Last month I became the proud owner of a 2026 Ram Promaster and drove it 16 hours from my home in Virginia to a piece of land in the middle of nowhere to convert it into a mobile basecamp that I can take on trips and work out of.

Roughly speaking, the plan (if you can even call it that) is to spend ~3 months turning this big empty metal box into a studio I can take on road trips whenever I want.

I still haven’t settled on a layout, but the general idea is something like this. This isn’t a full time living situation so I’m adding more emphasis on a desk for working remotely from but something like this is the goal.

A Mobile Homelab

I’ll make a future post going into far greater detail about the plans I have for the homelab, but I’m going to have the (to my knowledge at least…) world’s only Kubernetes cluster running inside a van. Probably not practical, but definitely cool. I’m still working out the power requirements for this but will post a detailed writeup when I do. Currently the only power options I’ve locked in is 600 watts of solar power.

The Vannomicon

You may have seen The Kubenomicon… I’ve been documenting every tool, component, decision, and technique I’m using to convert this van and when I’m done I’m planning on releasing a detailed mdbook that details each step so you don’t have to spend the 10,000 hours of research I did.

Something along the lines of this:

Why Jia Van?

The name of this project is Jia Van. The name comes from the persona used to carry out one of the most interesting compromises in recent memory. The story goes something like this: a pseudonymous contributor named Jia Tan spent years building trust within the XZ Utils project before sneaking a backdoor into the compression library that ships on pretty much every Linux distro. The whole thing was caught almost by accident when a Microsoft engineer noticed SSH was taking 500ms longer than usual.