If you’re behind a CG NAT (carrier grade NAT), you’ll be doubly in trouble as it will be essentially impossible to get a forwarded port since your “IP” is essentially a LAN address within your ISP’s CG NAT, if that makes sense.

Hey it’s a group chat with my grandma ಠ_ಠ

Nice! Just shared this (as a PDF without the domain name lol) with my family!

I’m an idiot and never linked the link

https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/authentik-docker-compose-guide-2025/

1. I got started with a guide from these guys back in 2020. I still use traefik as my reverse proxy and Authelia for authentication and it has worked great all this time. As someone else said, everything is in containers on the one host and it is super easy this way. It all runs on a single box using containers for separation. I should probably look into a secondary server as a live backup, but that’s a lot of work / expense. I have a Cloudflare dynamic DNS container running for that.
2. I would definitely advocate for owning your own domain, for the added use case of owning your own email addresses. I can now switch email providers and don’t have to worry about losing anything. This would also lean towards a more memorable domain, or at least a second domain that is memorable. Stay away from the country TLDs or “cute” generic TLDs and stay with a tried and true .com or .net (which may take some searching).
3. I don’t bother with this, I just run my server behind Cloudflare, and let them protect my server. Some might disagree, but it’s easy for me and I like that.
4. Containers, containers, containers! Probably Docker since it’s easy, but Podman if you really want to get fancy / extra secure. Also, make sure you have a git repo for your compose files, and a solid backup strategy from the start (so much easier than going back and doing it later). I use Backblaze for my backups and it’s $2/month for some peace of mind.
5. Do it!!!

Illinois at least passed a law to limit the consent given when using a digital ID with a police officer such that they’re ONLY allowed to use it for ID and not snooping, but that’s the only state to do so.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/should-i-use-my-states-digital-drivers-license

There’s gotta be a point where stuff can’t be failed. It just feels bad as a player if you tell me that I can’t figure out where the Sahara desert is when I’m standing right next to it.

Oh this sounds like fun! Plus my drawing is bad enough that it’s bound to be cryptic… and maybe tending toward the not super useful which fits the OP perfectly lol

This is so mean, I can just imagine a card being written for this that is extremely long and only in the last sentence does it say “requires attunement”

I gotta say, that’s a pretty good useless item

The dragon is barely a threat! Can’t be bigger than a hatchling!

There is really no accounting for style.

Plus it’s so much fun to appreciate the finer details and minutiae in D&D!

I like things that players would have fun with, but aren’t “useful” in the sense that it becomes a utility item they’re using every game. Something that can be a joke!

Not against items that have use either

It doesn’t help our friends in the EU, but I’m hopeful that the CFPB’s “Open Banking” rules might actually make it possible to do this with an open source product with OAuth and common APIs rather than these aggregators that are just web scraping your bank.

I’ve heard others recommend Low End Box before but I have no experience, so do some due diligence before selecting any of these!

https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/

I started with the 2020 tutorial from these guys. They’ve updated it a few times through the years so I can’t speak to how good the new version is, but I’m sure it’s probably plenty to get started.

https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/traefik-v3-docker-compose-guide-2024/

After I followed this guide, I’ve deviated significantly as I learned and started to do my own thing. It’s a great place to start and learn the basics of containerized applications and once you have that then you can host most things that are dockerized. All I need to do now to start up a new service is pull up the README on Docker Hub (or better yet, if LinuxServer.io has a container that does what I want to do, on their website), figure out what I want to do with the variables and any setup that needs to happen, and then I add it to my .yml and start it up!

I’ve got it all tracked now on GitHub so I can see what I’ve changed and when and if something were to go wrong I could revert back to a known-good configuration.

Vaultwarden is only the server, no? So any clients that you use to access Vaultwarden are built and maintained by 8bit solutions a.k.a. Bitwarden, including the desktop client that is the subject of this post.

De-Googling was what got me started as well. Wanted to be able to have my own Google Drive clone with Nextcloud. From there it was just one little improvement / additional service at a time as I learned to use Linux and docker. Now I run a Linux laptop and am considering an android phone.

Engineering background for reference.

It’s $10 per year