenance, remote access, backups, media stacks, monitoring, and sensible defaults.
Tools
Small workbench utilities like Link Cleaner, Markdown Cleaner, Heading Outline Checker, SimpleQR, ShittyQR, and hosted helpers that solve one clear problem at a time.
Fast starts: Link Cleaner, Markdown Cleaner, and Heading Outline Checker.
AI & Agents
Grounded writing on AI tools, schools and organizations, agent systems, permissions, local AI, and workflow reality checks.
Systems & Ops
Reliability, monitoring, access boundaries, operations judgment, and the habits that keep systems understandable over time.
Plex Help
Blurry video, buffering, remote streaming, quality settings, and device-specific Plex fixes for common playback problems.
Device guides: Chromecast, Samsung TV, Android TV / Google TV, and Roku.
Latest writing
- AI Crawler Policy Is Publisher Ops NowAI crawler control is moving from a robots.txt checkbox to an operational policy. Cloudflare’s new Search, Agent, and Training controls show why publishers need explicit rules before September’s default changes arrive.
- AI Automation Needs Budget Controls More Than More KeysGitHub’s July Copilot CLI updates make AI automation easier to run in Actions without personal access tokens. The real operator lesson is bigger: once AI agents move into CI, teams need policy, audit trails, and budget controls as much as model access.
- Secret Scanning Has to Follow People, Not ReposGitHub’s public monitoring preview is a useful reminder that credential exposure is a people-and-boundaries problem, not just a repository setting.