I’ve used a retired desktop for my home server since 1999. It doesn’t have the fancy web-UI management of commercial NAS, but I’m comfortable with command line and config files.

At some point, I realized I could use its wifi card and hostapd to replace my WAP. That was a bit of an adventure initially finding a card that really supports AP mode and setting up hostapd, but has now allowed me to migrate from 802.11g to n to ac much cheaper than buying whole new devices,

Recently converted to an N100 with 4x ethernet ports, which let me unplug my little 5-port switch.

Managing this doesn’t feel like a second job: it’s stable and just works. Automatic updates, with kernel blacklisted; periodically log in, update kernel & reboot. It does give me the opportunity, when I get inspired, for a weekend project, like adding hostapd or a new service, either via docker or bare metal. I like that I have one device doing “NAS,” WAP, and router jobs.

That drive averages 900 hours between power cycles? In Windows?

You need a lot of houseplants to make up for a human. Humans exhale something like 1 kg CO2/day where plants consume something like 0.2 kg/hr/100 m2. Figure natural light, maybe 6-8 hours of full sun in a day, and you’d need 60-80 m2 of leaf surface.

That kg/day of CO2 is enough to raise a 200 m2 home to 3000 ppm CO2. CO2 diffuses pretty well, but my 110 m2 house equilibrates around 1000ppm when it’s sealed against the summer heat.

This is one of my pet peeves with containerized services, like why would I want to run three or four instances of mariadb? I get it, from the perspective of the packagers, who want a ‘just works’ solution to distribute, but if I’m trying to run simple services on a 4 GB RPi or a 2 GB VPS, then replicating dbs makes a difference. It took a while, but I did, eventually, get those dockers configured to use a single db backend, but I feel like that completely negated the ‘easy to set up and maintain’ rationale for containers.

In my town, they said the rainbow colors are not the state description of crosswalks, might actually, effectively, erase the legal crosswalk, are confusing to drivers, and would increase pedestrian deaths. There’s always some bullshit rationalization for being the worst possible person.

People will accept either intelligence or stupidity. They will pay for a flattering sycophant.

Room temperature above 24°C, no blanket. Above 26°C, I don’t even need a sheet, but I’ll usually keep it, because cold air from the A/C sometimes disturbs me.

I know plenty of people who insist on cooling their room at night so that they can be comfortable under a blanket.

I’m used to ‘Packaged in the USA’ labeling on Made in [somewhere else] products. ‘Designed’…same-same, definitely since NAFTA, maybe before. The bible verses are new to me.

The services you’ve mentioned are all pretty low compute impact, just bandwidth, so I’d expect your MBP to be fine. Transcoding for jellyfin is the only real wildcard, and that depends on your media and client setups. I run pihole, homeassistant, immich, and kodi on a raspberry pi 4 with plenty of overhead for more services. NAS is nice if your library outgrows a single disk and your storage bandwidth gets choked by USB multiplexing.

My suggestion is to consider a cheap VPS and vanity domain for external access. Domains cheap as $5/year; fair VPSs cheap as $30/year. Use SSH to forward localhost ports on the VPS to container ports on the MBP, then nginx on thee VPS to reverse-proxy to those forwarded ports. You get unique names for every service, LetsEncrypt certificates, and an offsite location for critical backups. Make sure you are the one paying for VPS & DNS so they don’t get surprise-cancelled.

Putting the scan on the internet intact would be piracy. Putting up snippets is mostly OK. Ingesting the scans of millions of books into a massive data set and then regurgitating pieces of the masticated, processed mess seems still to be a grey area, but closer to ‘mostly OK’ than to piracy.

Second not using local.com If OP doesn’t want a real domain, use an unresolvable TLD, like “private” (so, pihole.private, audiobookshelf.private), but a real domain will just work better, will let them use real TLS certs, and prevent problems from apps bypassing system DNS. Even if it’s not as pretty or memorable as the hijacked domain name.

That Trump is a bad person. It started with “Russia, Russia, Russia,” then criticism of his Perfect Phone Call with Zelensky, the Stolen Election, all the Fake Trials, and now Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. All lies meant to tarnish the world’s Favorite President.

/s

My Pi spends all of its time around 55°C in a 20-25°C room. Main server idles at 47°C. Those aren’t worrying temps.

I’ve watched enough Lock Picking Lawyer never to want a consumer ‘smart lock.’ Half of them can be opened with a magnet. Maybe commercial grade is better, but I’ve been locked out of my job after every power failure for the last 10 years, until someone comes along with a physical key.

Re homeassistant on a Pi: homeassistant does a lot of database transactions, so you may want to have db storage on something other than an SD card.

Not exactly the same, but I have an air quality sensor I use to turn the HVAC fan mode on/off to filter. Also a CO2 sensor. Both wired to the RPi I run homeassistant on. The HVAC is controlled via T6 pro Z-wave now, but I started out with a Zooz Zen15 switch to just turn the whole thing on/off.

The CO2 sensor has been pretty stable for 4(?) years - it has an internal recalibration routine that resets its baseline based on the past week’s data. My readings range from 400-ish with the windows open & fans to 1200+ cooking with gas in the sealed house. Averages around 800 with the AC or 500 with the furnace (which exhausts combustion gasses). The aq sensor has been replaced once after 3-4(?) years. It reads exactly what purpleair says is outside with the windows open, drops to 0-2 µg/m3 with the filters running, spikes to 300+ cooking.

At the time, it was part of the whole poisonous structure of the 2017 tax bill, where everything would expire after Trump’s presumed 2nd term to sabotage his Democratic successor, confident that no one has long enough memory to realize where it came from.

You can only spin drives down if they’re idle. If you have a service that touches it - say, homeassistant logging data, tvheadend updating EPG - then they’re going to keep spinning.

I switched from an I3-530, nominal TDP 73W, to an N-100, nominal TDP 7W, and power from the wall didn’t change at all. Even the i3 ran around 0.1 CPU load, except when transcoding, and I’m left with the impression that most of the power goes into HDDs, RAM, maybe fans, and PS losses. My sense is that the best way to decrease homelab power use is to minimize the number of devices. Start with your seyrver at 60W, add a WAP at 10-15W, maybe a switch at 10-15W… Not because of the CPUs, necessarily, but because every CPU every CPU comes with systems to keep the CPU going, keep the power regulated, etc.

It’s from a Molly White doot. I don’t see it on her website https://www.citationneeded.news/ but she’s definitely been all over Trump’s crypto.

I’m not a huge docker expert, but I recently spun up a tandoor…dev, and their config instructions explicitly point out a couple of mounts that have to be volumes and can not be binds.

Docker’s own comments are https://docs.docker.com/engine/storage/volumes/ which my tl;dr is faster, can be shared by multiple containers, and can be a remote (NFS/CIFS) target.

I’d guess that maintainers use the volume structure to let docker handle the details of creating and maintaining the mount, rather than put it on the user, who may be spinning up their first-ever docker and may make all kind of naive mistakes.