Tech help that speaks human
Day-to-day IT for small practices — the fixes, the setup, the “why is this doing that,” handled calmly and explained in plain English. No jargon, no condescension.
~ whoami
james brooks · renton · greater seattle, wa
I make technology calm for people who’d rather not think about it.
I’m the person behind ThatNerdKnows. I fix computers, build websites, and run a homelab that’s probably more elaborate than it needs to be. The point of all of it is the same: make the technical stuff calm, honest, and understandable — so you can get back to your actual work.
// who
The short version
- role
- Founder — ThatNerdKnows (IT support + web design)
- based
- Renton · Greater Seattle, WA
- works with
- Small practices & owner-run businesses — often in mental-health care
- doing this since
- 2014
- off the clock
- Homelab, self-hosting, local LLMs, and writing down what I figure out
I started ThatNerdKnows because good tech help shouldn’t require you to already understand tech. Most of my clients don’t want to become power users — they want someone trustworthy to hand it to. The homelab habit is why I can: I break and rebuild this stuff for fun, so by the time it touches your business it’s boring, in the best way.
// what I do
Sites that earn trust
Accessible, fast, findable websites — especially for people in sensitive fields like mental-health care, where the site has to feel as careful as the work behind it.
Self-hosting & homelab
The part I do for love: Proxmox clusters, local LLMs, self-hosted everything. It’s where I keep my hands dirty — and why the business advice is grounded, not googled.
// what I handle
The everyday reality
The unglamorous truth of small-business IT — drawn from hundreds of real, resolved support issues. This is the day job, the range of it:
// writing
Things I’ve figured out and written down
Real problems from the lab and the field, documented properly — the kind of guide I wish I’d found when I was stuck at 2 a.m. The deep, technical end; the everyday small-business version lives on thatnerdknows.com.
- 01 Linked but no IP: a network detective story A device links up but never gets an address. A calm, layer-by-layer triage that finds the real culprit — and the one conclusion people miss.
- 02 Self-hosting Supabase in a Proxmox LXC The full Supabase stack in one lightweight Proxmox LXC (~1.3 GB idle) — plus the new ES256 JWT key system that trips people up.
- 03 Running 30B-parameter LLMs on a Ryzen iGPU Give an integrated Radeon real VRAM under Proxmox and serve models too big for a small discrete GPU — the LXC setup, UMA tuning, and the real cost.
- 04 Self-hosted error tracking with GlitchTip A lightweight, Sentry-compatible error tracker on Proxmox, dashboard behind Authentik SSO while ingest and the API keep working — the gotcha avoided.
- 05 SSO for any app with Authentik + Traefik Put single sign-on in front of any self-hosted app — no app changes — with Authentik forward-auth and a Traefik middleware, plus three gotchas.
- 06 CrowdSec IPS in front of Traefik A lightweight IPS that reads Traefik logs, blocks brute-force and scanning IPs, and pulls a community blocklist — plus the Cloudflare real-IP gotcha.
- 07 A flash-and-walk-away Proxmox install Unattended, headless Proxmox VE from a USB stick — no monitor, no keyboard. The answer file, the assistant, and three gotchas.
- 08 A homelab status page with Uptime Kuma A clean self-hosted uptime dashboard with history, alerts, and an optional public status page in a lightweight Proxmox container — and where NOT to put it.
- 09 When your iPhone won't AirPrint The printer's-right-there-but-the-phone-can't-see-it problem — turn a Linux/CUPS host into an AirPrint bridge for a host-based Brother printer.
- 10 Fixing random N100 & N5105 mini-PC freezes The budget-homelab darling that hard-freezes at random while idle — no panic, the logs just stop. The deep C-state hang: diagnosis and fix.
// now
What’s running lately
last updated 2026-07
- lab Proxmox cluster + a Ryzen box doing local LLM inference on the iGPU
- building Self-hosted tooling for the business — tickets, docs, analytics, all mine
- learning Getting more out of small local models than they’ve any right to give
- reading — your pick, James
// contact
Got something gnarly? Let’s talk.
Whether it’s a business that needs steady IT, a website that needs to feel trustworthy, or a homelab rabbit hole worth comparing notes on — I’m easy to reach.