Your busted laptop from 2019 or that old desktop that has been gathering dust in a closet might not be suitable for use as a "normal" PC, but they have more than enough power to run useful services. You don't need a data center tucked under your desk to get started with self-hosting—almost any PC will do.

The average person now has several monthly cloud subscriptions, and the situation only gets worse when you look at households. You have cloud storage, a handful of apps, a photo subscription of some sort, not to mention Microsoft Office. Each one individually won't break the budget, but cumulatively, subscription costs can easily run into the hundreds of dollars per month.

I spent nearly six years running a dual-socket decade-old Xeon server as my primary NAS. Recently, I moved to an off-the-shelf Ugreen NAS and started comparing the two. The thing is, they really can't be compared, and I realized I've spent way more money on that old Lenovo than I originally thought.

If you've ever used a mesh Wi-Fi system, you've probably noticed that the satellite nodes usually have a spare Ethernet port. It is tempting to use that port to attach a NAS. After all, it seems like a good way to get your NAS connected without running a cable across the floor or through a wall.

Owning your own media, be it movies, music, or TV shows, is a great way to ensure that a change to a licensing agreement doesn't suddenly deprive you of one of your favorite pastimes.

If you've been on the fence with whether to buy a NAS (network-attached storage) or not—let me show you a different way. ORICO's latest 9948RC3 PRO DAS (direct-attached storage) system offers great transfer speeds, RAID, and more, all without a pesky network connection or custom operating system to deal with, and I actually really enjoyed using it.

Cloud-based automation services such as Zapier and Make let you connect different services together to automate tasks without having to build everything from scratch. If you'd rather not have all your personal automations running in the cloud, n8n gives you a different option.

As we march toward fall, it's time to start thinking about tidying up the homelab and making it a bit safer and more secure. Today's projects include two programs that help keep an eye on your homelab for you, and one that makes your information way more accessible.

I love my Bambu Lab printers, but I got tired of the software lock-in and decided to see how well I could recreate it with community tools. I was actually able to get remote monitoring and notifications working fairly well without a ton of work, and here's how I did it.

I love Jellyfin; it allows me to stream my entire movie and TV show collection across multiple devices. There's really only one thing that Jellyfin can't do, and that's deciding what I'm going to watch. I wanted to find a more entertaining way to choose a show or movie, and what I found was even better than I expected.

Most of us have an old bookshelf speaker, soundbar, or Bluetooth speaker lying around somewhere. They still sound good, the problem is that they're not very "smart."