If you can’t repair or use that, it will still sell for quite a lot these days on eBay.

I don’t have many alerts setup, but I use Mattermost anyway and I send alerts into a Mattermost channel. Sonarr and Radarr report when a download is complete. Jellyfdash reports when someone outside my home starts streaming something over Jellyfin.

I feel bad for anyone building now. I built my gaming setup + NAS and server PC and upgraded my Steam Deck in the past 2 to 3 years. Going to get as much milage out of these as I can till things settle down. I’ve changed all my Docker services to lower resource alternatives to keep things running on my existing ram.

Then in 5 years when things have only gotten worse and this is the new norm then I’ll cry alongside everyone else. Or maybe China will get their fabs up and running and swoop in to undercut these bastards to save us all.

Since this is DIY, you can fuck it up as badly as you want. The possibilities are endless!

Watch this guy’s video. He DIY restores a smashed iMac screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FStfdGjAwc

Excellent hack.

In case you’re a masochist like me and want a lot more work on your hands, then you could remove the whole laptop mobo and make its own case and make it more compact in the process.

I’ve done this recently to make a standalone machine out of a busted laptop. This can give you a single, more compact unit with all the parts inside. You can improve the cooling and noise too (by using desktop fans). You’ll maintain your laptop resale value too by not destroying the case and being able to put the mobo back in place in the future. Infact, with today’s ram prices, the reason I went down this route is because you can get broken laptops with soldered in DDR5 ram.

They’re surprisingly expensive for what they are. I’ve been shopping for broken laptops like that for ages to use as an emulation console for my kids. Ended up going with a NUC/mini PC and that’s got a smaller footprint, better cooling, better IO and tends to be quieter.

Joplin self hosting seemed like a pain and it works perfectly well synchronising via WebDAV. I’d be interested in hearing how you get on.

I’ve been using Actual Budget for a couple of years and only recently started getting into slightly more functions than basic expenses recording. It’s really good to be able to have it do more as needed.

I host Tiny Tiny RSS.

• my list of subscriptions and categorisations are centralised so I don’t have to set this up on any other device. I can access this on my phone, tablet and PC.
• it synchronises read/unread stories across devices so I don’t have to keep sifting through the same articles I’ve seen.
• I’ve got a long list of blacklisted words. I don’t want to hear about sports news, celebrity gossip, USA-centric news, “he said/she said” bullshit from social media that mainstream news seems to love to report, etc. Now I can set up my blacklist in one place centrally.
• there are a lot of great apps that will access the server RSS feed. I’m never actually going to to TTRSS browser page.

The point isn’t to download content to the server at all. It’s to keep the centralised list. I host opodsync (Gpodder podcast server) for the same reason.

FYI: I’m a noob myself.

Looks fine, but if you’re looking to mess around with a first build then you could go cheaper. Secondhand hardware would save you money, especially since older hardware is great for server use. At least you’re saving money with AM4 and DDR4.

Some thoughts:

• I went with an Intel CPU for Jellyfin transcoding.
• 16gb ram is enough to start and I host tons of stuff with that much, but the more ram the better. Having 2 more ram slots for future expansion would serve you well (but not essential).
• Faster networking would be better. Your mobo has 1 gigabit LAN. Again not a deal breaker. You can add faster networking yourself later.

This guy makes great videos, but you have to be careful to not overcomplicate things or chase specs that pro home server guys want that make no difference to noobs.

Yup. That’s it.

It’s running in Docker on my Debian server: https://kopia.io/docs/installation/#docker-images

One HDD in my NAS is dedicated to only have encrypted backup data that Kopia creates. The same Kopia deployment can’t upload data to the cloud, so Kopia only makes local backups every night. Then Synology’s cloudsync app is scheduled to send the backed up files to a Backblaze bucket online.

Docker containers:

• actual (budgeting)
• affine (note taking)
• bentopdf (PDF editing)
• beszel (server status monitoring)
• cloudflared (for a cloudflare tunnel with my own domain)
• dockge (Docker management)
• guacamole (server remote desktop access)
• immich (photo application, backup, gallery and AI tagging)
• jellyfin (video and music server)
• kavita (comic books and ebooks)
• kopia (backups)
• mattermost (used solo for sharing text, links, files, etc to myself)
• papra (document storage, tagging and OCR)
• pihole (DNS adblocking for whole network)
• opodsync (gpodder podcast sync backend)
• omnitools (file conversion etc)
• prunemate (automated scheduled docker pruning)
• qbittorrent (with gluetun VPN )
• Redlib (reddit access with gluetun VPN because fuck you UK mandatory ID checks)
• samba (file sharing on the local netwrok)
• syncthing (mostly used to keep retro/emulated games in sync across devices)
• tiny tiny rss (RSS platform)
• qbittorrent, through gluetun VPN on a VPN)
• SABnzbd, radarr, sonarr (for media)
• watchtower (automatic docker updates)

The setup is on a bare metal Debian mini PC server with storage on a Synology 2 drive NAS.

Thanks for asking

I’m like you, learning as I go along. The answer for complete security seems to be that it takes a bachelors level of learning and you better make a start. I bookmarked this for when I have time to get into it.

For now though, I’ve just followed the steps in this guide and stopped there. I would recommend this.

Not the standard answer, but here’s another opinion: I think Signal is a good alternative.

Depends on how you use Instagram. If you’re just sharing with closed groups of friends and family then just make some groups in Signal and share pictures with each other there.

If you want to post to everyone or look at everyone else’s posts then this obviously isnt going to work. But if your use case is as I describe above then just try using your private chat app.

I tried signing up. Porkbun asked me to upload a photo ID before they would make an account for me (UK). Noped out of there.

I tried signing up and they wanted a copy of photo ID or something ridiculous. Noped out of there. Is that just a UK thing or what?

Same. Except work seems to block my cloudflare tunnel so I have to use Synology reverse proxy.

I’ve kept both. Synology photos does auto upload from my+wife’s phones. Then Immich scans this as an external database to import.

Synology keeps the photos in a normal name and folder structure. So the files can be accessed and organised in a normal file browser. Moving to a different device or app is as simple as copying the files over. These folders are backed up off site so even if my hardware dies, I don’t have to set up Immich again before I can access the images as they’re normal image files.

Immich auto upload puts the photos into its own database that is not human readable. I didn’t want that. But I do want the AI tagging, search and fast browsing Immich has. If I didn’t already have Synology photos set up, then I might have tried using Syncthing to send photos to my NAS and then access through Immich.

I’ve been through this whole process and wanted to make the best choice and explore all options myself. In the end my conclusion ended up being what most people online recommended after all: keep NAS and compute separate and that Debian is best for a Linux server. Now I have a Synology NAS and a 12th gen Intel mini PC. I run most of what you mention above and it works great.

I spent ages looking at so many sources to learn and get this set up. After I got it all done, I found this is one simple guide that basically covered the whole process and I really with O found this early: https://thecybersecguru.com/tutorials/self-hosting-guide/