Some drives are worse than others and higher capacities get worse and worse, in my experience, Seagate drives are extremely loud.

If you get helium drives (like wd red plus > 8TB i think),or 2nd hand hgst/ WD enterprise drives) they are significantly quieter.

But, having an ssd is cheaper probably. I have an SSD for the boot drive and all databases, configuration folders, etc… In docker so general IO is fast, then media, documents, pictures, etc… On the big HDDs.

KNX.

Everything is decentrally programmed, and you can do extra automations and stuff from home assistant, but KNX devices are wired (generally) and will always Just Work™. More expensive that the cheaper retrofit options, but if you factor in manual overrides or getting the “better” wireless smart devices it is comparable. They generally also have a manual override at the panel. For core functions like lights, HVAC, roll shutters or blinds, etc… That is honestly the best option (unless you want every light to be an RGB light for some reason, then you still need smart bulbs)

Don’t get a tablet if you already have a Linux laptop or a dedicated workspace.

Get a drawing pad. They are better, more cost-effective, have a better feel (non-display versions), have better pens, and you aren’t restricted to neutered programs offered on android/iOS.

Wacom is traditional, but expensive and their pen tech is kind of aging at this point, but they always work flawlessly.

XPPen is the great value alternative (with even better stuff on the top end). i have an XPPen Deco Pro Gen2 and it is an absolutely great pad with the texture of paper, and their little macropad with a scroll wheel works well. The downside is that you need a screen, but it is quite ergonomic.

The few actual artists I know use the XPPen Artist Pro series which is a drawing pad with a screen, and then they just plug it into their laptop and close the lid. Not as portable, but generally as good or better experience

XPpen also has good Linux drivers. They work in the kernel by default often, but the macropad and pressure sensitivity customization won’t work globally without their drivers.

This is similar to what I do.

I have a USB drive with the whole bootloader + decryption keyfiles on it. I remove it while it is running as everything is stored in RAM and already booted.

Downside being it has to be plugged in to update the boot partition during an upgrade.

Bitwarden

There is also leantime.io that I have been hosting for 5 years or so. It is a bit more than planka or tarallo as far as scope I think, but it has integrated kanban, gannt charts, and hour logging which is all I need for my personal projects.

Your cloud example is exactly right and exactly what we want to NOT HAPPEN.

They shoved the cloud so much down our throats so that they can force you into monthly income-sucking unneeded subscriptions. That is it. That is the single reason everyone did it.

The result is now the average user has a much worse experience overall. One literally has to fight with Microsoft products to save things on their own computer. IoT and smart products literally won’t function without connections to their “cloud”. Phones come without SD card compatibility and with low flash memory to force you into cloud subscriptions. Now every damn piece of software is a way overpriced subscription that almost all originally started as “switching to cloud infrastructure” (fucking adobe creative cloud).

The “cloud” has had so many data breaches and people data have been stolen, siphoned off, lost due to bugs, and sold to earn even more cash on the side.

A huge portion of the general corporatization and bad enshittification of digital services and software in general can be attributed to “the cloud shoving down our throats” that you describe.

AI is looking to do the same thing except castrate peoples’ digital skills, critical thinking skills, transcription skills, and writing skills in order to siphon more and more of your income off in the form of AI subscriptions while they double dip and sell everything you ever say to it and triple dip in mining everything you say to it as R&D that you pay to do

Companies need to do the fucking R&D themselves with their revenue of a small country and stop forcing regular people to pay to be their alpha and beta testers and focus groups, and people gobble that boot up so hard because LLMs have a few small areas where they are slightly useful and can save 10 minutes per day and make them not have to critically think, so people will literally sell their data, their already small income, and their soul to save 10 minutes, and in 10 years the digital experience will be even more shitty and degraded than it got after “the cloud.”

Your usecase is the exact definition as using LLMs as accessibility and to actually better the user experience for certain people which is not the goal of any AI company or 99% of LLM integrations

TD;DR

Non-consentual cloud shoving has caused newer generations to think that paying corporations every month to save files is normal and that your data is not yours and always corporate property ™®©, along with the decimation of understanding simple file structures. You can actually talk to teachers and professors and they unanimously say that tech literacy has nosedived.

Now with the LLM shoving, they are trying to force the new generation to have to pay subscriptions to think, write, compose, draw, and get information by stripping them of those skills.

Also the Node 804 is worth looking into with an entire separate chamber for HDDs in order to keep them cool without exposing them to GPU and cpu heat, plus it is a lot shorter instead, sometimes easier to fit places (mATX motherboard only)

Gadgetbridge in just about the only one.

The problem is that the watches themselves use proprietary BS Bluetooth protocols with their own cryptic values to stop people from decoding their own devices unless you use their app…

I wish I could get my polar H10 to work with it… For now I have to use the polar app and export manually via the web interface…

Obsidian ticks all of these boxes and syncthing to sync notes is a 5 minute setup.

Plus it stores things in plaintext instead of a database format that vendor locks you in (despite the claim of “no vendor lock in”)

Ooooo yay another half-baked AI shoved into everything whatever possible.

Not really self-hosted, but I set up obsidian with syncthing and am going to transfer all of my notes from book stack to it and let bookstack be more organized documentation and obsidian to be a big scattering of notes and tags and such. I tried it with bookstack, but the flow was too much of a barrier for me to use it consistantly

I am doing something similar. I use OIDC for everything possible.

Authelia is quite picky about everything being correctly populated, but if I remember right, the documentation doesn’t do a great job of explaining different variables for someone outside of the security industry (similar with traefik). I found a good tutorial via search that got all of the defaults set up, then playing with the options to my liking and now it is just copy pasting the condiguration per app that I want to enable, generating an key and hashing it.

If you want, I can sanitize my config and share it?

Tons of stuff are not on fdroid due to requirements by fdroid, a longer process to push releases, etc…

It works for many apps, but there is IzzyOnDroid for much faster releases as well as dozens of fdroid repos for specific projects by default available on NeoStore.

I am not experienced enough to know the ins and outs of why fdroid is so difficult and slow for some devs, but it has been someone limited in apps at times because of it.

Holy shit I never knew that.

I really thought it was one of my apps that I used that wasn’t Foss because it was so useful.

Now I want to use it more!

Mealie is so underrated. They have meal planning, recipes, recipe parsing from the internet, grocery lists based on recipes and meal plans, like 4 different ways to organize recipes, and OIDC/SSO on top of it all!

The shed as an of site backup is a good idea.

We live in the shed (it is really its own entire stone building) during our full house renovation, so I have already run electrical and cat6a to the shed and have an old router in AP mode there.

Hooking up one of those NAS boards or a 2nd hand old PC there would be a good backup option.

Sorry but YouTube is such a wealth of tutorial information that quitting it cuts you off from huge amounts of info that you (nowadays) can’t really find through search engines.

Tutorials for self-hosting, embedded development, analog design, gardening tutorials, etc…

A lot of these you literally cannot find online anywhere except for tiny bits and pieces through forum posts that take hours just to put them all together. Most blog posts nowadays are so horribly written on technical subjects and leave so much out as “implicit knowledge” that they are mostly unusable except by people who are already experts, which negates the point. (Shout out to gamersnexus which has a fast, no-ad website with all of the results from their lab testing on their with text write-ups and charts)

YouTube is expensive as all fuck to run. This is why alternatives will never take off unless they have a solid monetization model (e.g. floatplane). Sorry, but people on home internet with 100 down and 30 up aren’t going to be able to host peertube nodes and stream 4k video to more than a couple people. Text and music work well decentralized, but people start to become a lot less able to contribute when hosting costs become hundreds per month and their home internet is saturated and barely usable instead of single digits with light traffic. This isn’t even mentioning content creators’ monetization.

Also mealie supports SSO with OIDC so authelia/authentik can cover it and there is no need for separate accounts.

Also being a PWA on mobile instead of another electron app means that authentication in front of it doesn’t break anything.

Yes,

https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/expansion-cards/ECS07/ https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-RIITOP-Expansion-Chipset-ASM1166/dp/B0D8BCWHPT

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003335714128.html

Then you have 4 main plus these 5-6 extra. Just put your boot drive on a data drive instead of m.2 or get an adaptor and you are good to go. 8 data drives plus a boot drive