Great idea! However, something bothers me. From F-Droid:

This app relies on catbox.moe to upload images and Google, Bing, Yandex, TinyEye, Perplexcity and ChatGPT for search.

I am not familiar with that service, so I went to the website and looked at FAQ:

How long does Catbox keep files for?
Forever. If you don’t want your file to stick around until the heat death of the universe, use Litterbox.

Are you (F)(L)OSS?
no.

Not sure what it is exactly but having my uploaded files stored in some obscure database until the heat death of the universe does not fill me with trust.

I have a Pixel phone and used the screen scanning tech (forgot how it’s called, but it’s the same feature, I believe) for OCR to copy the WiFi password from a photo of the sticker that’s on the router and of course it immediately sent that password to Google and run the search, ugh. I don’t want to send my WiFi password to some website I never even heard about, either.

Can you explain how it works?

Thanks!

May I ask which Hetzner VPS did you choose? I wonder if the Cost-Optimized ones are sufficient. I would be using it with max 2 users, same as you.

If I go with the VPS option I’d like to host Immich instead. But it seems to be hungry for memory, especially with the ML features enabled.

I really don’t understand this “Nextcloud does too much” rhetoric, the standard bare metal installation is basically just Files, Photos, Calendar and Contacts

That’s just my impression based on their website, it looks like a business suite, but I’m probably looking at it wrong. Thank you, the part about the database is important.

A bonus question regarding the 3-2-1 backup strategy. If my VPS is in Germany, but I spin up a Storage Box in Finland, that falls within the boundaries of “off-site backup”, even if both are managed by Hetzner. What do you think? It’s just easiest to setup, I guess. Otherwise I need another cloud provider (perhaps some S3 object storage).

I was looking at this self-hosting guide and scratching my head in confusion. They say $80 nets you a 4TB HDD. Meanwhile, in my country that costs more like $220+. Yes, for an HDD, not SSD (that would be more like way over $500). I see the guide has been updated this year, so either the US lives in another world or nobody has updated the pricing.

If you’re that paranoid you can host it yourself.

https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs?tab=readme-ov-file

https://mozilla-services.github.io/syncstorage-rs/

It’s open source.

Voyager is free.

I meant that I can buy one of those Radeons dedicated to AI work, like the ASRock Radeon AI PRO R9700 Creator 32GB GDDR6. If I need to.

Currently my Ryzen iGPU is all I need, because all I need is to see the graphical desktop environment on my screen ;) It does the job well.

I use Claude Code as well and I am slightly concerned with that ID verification news, even more so because of the technology partner that they chose.

Say I have a GPU with 32GB VRAM and I am on Linux, what local LLM would be good for coding?

Currently I just have an iGPU ;) but that’s always an option, albeit a very expensive one.

For shopping lists I use Listonic. It’s easy to use and better suited for shopping because it groups products into categories, so you don’t have to sort them yourself and don’t have to walk around the store back and forth because you picked up strawberries, moved to the toilet paper section and diary and then noticed you didn’t pick apples. :) It syncs, so if you go shopping with somebody else, you can split and see what the other person already grabbed (as long as there’s connectivity, of course).

That’s fair. I myself migrated from Google Keep to Standard Notes and later to Joplin. I never thought that I needed for it to look like post-its :) But now that you said that I see why you wouldn’t be happy with either of the non-alternatives.

As for passwords, well, I wont talk about that. It’s not good but still not worst practices at least.

Paper notebook? ;)

I just wish syncing was a bit more seemless.

What problem do you have? I use OneDrive sync, which is not even recommended, because OneDrive doesn’t work well with syncing many tiny files, but it works surprisingly good. If I need to sync NOW (rarely), there’s a menu item for that. Otherwise the automated sync was good for me.

My Bitwarden and Proton Pass also require Yubikey to be present when logging in on a new device.

Joplin not mentioned. It’s like Standard Notes, but FREE, including cloud sync (many targets available). I used Standard Notes but their business model changed which drove me to look for alternatives and I landed with Joplin. Highly recommended!

By “same platform” do you mean keeping them in the same app or the same system (e.g., my Android smartphone)? I used to use Authy, but after I bought the paid subscription for Bitwarden I moved my TOTP codes there (and later to Proton Pass) because it was so convenient.

Thanks for telling me about Betterbird. I see I can run it at the same time as Thunderbird which naturally fits my workflow described above 😅

I am thinking of self-hosting some stuff right now, but that’s mainy OneDrive/Google Drive replacement and Google Photos replacement. I could maybe self-host Bitwarden, too. Email? Nope. I know there’s A LOT of work with that, with the domains (so my emails don’t get rejected by other parties), with spam filters and so on. I will leave that to the professionals, it’s too important. File storage is for me, but email is for communication with others. So congratulations if you got that working :)