I have a n ESP32 with a thermocouple stuffed down my (gas) oven chimney, so I can tell what temperature it actually is (about 40°F/20°C cooler than the dial).

I have one plugged into an addressable LED matrix, which has yet to get mounted, but will eventually be a closet/dressing light. There’s a few places where I’d like a ‘normal’ warm white light, with the option to switch to a blinding daylight for chores, and maybe a low-light, colorful animated nightlight.

I have a Pi-0w reading temp/humidity/CO2 in a grow tent that’s a good candidate for ESP32-ification. I have an air quality sensor plugged directly into a Home Assistant server that could go on ESP32 if I wanted it in a different location. Humidity in the bathroom, with a controller for the bathroom fan is another good candidate.

If I can come up with a good way to put them on battery, with a 6-12 month lifetime, then temperature in the attic, and on the input/output sides of the HVAC would be useful.

I only one I know about https://socprime.com/blog/cve-2025-27840-vulnerability-in-esp32-bluetooth-chips/ which is a bluetooth thing, presumably meaning that you’d have to be in bluetooth range to exploit it.

My paranoid concern is that I’m going to buy these $2 ESP32 boards from some unknowable Chinese company, and how could I know if there’s an extra, malicious supervisor element added. So, my ESP32 devices live in the ‘untrusted’ VLAN. They could, theoretically, discover each other and send their sensor data to some nefarious broker, but they don’t have microphones or cameras. I don’t even see how they could get enough information to discover my physical address, without cooperation from my ISP.

I was really intimidated by ESP32. Liked RPi, back in the 3b days, because I could comfortably sit in the python interpreter, play with sensor interfaces, and get immediate feedback of what & where I screwed up. Familiarity led me to RPi4 for libreelec and 0w for more sensors.

Recently took the plunge on some ESP32s, though, and, just…wow. I mean, I’m going through esphome, but every sensor and control I’ve checked is just a couple of lines of YAML away. And low enough power that I’m starting to think about batteries. ESP32 is still pretty intimidating for noobs, but the ecosystem that’s grown up around it is fantastic once you get over that hump.

I started using HA to turn lights on and off on timer while I’m out of town, so it looks like the house is occupied.

Then, because I am a nerd, I added some environmental sensors so I could see temperature & air quality.

Eventually linked the air quality sensor to a smart thermostat, so it could turn the HVAC fan on when the air is dirty & off when clean, rather than leave it on 24/7 (like the HVAC people recommend) or on ‘circulate.’ That saved around 3.5 kWh electricity every day, or $100/year, while keeping the house dust and allergen-free.

The problem isn’t necessarily corporate services - the problem is corporate services with no practical competition. If there’s an actual marketplace, then enshittification is limited, because you can just hop providers when service degrades. If there’s an actual marketplace, then you can hop providers when some government takes control your provider.

Putting fun services behind the wall of ‘you must be this technically competent to participate’ isn’t going to fix the broken system.

In the US, that would require either dramatically simplifying the tax code or attaching your social security number to a hell of a lot more transactions. Medical expenses over 7.5% of income are deductible, so the IRS would need to know every time you buy aspirin, and CVS or Kroger or wherever you buy that needs to log your social security number. Educators are allowed to deduct the cost of school supplies, so the IRS would have to know every time they buy crayons (and whether those crayons are personal or classroom). Certain home improvements, so Lowes needs your SSN. If the guy you sold your PS3 to on Facebook is trading them as a business, then IRS probably needs you to report that transaction.

In the old days, university IT put essentially no access controls on their networks, so students’ dorm computers were completely exposed to the internet. Any service you started was immediately, globally accessible. Some big sites, including slashdot and facebook, got their start in some kid’s dorm room. I feel like access controls really got going in the early 00’s - first for residential, then for broader campus.

Check with your IT people - they may have policy or conditions under which they will expose ports on your personal computer to the internet. Otherwise, your best bet is probably free-tier AWS or Oracle.

Not free, but there are some ‘KVM VPS’ providers out there that will rent you a small, internet exposed computer pretty cheap. They can be a good platform for experimenting with self-hosting services, without exposing your personal equipment or home network. eg: 1CPU/1GB RAM/24GB SSD $12/year https://my.racknerd.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=903

I started using https://purelymail.com/ because they’re $10/year. Been happy with them, but I don’t use/need any fancy features. Hosted on AWS, if you care about that. Their domain instructions are https://purelymail.com/docs/domainDocs

My favorite intro to burritos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpyIOhuP1FI

You have to fold the ends of a burrito tortilla in to seal the filling. It’s a sharp fold that corn tortillas just can’t do. Burrito tortillas are often 12"/30cm or more, and I feel like corn tortillas aren’t strong enough for that (never tried, but also never seen them for sale).

With RFK’s new dietary guidelines, you’re not supposed to eat carbs, which would normally be the main source of low-budget calories. 6 ounces of pork is only around 350 calories, so RFK’s going to want you to get 3 times that, which is going to blow your $3 budget right there.

Can’t make a burrito with a corn tortilla. Otherwise, solid insight.

I realize you’re looking for new toys, but ‘anywhere in the flat’ includes ‘under a pile of pillows.’ Otherwise, for personal photo-sized storage, just put a couple 2.5mm format SSDs in the QNAP.

Trump is absolutely incapable of distinguishing between having a thing and having won that thing. Machado was definitely going to try to buy leadership of Venezuela with her medal, and the committee just cockblocked her.

I kinda want to see what James Maynard could get for giving his Fields Medal to Trump. Partly because it would be funny to see Trump claim to be a Fields-award winning mathematician, partly because James Maynard would make a much better Secretary of Education than that wrestler.

Depending on the board in your mini-server, you may have enough SATA ports to plug in directly. I have a system similar to what you’re describing (N100 with 4x 2TB HDDs with 1.5TB data): 2 of those drives are set up in RAID1 (mirror), and once a month, I plug in one of the spares, rsync the array to it, and unplug it. Every 3 months or so, I swap the offline drive with an offsite drive. I used to use a USB dock for the offline drive, but I got a 3-bay hot-swap enclosure to make the whole process faster and easier.

The server shares the array via NFS and SMB, and it is absolutely a NAS for all my other systems.

If you expect to exceed 2TB data within 2 years, then you’ll need to replace all 4 of those 2TB drives in 2 years. You might, today, get a pair of 4 TB drives and one 2TB, use the 4TB as your main storage, the 2TBs as rotating backups, and wait until you actually outgrow 2TB to upgrade the backups.

I see you’re getting lots of advice just to use c/selfhosted as a free consultant. That’s good advice if you’re self-motivated and focused.

If you want someone to be a coach through the process, to keep you focused and moving, that’s a) a slightly different skillset and b) worth putting in the description. I mention this only because I have a bunch of aspirational projects on my to–do list that have just sat there for literally years because of perfectionism, anxiety, and maybe some undiagnosed ADHD. I’ll also counter by noting that a lot of people, this time of year, buy a gym membership on the theory that spending the money will somehow force them actually to go to the gym, only to find that spent money is not actually a motivator.

Steam can do massive numbers spikes because they have essentially infinite inventory. The whole reason scalping video cards works is that Nvidia can not make as many as people want, even at full retail price. The existence of scalpers implies that Nvidia could raise prices, sell slightly fewer units at higher margin and get greater total return.

Great project. I like the 1-star reviews complaining about the lack of advertising and tracking.

If you want it to be an actual community service, then you want it to be something that outlives your residence, your tenure as event coordinator, and your interest in being the neighborhood IT guy. It’ll be much easier to transfer control of a VPS to your successor than to give them hardware that also hosts a bunch of your personal services.

You can start with a very small, nearly free VPS while you recruit users & scale up as (if) anyone bites. Probably even get the HOA to pay for it.

Georgia still has among the lowest per-kWh tariffs in the country, at $0.086/kWh (0.0806 in winter). Plus $14/month service charge and 20% taxes & fees. Compare California at $0.40/kWh.