Fetched it. Started it. Did a really nice job fetching my whole health record from insurance co & has a wide array of compatible providers. Decent presentation of repeated test results. It’s got a bunch of areas “not implemented yet,” but it’s a decent way to visualize the records. Probably even better if you have health records from multiple providers.

Safe deposit box is exactly the right size to hold a 3.5" HDD. Or several. I keep a backup Yubikey there too, because I love the physical token 2FA, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose it.

[US] I have a z-wave network of Zooz Zen04 power-monitoring plugs and Minoston MP21 non-monitoring plugs. Automatically set themselves up by scanning the little QR code, Haven’t had any network drops or device failures in…3(?) years. One Zooz Zen15 high power, monitoring device occasionally (every few weeks) glitches and reports an spurious, instantaneous 5-20 kWh energy consumption

The really nice ones :) Concrete is a lot quieter. They’ve put up several new complexes in my area, and even for $600k, you get just framed party walls. Some of the builders go so far as to build little brick extensions on the exterior facade, so it looks like masonry wall extends between the units. My unit has a daylight basement, and the below-grade party wall is cinderblock, like the below-grade exterior wall, but that ends at grade.

For example, in my 1980s townhouse, all the plumbing goes through one interior wall. There’s void space in the bathroom that carries chimney and ductwork. Wiring goes variously through that one interior wall and the exterior walls. The kitchen has a fake wall built in front of the party wall to give space for extra outlets.

In most cases, the ‘party wall’ between two townhouse units is not allowed to carry any services - no wires, pipes, or ducts. The ones I’ve seen being built lately often have a couple extra sheets of drywall just sitting in the wall between units, presumably as a fire/noise retardant, and that might confuse stud detectors.

You’re also not supposed to do stuff to those party walls, at least not without consent from the neighbor, because they are essentially co-owned.

You don’t even need to learn HTML to do it. Any word processor will ‘save as HTML,’ but the markup should be straightforward enough for anyone considering selfhosting. CSS can be a real rabbit hole, but browser default styles aren’t awful.

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.

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.

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.

The image is 950x940 px, and an acre is 209x208 feet, so overall scale about 4.5 pixels per foot. “Lawn” is 250x310px = 55x68 ft or 3800 square feet, although the actual lawn-looking space is larger and several parcels. The fruit tree orchard is about 40x60 feet, chickens 30x30. The big cow is 15 feet long, which seems kinda big. House, excluding garage, is 32x22, which seems like a small 1 bedroom apartment.

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.

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.

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.