About.md

I build things to understand them. Sometimes they work.
Sometimes they teach me something better than working would have.

I'm Christian T. Drieling — engineer, tinkerer, and collector of
half-finished side projects based in Oldenburg, Germany.

This blog is where I write down what happened: the experiments,
the infrastructure decisions, the AI rabbit holes I fell into at
11pm on a Tuesday. No polished theory — just applied curiosity.
Try something, see what breaks, figure out why.

What this is

Applied Curiosity is a personal lab journal. I write about things
I've actually tried, built, or broken — with enough detail that
future-me (and maybe you) can reproduce or avoid it.

Topics I keep coming back to:

  • AI that runs on hardware you own
  • Self-hosted infrastructure and the lessons it teaches
  • LLMs in practice — what works outside the demos
  • Automation, home lab, and the joy of it works on my machine

What this is not

  • A tutorial site. Things break mid-post and I'll tell you.
  • Thought leadership. I'm figuring this out as I go.
  • Up to date. I write when something is worth writing about.
  • Vendor-neutral. I use what works for me, not what's popular.
  • A substitute for the docs. Read those too.

Stack

Local-first. Cloud where it makes sense.

Hardware
MacBook Pro M4 Max — 128 GB Unified Memory
Mac Studio M3 Ultra — 96 GB (waiting for delivery)

Local Inference
LM Studio · oMLX · Ollama on Proxmox

Models I run regularly

  • Text: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B · Gemma4-31B · Qwen3.5-9B
  • Voice (TTS): Qwen3-TTS · Voxtral-4B
  • Speech (STT): Parakeet-TDT
  • Embeddings: jina-embeddings-v5 + jina-reranker-v3

Agents & Automation
Hermes Agent · n8n · Open WebUI Pipelines

Search & RAG
Perplexica · Apache Tika · Jina stack

Cloud fallback
OpenRouter / Claude API — when the model needs to be smart and fast

Uptime: mostly.