It’s a little bit of everything.

I haven’t really dabbled with tech much outside of work since college. This year, I started on a huge journey to change that for a couple of reasons:

• The ongoing technofascist shitshow was the biggest motivator. I want to move as far away from big tech as possible. I’m sick of passively supporting companies that supply and fund genocides, steal and cheat their way to billions, and shove AI bullshit into everything.
• Regaining control and privacy. This goes hand-in-hand with the previous point. Complacency is part of how we got here.
• On a personal note, I quit Twitch streaming last year after a decade, and frankly just needed a new hobby.
• The Steam Deck showed me that gaming on Linux day-to-day is extremely viable after all these years. Last time I tried a Linux desktop, it was practically non-existent outside of Valve porting the Orange Box.
• It just makes for some interesting projects

I’ve done all of this in the past 5 months:

• Got a new desktop (I just needed the upgrade in general), tweaked the hell out of Windows on it, but wanted more
• Scrapped that plan and set up a CachyOS dual boot. I’ve touched Windows maybe 5 times since then. I keep it around just in case but I never use it.
• Wiped my bloated phone and installed GrapheneOS
• Started making some moves on the software side: finally bought a good VPN, moved off GMail to Tuta, started using LibreWolf and Fennec, etc etc.
• In that process, I got a cheap VPS and set up NextCloud as a Drive replacement. No idea what I was doing, security nightmare I’m sure, and I ended up scrapping that and going the full selfhost route
• Now I’m selfhosting 40ish services on a mini PC that not only replace big tech products I used to use, but also add so much more utility

I grew out of just about everything in my old digital library so it’s been long gone, but I didn’t realize just how much stuff I had on my old bandcamp account already. Grabbed all of that, bought a bunch more, obtained everything else from my Tidal rotations and slapped it all into Navidrome.

The initial setup is definitely a pain but the payoff has been tremendous. Not financially though - I spent more buying new shit from small artists than I would spend on a streaming service in a year. But that goes so much further for them than streaming does anyway.

My wife was mentioning the other day that if something happened to me she’d have absolutely no idea how to work any of this shit and that convinced me to actually start documenting it LMAO

Good time to start doing it too. Aside from setting up a NAS this weekend and figuring out an audiobook solution (not something I’ve ever dabbled with but I really should start reading some communist theory), I’ve got this project right where I want it for a long while.

I’m putting together a pretty simple one this week. Got a used HP Elitedesk G4 SSF for around $150, already have 2 8TB external drives lying around that are easy enough to shuck and slap into it. Should be pretty easy to just slap TrueNAS Scale onto it, set up a mirror with the 2 drives, and be good to go for a while.

I’ll definitely need more space down the road and this thing can’t fit more than 2 drives without some modifications (3 is doable, but 4 will take some 3D printed parts which I believe someone’s still working on fine-tuning). But it’s good enough for me for now, still got 2.5TB I’m not using.

If I thought about storage a bit more before starting this project, I probably would’ve just gotten the same SSF but with some slightly better specs to use as the entire server, rather than running 2 different machines, but oh well.

Edit: Slight change of plans, got a 12tb drive free through a program at work, so gonna go with UnRAID instead. The license fee is a bit disappointing but it seems to suit my needs better, and being able to mix and match drives of any size at will is pretty nice

Grab the entire series, load it up on the tv, and let it rip all day

I started this about a month ago, absolutely no idea what I was doing, and in that short time this little box has grown a ton. Got the basics for cloud storage, jellyfin with the arr suite, navidrome to replace spotify/tidal, etc. Got my scanner going right into paperless, finally starting a budget planner with actualbudget, even set up homebox to maybe eventually keep track of my collections of random bullshit. Spent 3 days fighting with Wireguard and gluetun to make a single VPN connection that’ll hook me into my LAN but also output all my traffic through Mullvad, using pihole as my DNS - I should get Unbound set up at some point too but that’s a project for another day.

Today I learned about homeassistant, and while I’m not one to care about IoT shit or whatever, just dabbling with NFC tags for the lights and such has been pretty neat.

This week I’m getting a second machine in that I’m going to use exclusively as a NAS and stop relying on USB external hard drives.

I really just wanted a little 24/7 Bob Ross box with a bit of cloud storage, and this project blew up a lot more than I thought it would LOL

This is what I’m currently doing, I use backblaze b2 for basically everything that’s not movies/shows/music/roms, along with backing up my docker stacks etc to the same external drive my media’s currently on.

I’m looking at a few good steps to upgrade this but nothing excessive:

• NAS for media and storing local backups
• Regular backups of everything but media to a small USB drive
• Get a big ass external HDD that I’ll update once a month with everything and keep in my storage unit and ditch backblaze

Not the cleanest setup but it’ll do the job. The media backup is definitely gonna be more of a 2-1-Pray system LMAO but at least the important things will be regularly taken care of

Clearly. That’s not a good thing.