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There's de-googling and privacy and all....thats all great. But it is a completely separate thing to take back attention from distractions, bullshit notifications and letting tech overlords reach into our daily lives and disrupting our focus and attention whenever they feel like it. Notification real estate is hugely valuable and the default for every app should be "off", with further fine tuning as needed. Better bulk settings are needed for notification settings adjustment.
Technology Connections has done a brilliant video about notifications recently.
Oh dang, someone asked and I don't have to talk about my server uninvited. Hype!
Storage is on a NAS: synology 2 bay NAS with 8TB (media: photos, movies, TV shows, books, comics) and 2 TB HDD (Kopia backup snapshots). I don't need RAID configurations. Important data is already 3-2-1 backed up and if an HDD fails then I'll just replace it when I get to that point.
Server: Headless mini PC with Debian with a 12th gen intel, 16gb ram, 1tb NVME (mostly live data, shared folder, game saves, etc).
Docker containers:
actual (budgeting)
affine (note taking)
bentopdf (PDF editing)
beszel (server status monitoring)
dockge (Docker management)
guacamole (server remote desktop access)
immich (photo application, backup, gallery and Al tagging)
jellyfin (video and music server)
jotty (quick notes and task/shopping lists)
kavita (comic books and ebooks)
kopia (backups)
linkwarden (saving weblinks)
mattermost (used solo for sharing text, links, files, etc to myself)
paperlessngx (document scanning, OCR and Al organisation)
opodsync (gpodder podcast sync backend)
prunemate (automated scheduled docker pruning)
samba (file sharing on the local netwrok)
syncthing (mostly used to keep retro/emulated games in sync across devices)
tiny tiny rss (RSS platform)
vpn-torrent-stack (conatining gbittorrent, prowlarr, flaresolverr, radarr, sonarr, all running through gluetun VPN on a VPN server)
watchtower (automatic docker updates)
Synology Cloud Sync sends the Kopia backup snapshots to my Backblaze online storage and also keeps a local folder synced with my Mailbox.org cloud drive.
Synology also handles the reverse proxy access.
Agree with all the points you've got there. The point is to be informed of the facts and that's becoming increasingly difficult to do. Here's what has helped me:
Use RSS feeds. News sites are trying to compete with social media now and try to put gossip junk all over their front page. RSS serves up news stories in time order.
Use an RSS app that lets you set filter words (I like Pluma on Android, or now I've moved to Tiny Tiny RSS on my home server with Read You app on Android). Filter out the stuff you don't want to see. I don't care about Elon Musk "news". I don't care about the British Royal family. My list keeps getting longer, but set it up to filter out all the stuff you don't want.
Pick the sources that work best for you. I like BBC and Guardian (checking out France24 as well), but take a few reputable quality sources you like.
Following the news isn't a moral good (as many would portray). You can follow the news as little or as much as you like. I check it once a day to skim headlines mostly, and take breaks for a number of days at a time.
I tend to block breaking news stories from minute by minute updates and prefer to know the facts once the story has developed. Youtube channels like TLDR news do a good job of summarising events a day or two later. E.g. the recent Bondi Beach incident in Australia, I want to know the details of events once they have some idea of what's happening (usually by the next day), and don't care so much about hearing every 5 minutes about a reaction statement from some political figure.
Not knowing about a bunch of stuff is ok. There's so much information out there that it is too much for one person to study on a daily basis. If you've got other stuff to do, that's ok.
Stop getting your "news" from social media, messaging apps forwards, and other ragebait sources.
I started with just a Synology NAS as well and struggles with Docker containers constatantly causing problems and not starting up (or shutting down). Turned out that the Synology hardware didn't have the muscle to run so many services (I had a lot fewer services back then, but it still kept stumbling). The mini-PC seperates the computing portion to be able to do the heavy lifting. Used 7th gen mini-PCs are going to be cheap as they flood the market in coming months as companies ditch machines that can't upgrade to Windows 11. Although be warned that these might not do the video transcoding you want.....check on your requirements.
Mariushosting.com is the single best resource I've found for Synology docker deployments. Here's a more complete guide once you have a mini-PC.
Unpopular opinion: AI helps quite a bit when you get stuck (Claude has been the best in my experience), but you need to know how to use it (i.e. let it diagnose problems to point you in the right direction to read about solutions....don't try to just execute everything it says because it doesn't understand your setup. It's great to feed it log outputs to allow diagnosis).
Once I got into it, I started looking for more and more self-hosted solutions that would be relevant to me. You can fire up a Docker container, check it out and delete if you don't like it.
Mini-PC running a Samba server: this is to share the storage connected to the mini-PC. Drives in the Synology are already easily shared through the Synology interface, but I am using these for bulk media storage and backups so don't usually need to access these directly. I use the server PC storage for small amounts of live network storage.
why go with the Synology for reverse proxy: It's very easy to do through Synology's baked-in solution. I'm conscious that I don't know a lot about security yet, and my reading tells me that the Synology solution is safe. I didn't want to take the risk of exposing services to the open internet through DIY solutions till I know more.
Interesting for this video to have just come up on my feed yesterday.
Don't know how many veterans will see your post and it's worth posting in the dedicated self hosting communities.
I've only started learning in July and posted about my setup above.
My guess for your situation would be that the best option is to get a Pi SATA hat and use that as your NAS. Then use the laptop for messing about with game servers, etc so your Pi NAS data isn't threatened by the inevitable screw ups.
The second best option could be to get a SATA card for your laptop and use that as a single server PC. But be sure to backup your data and avoid putting critical functions on this.
Or sell what you have to put money towards an old cheap PC to give a more straightforward setup to learn on. Depends on how proficient you are with these operating systems (learning a new system vs learning to navigate around unusual hardware combinations). I was a complete noob and wanted to make use of my little Linux familiarity and didn't need anything TrueNAS or Unraid offered, so I went with a secondhand mini PC with Debian.
