About this site, and me

I'm Richard Baxter. I've spent the best part of fifteen years in technical SEO - I founded Builtvisible - and these days I build AI tooling at Houtini. This site is the hobby side of all that: the mining and the local-AI gear I actually run on my own bench, written up first-hand.

For me, this started because I own a gaming rig. One card became a couple, a couple became a mining rig humming away in the corner, and before long I was elbow-deep in waterblocks and thermal pads trying to keep the things cool. I wrote it all down as I went, mostly so I'd remember what worked.

Then the Ethereum Merge happened and GPU mining largely stopped making sense overnight. The rigs didn't go to waste though. Those same 24GB cards turned out to be the cheapest sensible way to run large language models at home, and I found myself back on the same bench, doing the same cooling and multi-GPU tinkering, for a completely different reason.

So that's what this site is now. Two halves of the same hobby. On one side, home and lottery Bitcoin mining - the little Bitaxe on the shelf, the long odds, the solo pools. On the other, local-AI rigs - which GPU to buy, what your VRAM will actually run, how to keep it all cool. The hardware in the middle bridges both, and I've owned or run most of it.

The one rule I hold to: tell you the truth. Home mining almost never profits, and I'll say so on every page rather than sell you a dream. Every spec here is checked against the manufacturer or a proper teardown before it ships, and the settings are the ones people actually run. If I earn a small commission when you buy through a link, it never changes the take. That's the whole point of running my own site instead of writing sponsored posts for someone else's.

Questions, corrections, or a block find you want to brag about? I'd like to hear it.

- Richard Baxter · Houtini