Not sure if the UK is similar to where I lived, but they were the worst “cloud” provider I’ve ever used. Want to shut down the instance you had to recreate it with a different OS? Good luck getting it back online as they are out of capacity. Also, if you accidentally deleted one of the default network components it was impossible to recreate it without incurring a cost kind of going against anything you learned about cloud computing and “infrastructure as code”. It was a glorified GUI.

Edit: I’m just glad my current employer does not use anything oracle as their support is also famously bad.

It’s shit for automating things and especially useless outside the Apple ecosystem, but it does offer the option to turn off sharing.

Apple ID -> Find My -> Share My Location

Since it’s closed source it’s possible they still capture the location and I would t trust it, but in practice anyone that you’ve allowed to see your location (for an hour, day, while on-route) gets a “location unknown” on their app of the toggle is off.

Great points, as someone who is very happy with their current home automation and services, checking in the config files to a git repo was the critical step. Also backup volumes since many containers tend to store state in some binary or internal DB. At the very least try restoring the config to verify you have what’s needed. The containers should start even if they have no media on it.

In terms of tinkering not being fun anymore. That’s okay, sometimes you need a break.

A point that is sometimes not brought up enough in my opinion is to plan for loses. What can you afford to lose if you can’t backup everything (due to price, etc.)? config files and photos or personal data are relatively small (compared to something like a media library) and should be prioritized.

I was wondering if they were doing CPU transcoding in plex instead of using a client that supports direct playback. A few Apple TVs can generally do the trick at a much lower cost and double as YouTube and other streaming services clients.

Even on windows sometimes depending on the target host, I’ve had to type host.local. (Final dot to do exact match) instead of host.local

This didn’t seem to affect other domains. I’m assuming it was due to special handling of .local

For item #1, self hosted solutions like home assistant also allow using “smart” devices without the cloud in some instances. You are not at the mercy of a vendor going out of business or dropping support and your devices becoming bricks.

Not all devices are compatible, but from what I’ve learned, I would never buy another device with so called “smart” features if it is not compatible with home assistant.

For #1 I would say not to focus on learning the same kind of thing that you started at some point recently. It took me a few months to get my local setup going since I would do it after work (also similar skills) and get tired of poking around.

At some point I gave up and started doing other things that brought me joy (video games, paint night with YouTube tutorials, movies/TV). When I finally decided to get back to it, it was enjoyable again. If I have to re-do it from scratch it could be done in probably a few hours or at most some nights after work and would be enjoyable since the annoying “got ya” lessons are somewhere on memory or some searches away that could be filtered much quicker.

I have made that migration myself going from a Raspberry PI 4 to a n100 based NAS. It was 10 minutes for the software stack as you said This not taking into account media migration which was done on the background over a few hours on WiFi (I had everything on an external hard drive at the time).

That last part is the only thing I would change about my self hosting solution. Yes, the NAS has a nice form factor, is power efficient and has so far been very optimal for my needs (no lag like rpi4), however I have seen they don’t really sell motherboard or parts to repair them. They want you to replace it with another one. Reason 2 on the same is vendor lock in. Depending on the options you select when creating the storage groups/pools (whatever they are called), you could be stuck needing to get something from the same vendor to read your data if the device stops working but the disks are salvageable. Reason 3 is they’ve had security incidents so a lot of the “features” I would not recommend using ever to avoid exposing your data to ransomware over the internet. I don’t trust their competitors either. I know how commercial software is made with the smallest amount of care for security best practices.

Dang, I used to use Nooblet when playing crysis wars a long time ago. All the flying tanks kind of ruined it after a while, but it was nice to find a moderated server running Savanah and Battleground which had the Helis and VTOLs…

Reminds me of the “chmod 777” crowd at work. Goddamn it.

This all makes sense to me since we deal with it at work. I would maybe add a service vs route point to differentiate things like UI that need external exposure. The main difference is we use kustomize instead of helm. Out of curiosity if you had any experience with both and why did you settle in helm?

They are also enterprise drives which consume slightly more power and more importantly generate more noise/clicking sounds on average when compared to a consumer drive. Depending on where you were planning to install them, it might not be the best option.

I would suggest docker compose before a UI to someone that likes to work via the command line.

Many popular docker repositories also automatically give docker run equivalents in compose format, so the learning curve is not as steep vs what it was before for learning docker or docker compose commands.