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
- Shorter TLS Certificates Need a Renewal Window AuditLet’s Encrypt’s shorter certificate schedule will expose brittle cron jobs, manual challenges, and broken reload hooks. Audit the whole renewal path now.
- Copy Fail Is a Host-Kernel Inventory ProblemCVE-2026-31431 is a local Linux privilege-escalation flaw with a wider operational lesson: containers share the host kernel, and appliance kernels belong in the patch inventory too.
- Prompt Injection Is Static Analysis NowCodeQL 2.26.0 added JavaScript and TypeScript detection for system prompt injection. The practical lesson is bigger than one query: prompt boundaries now belong in code review, CI, and release gates.