Self-Hosting on Mark Zhu's Blog

Intelligent Orchestrating the Home Lab and Smart Home by OpenClaw

labile.zhu@gmail.com (Mark Zhu) — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 03:12:15 +0800

This article demonstrates how OpenClaw Skills can orchestrate Home Lab and Smart Home intelligently. By encapsulating infrastructure knowledge, monitoring systems, ann automation APIs to structured Skills. An AI agent can troubleshooting servers, visualize operations by smart lights, and deliver a summarized real time web news through smart speaker.

Background

I have been running a home lab and a small home set up for years. Ask more and more devices and services were add, maintenance and management gradually become increasingly complex. Meanwhile, after years of experience, I realized that traditional smart homes are not fully “smart”. Most of the problems exist simply because I was too lazy to automate them probably. Now, modern AI may help mitigate those issues.

The Concepts Anatomy of OpenClaw

labile.zhu@gmail.com (Mark Zhu) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 03:12:15 +0800

OpenClaw is the most populated self-hosted personal AI assistant in the world right now. From the perspective of an AI Agent developer, it is not only a AI tool, but also one of the best real-world references for agent design patterns. It helps us create more sophisticated designs when building our agents. In this article, I will go down the rabbit hole and ultimately build a conceptual model.

Conceptual Model

The following diagram is the conceptual model I built.

Self-hosted Matrix Channel for OpenClaw - Take the red pill

labile.zhu@gmail.com (Mark Zhu) — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 03:12:15 +0800

This article explains how to self-host an OpenClaw AI assistant using a Matrix chat channel. It covers setting up a Matrix server, installing and troubleshooting the OpenClaw Matrix plugin, configuring access policies, and enabling secure, private AI interactions without relying on third-party messaging platforms.

Digital Zen: How I Tamed the Chaos of My Gadgets with Homebox

labile.zhu@gmail.com (Mark Zhu) — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 08:12:15 +0800

As a software engineer, my life has always been a blend of the digital and the physical. By day, I build complex architectures for large corporations, helping them manage their vast digital assets and streamline operations. By night (and on weekends), I’m a tinkerer. Whether it’s writing a custom script to automate my lighting, setting up a cluster of Raspberry Pi servers in my basement, or performing a DIY oil change on my car, I find immense joy in hands-on projects.

ChatBlog - An Experiment in AI Interaction for Personal Blogs

labile.zhu@gmail.com (Mark Zhu) — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 03:12:15 +0800

Introduction

Adding a chatbot to a blog is both interesting and practical. It can answer readers’ simple questions based on the blog content and the author’s introduction articles. ChatBlog (chat + blog) might be an engaging and useful model for interactive technical sharing. This article documents my exploration and implementation process.

Currently, the interactive knowledge base + LLM model is popular. A blog serves as an open knowledge base for tech enthusiasts, and making it open to chat is an intriguing idea.