Maker's Logbook by Stefan Herndlbauer

Week 017 (Nov 17–Nov 30): A Fresh Start, New Ideas & the Road to HakFabrik

✍ Week’s content, if you missed it

I took a one-week break to refocus, recharge, and come back with fresh energy.

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🛠 This Week at the Workbench

• Finished the landing page for HakFabrik.com. I integrated a third-party email service and built a small API to keep full flexibility over form handling and data flows.
• Updated my home lab setup by adding an Intel NUC to the Proxmox cluster as a dedicated malware and reverse-engineering sandbox. I isolated it with its own VLAN and a pfSense virtual machine to ensure clean separation from the rest of my network.
• Solved more CTF challenges on HackTheBox, and realized that my MacBook setup limits me for deeper reverse-engineering tasks. Hopefully the new Linux laptop will fix this bottleneck soon.

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💡 Things I Learned or Noticed

• While preparing my new podcast episode, I reflected a lot on the format. Recent recordings felt stiff, so I tried a more honest, conversational style — closer to how I naturally think and talk. It felt refreshing.
• Explored several design-to-HTML tools that promise to convert UI designs directly into production-ready code. Despite the hype (TeleportHQ, Anima, etc.), nothing produced clean enough HTML/CSS that I’d use in real projects. For now, hand-crafted code still wins.

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📸 Snapshot of the Week

🔗 Inspiration & Resources

• ​https://elevenlabs.io — Tested AI-generated voices for podcasting. Impressive and slightly frightening, what’s possible now.
• ​https://www.eu-inc.org/petition — A new initiative I support. A unified EU-INC corporate structure could simplify cross-border startup creation in Europe.
• ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJVFXsNzYZQ — A great intro to NixOS, a Linux distro where your entire system configuration is defined as deterministic code.

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🚀 What’s Next

Next week, I’m planning to start building the first hardware prototype for HakFabrik.