BartyDeCanter

My first thought would be to try and fix it, then you have a nice laptop or get to be the family hero when you return it working to your brother.

Past that there are several services you might use that can take advantage of the video card: Immich image recognition, Paperless OCR, some of the local Whisper servers.

Or you have a nice set-top PC for big screen gaming and media playback.

You definitely don’t have to go full LLM for this. There are a wide variety of local spam filtering tools available, depending on what email application you use. If you really want to use modern ML, I’d go with something like Laya as it is tunable and runs locally.

Easily! My Pi runs PiHole and a print server and I’ll could probably run almost my entire stack in it if I wanted. Jellyfin would be the hardest due to transcoding CPU usage, but it’s probably ok for one stream at a time.

The other issue for me would be storage. Since I have a 28TB NAS I run everything that requires large storage on it, but a USB RAID attached to a Pi would probably work just fine.

I have a git repo with all my docker files, config, notes, etc. I have a main overview file covering the overall system and then a directory for each machine. I edit things on my local machine, then scp and ssh to the various remotes. Once I’m happy with my changes, I commit and push to my Forgejo install on my NAS in case my main computer fails. Secrets, passwords, and keys are in my Vaultwarden.

I don’t use AI for it, but a local model could probably give me the commands to do whatever I wanted based on the repo.

Or you can go straight to the source and use the Trash Guides

Like all projects, you should think about needs, budget, and time. You’ve got a good list of what you want to run which is a good start. Budget is next, particularly considering the price of hardware these days.

FWIW, I run Jellyfin, Navidrome, the entire arr stack, Forgejo, Paperless, mealio, and Immich on a NAS with 24GB RAM and have never needed more. 8GB would have been a bit tight but probably doable. 16 will be plenty for you.

From TFA, emphasis mine:

What veans is for#

Coding agents keep their own to-do lists. Claude Code has TodoWrite, other tools have their own scratch files, and either way that list lives inside a single session and disappears when the session ends. You can’t see it while the agent is working, your teammates can’t see it at all, and nothing survives to the next session.

veans replaces that ephemeral list with real tasks in a Vikunja project. The agent claims a task before it starts, moves it along as it works, and leaves it in review when it’s done. The result is that the agent’s work is visible in the same place you already track everything else: you can watch a task move across the board in real time, comment on it, reprioritize it, or pick up where the agent left off. When the session ends, the trail is still there.

veans itself is built for machines, not people . Everything prints JSON, so it’s made to be consumed by an agent or a script. The human side of the workflow happens in Vikunja.

What Taskwarrior lets you do is something like this for people:

task add priority:high due:thursday depends:32 something I need to do
task ready   # shows all of my tasks that aren't waiting on something or depending on something
task project:home-repairs export > home-repairs.json # export my entire home repair project to a json file to process into a gantt chart, budget (since I can add a price tag to each task) and whatever else

but then I can also have a script that looks like:

# add-tasks.sh
infile="$1"
proj ="$2"

while IFS= read -r line; do
    [ -z "$line" ] && continue
    [[ "$line" =~ ^[[:space:]]*# ]] && continue
    echo "Adding task: $line"
    if [ -n "$proj" ]; then
        task add "$line" "$proj"
    else
        task add "$line"
    fi
done < "$input_file"

which lets me have preset task lists for various things, like:

add-tasks.sh ~/tasks/packing-list.txt proj:work-trip
add-tasks.sh ~/tasks/xmas-list.txt proj:xmas-presents

Thats an administration cli, not a daily use cli.

And, I mean things like being able to take tasks, pipe them through whatever tooling you like, pipe them back in, sync them from any other task system, etc. TaskWarrior has a fully customizable priority and urgency system, tagging, dependency management, and status system. I also like that TaskWarrior is usable completely offline and then can be resynced whenever you feel like it.

Vikunja is great and probably the right choice for most people. But if you do significant project planning for yourself AND want to be able to deal with you todo list programmatically, the only other thing close is orgmode.

Fair enough! The lack of a cli is the deal breaker for Vikunja for me.

There is a WASM ticket being worked on that once it is completed will allow for all sorts of fancy web UIs for TaskWarrior as standalone PWAs or whatever. I should check in on how that’s going.

I’ve taken a brief look at it. The ui is fairly slick, but you have to use it their way and it doesn’t have a cli. How much that matters is up to you.

Instead of new and exciting, how about old and boring? https://taskwarrior.org Sync server is self hosted, it’s more configurable and programmable than anything else and has a variety of front ends on different platforms.

And give up the best weather and access to 5 star restaurants in the world? Surely you jest!

Not exactly self-hosting, but I’ve worked at two different academic labs that had unique issues and small budgets.

The first was on top of a mountain at 3km elevation. The low air pressure meant that all hard drives had a lifespan of no more than a year before starting to have issues. This was in the pre-SSD days. The “solution” was to boot from a floppy, never compress data, and have a student return the drives to a low elevation and swap them for the prior ones every six months.

The second was at a place that was using old Datacube MaxVideo hardware that we would never have the budget to replace. It would crash if the room temperature got above about 18C, so we set the thermostat to 15C. Which doesn’t sound too bad until you’ve tried sitting at a desk for 8 hours where everything is 15C and the heat is just slowly leaving your body into the chair, the desk, and the keyboard. And then you walk outside where it is 32C and instantly start sweating because you’re still in several layers and fingerless gloves.

I have NAS that had a similar problem, but from the logs it was clear that the machine was running fine after going non-responsive, but either the NIC or something else network related was crashing. However, the logs weren’t capturing the exact issue. I wrote a script to ping Google every 10 minutes, write a bunch of debug data to disc, and then reboot.

And it has never happen since. I have no idea what the root cause was, but sending those pings out seems to have fixed it.

I use Tailscale for this, with my own Headscale server so that I am in control of everything. It’s a much easier approach that is more likely to pass the spousal acceptance factor.

I’m going to echo what others have said here but hopefully clarify it somewhat. For most FOSS projects you can contribute by code, documentation, writing/reviewing bug reports, or other project management tasks. The projects probably have a “Contributing” section on their website that will help you get started and might even have an “easy tasks” or “good for beginners” section.

If you’re primarily interested in contributing by writing code, then you need to learn to code. Pick a language that a project you care about is written in and find the beginners tutorials.

You going to want to learn the basic tools the project uses even if you’re not writing code just so you can interact with the project’s community, so probably git, their bug tracker, and whatever they use for documentation and translation.

And don’t be surprised if it takes a while to get that first contribution in. FOSS developers tend to become grumpy with time and generally have high standards, and due to the massive amount of LLM slop being thrown their way these last few years have often become even more so. But your work will be appreciated if you stick with it.

Just use Tailscale for your VPN. If you want to be 100% FOSS self hosted, set up Headscale as your control server somewhere. It’s simple, secure, and has excellent performance.

I use Hetzner, they’ve been easy to work with, reasonably priced and I’ve never had a problem.

NAS

• Arr stack
• Jellyfin
• Navidrome
• Immich
• Forgejo
• Paperless
• Mealie

RaspPi

• PiHole

VPS

• Tailscale
• TaskWarrior Sync
• Vaultwarden

Personal Workstation

• Forgejo runners
• Immich image detection
• Paperless OCR

And of course all the basic security measures and Borg backup on everything.

I hate to be that jerk, but did you consider just implementing this as a front end to TaksWarrior? It has everything here, with 20 years of experience, except for the nice GUI front end.

Honestly, this is one of those things where you need to define what AI means. Paperless 2.x used a machine learning-backed OCR library called Tesseract that has been in development since 1985.

The current version does use a LSTM neural network, since 2018. Is that an AI? Fuck if I know because AI is a basically meaningless term.

It’s not an LLM or a diffusion model, which is what backs a lot of the things people are calling AI nowadays.

Exactly, that’s the “in theory” part. In theory, 802.11ax (aka WiFi 6) can hit 1.1Gb, and 802.11be (WiFi 7) can hit 23Gb(!!), while most common cheap Ethernet devices support 1Gb, though fancier ones support 2.5 or 10. But you’re only going to hit those rates in an anechoic chamber with perfect antennas, placement and no other devices. And that speed is shared between all connected devices.

But a $20 Ethernet switch can support 8 devices getting a solid 1Gb connection simultaneously.

Related, I have a Roku TV that only has a 100Mb Ethernet connection but generally reports several hundred Mb over WiFi. I still only use the Ethernet connection because a 4k show only needs about 60Mb, and I never have had a problem with the Ethernet connection, while WiFi would drop out several times a week.

It does, and they work well.

The basics for anything:

• ssh key access only
• and a hardware key if available
• disabled root
• fail2ban
• rate limiting
• unattended upgrades
• calendar reminder to run full updates

After that, it really depends on what you’re running and who needs access where.

If it’s just you, or a small group of devices that you have access to and can maintain, Tailscale is the easiest best first step, or your own headscale server.

In theory, yeah, modern WiFi and gigabit Ethernet are about the same speed. But WiFi will always be less reliable, the bandwidth is shared rather than per device, and if you have neighbors you will lose some to interference. Also, cat6 can get you to 10 gigabit, so is much more future proof.

If you can reasonably easily get to the runs, put in the Ethernet. It will be more reliable, future proof and cheaper. If it’s a major pain in the ass, MoCA will be fine.

I use PorkBun. I didn’t have to upload any id, but I pay with a credit card so they do have my name and whatnot. They have a pretty decent API to manage whatever you need.

lol, I kinda do. It’s this weirdly and wonderfully idyllic town that feels like what a small town should be, while still being very progressive and queer friendly.

As for the meds, I’m trying to stock up, but mine are pretty restricted so at most I’m getting one or two spares per month. My partners are more reasonable, so they have a larger cushion.

In that level of extreme disaster, honestly not going to be caring. But I did have a layered approach to less extreme more realistic scenarios.

Neighbors and Community

The most important thing in a real emergency. We know our neighbors, chat with them on the street and in line for the weekly ice cream truck. We have several close friends within an easy walk or bike ride and are part of a local social club that we go to every week. We’ve had the emergency chat with many of them.

Power

15 minute UPS on my NAS will get me through small power bumps. I also have a large backup battery meant for camping with solar panels that lets my partner and I go indefinitely without city power for our medical devices, with enough to spare most days to keep our phones topped off. I’m currently using it a a oversized UPS for my desktop, but in a real emergency I’ll shut that down and move it to the bedroom.

Longer term, we’re planning on getting solar+house scale battery. I had one before and it got us though multiple days without power as long as we were careful.

Food, water and general supplies

55 gallon food safe drum of drinking water with the tablets that keep it safe for years. I have a todo item that reminds me to rotate it out every three years. We have two emergency bins, one with a hand crank/solar/usb powered radio and flashlight and assorted emergency supplies. The other has freeze dried hiking meals. They were the cheapest per meal per year of shelf life last time I did the math.

Medications

A real gap. I can’t get more than a one month supply of my meds, similar for my partner. While neither of us have immediate life threatening problems without them, we’d both be in rough shape in different ways. Don’t know what to do about this.

Backups

My desktop, my partners laptop, the NAS, and my VPS all have offsite backups to another country halfway around the world. I test recovery annually, and use healthchecks.io to notify me if they stop doing their daily backup. I need to finish getting my laptop backup running, but it’s been low priority as I mostly use it as a thin client for my desktop and keep a few files synced with Syncthing.

VPS

A few critical services run on it instead of my at-home NAS in case our home internet connection fails. It’s physically located several hundred miles away. Again, backed up elsewhere so I can relatively quickly recover it if needed.

NAS

Hot-swappable 4-disk raid with a spare sitting in the closet. That should get me through most issues, with the offsite backups for things that don’t. It also pings healthchecks with a few daily self diagnostics.

RaspPi

Really just running PiHole, so the only data to back up is the split dns config which lives in my notes on my desktop. Seems like a weak point, but could be replaced by the NAS, router, or my laptop pretty quickly.

Mobile devices

Backed up to their corresponding corporate overlords, except for photos and videos which go to immich on the NAS. I wish I had a better solution here.

Me

I have a notes directory describing the setup with configuration, docker files and playbooks for the various services in a local git repo on my desktop. I have printouts of the assorted recovery codes and a letter explaining all this in my filing cabinet alongside my will and advanced directives. We have enough technical friends that my partner can ask one to help, or just point an LLM at the note files and have it walk them through most things. I’ve audited the notes and git history for credentials and it’s clean. Just IPs and machine names, lists of services on each, clean docker files and basic maintenance instructions.

I think my biggest gap is what to do in a dual-failure case where I lose my home internet connection, and my desktop ssd fails. My data would be safe in the offsite, but I wouldn’t be able to reinstall Debian. My laptop would let me take care of most things for a while, but maybe I need to set up a mirror…