That is pretty much why. I took one programming class in high school (2004) and since then alway enjoyed solving software puzzles.

I ran my first “smart” phone for more than 5 years before needing an upgrade. My latest Pixel 8 is less than a year old and now has a row of pink pixels. Never been dropped, never been wet, never fast charged.

This is a 10 year old house and was supposed to be built with all the latest energy saving tech, except it’s Canada and I doubt it would have passed inspection even on the day it was sold.

Nope, home made sensors and python scripts.

Previous to this the basement was always 5 degrees warmer than the rest of the house because the ductwork was so terribly installed. I spent a week sealing them all up only to find that what feels comfortable has as much to do with the humidity as the temperature so just balancing flow between floors couldn’t fix everything.

The weather outside changes things indoors way more than I expected. By looking at the graphs I can tell if it was a windy day, if it rained at all, if it was sunny and which blinds were open that day.

I noticed pretty quick how much the weather outside affects the inside of the house. When it’s windy the bedroom temperature drops fast. If it was sunny in the day there will be a peak temperature several hours after sunset as the heat soaks through the west facing brick wall. When the outside humidity jumps the inside follows fast but if the humidity drops outside it takes days for the house to catch up.

If I was clever I could probably set up a predictive thermostat that takes into account the next 6 hrs of weather when choosing to run the heat or air.

I just infer from the temp/humi sensors. When either one runs there is a very clear pulse in both readings. The UPS is an APC1400XL, it tells me it was manufactured in 2003, I cleaned out the exploded batteries and put new ones in this year and it worked fine. I think it was only ever used once (until the original batteries burst). I have the UPS supplying my server, NAS and the POE switch that powers a couple of cameras outside.

The shower, we went to bed late. There was also a rainstorm that night which skews things, but it’s curious that the shower will actually raise the humidity of the whole house for hours after it’s been used.

I used AHT21 I2C modules from Aliexpress https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002613543870.html . I think the one that failed last fall was a bad solder joint but I had a spare AHT21 board and ESP8266 so I just replace the whole unit.

“File Browser” or “Sharry” allow you to make public links to share files with others BUT you need to run them on a server that is accessible to both parties.

Chaotic good, right there.

I recently setup Guacamole (Web based VNC/RDP/SSH) with totp and was able to close external SSH access. Now everything I run can sit behind a single reverse proxy, no extra ports.

I found WatchYourLan hosed my PiHole logs. Somehow the WYL instance got its hostname associated with ~10 mac addresses on my lan so more than half of my traffic comes from “watchyourlan.local”. FML

I keep each service separate as far as DBs, if something breaks or get a major upgrade I don’t have to worry about other containers.

Namecheap, cheap, easy to use, easy to setup DDNS, helpful support staff. I have heard horror stories of them selling popular domains out from under their owner but none were recent.

Because most selfhosters are too lazy or inexperienced to break away from cloud services. Docker is great but it has also enables a “just run this docker” mentality that mirrors the Windows “just run this exe.”

edit: I think that the opportunity to learn how a project works, how to debug problems and how to integrate a project into their own setup is obscured.

I ran my ssh behind 53 for a while because it’s rarely blocked. A few bots even got it right and figured out it was ssh.

Without being able to set a static ip and forward ports you cant host services and point to them with a domain, like driveway-home.com or something.

But I think cloudflare has a service that lets you connect remotely without needing static ip’s (some one else will know the name). If you were to use that then you can use your laptop to host pretty much anything on the Awesome Selfhosted List.

Device agnosticism. Life is easier when it doesn’t take ONE laptop or phone failure to destroy all your data.