Mac Studio as a Kubernetes Compute Satellite

My K3s cluster runs on six Intel NUCs. They’re great for the 50+ containers that make up my homelab — Plex, Home Assistant, Frigate, Paperless, the usual suspects. But they’re terrible at machine learning. Four Skylake cores and 32 GB of RAM per node doesn’t get you far when Immich wants to classify 80,000 photos or Frigate wants a vision model to describe who’s at your door. The Mac Studio sitting under my desk — M1 Ultra, 64 GB unified memory — is the opposite problem. Absurd single-machine ML performance, but I don’t want to migrate my entire cluster to it. I want the K8s cluster to stay the control plane for routing, TLS, service discovery, and GitOps, while the Mac handles the heavy compute. ...

July 21, 2026 · 6 min · Rusty Bower

Fixing 10,000 Upside-Down Scanned Slides with a Local Vision LLM

My grandfather had about 10,000 35mm slides. I rented a SlideSnap X1 and spent a weekend feeding them through — 33 boxes worth, organized into folders by box. The scanner itself was great, but when you’re pushing through thousands of slides in a weekend, some inevitably go in upside down or backwards. No metadata, no EXIF orientation flags — just thousands of JPEGs, some right-side up, some not, sitting on a NAS. ...

February 23, 2026 · 7 min · Rusty Bower