I got a cheap Nest E thermostat on eBay from a charity shop seller. It cost me like £15.

Replaced my dumb one with it, then hooked it into HA and made a sensor from all my motion sensors and door sensors which all have temperature gauges in them.

Conglomerated those sensors into one that tracks the average (making sure to only have so many per floor so as not to skew the data to one part of the house) then made a sensor called “Is it cold enough to have the Heating on?” which acts as a simple switch with a lower and upper limit.

Now my heating only comes on when I need it to based off the temperature of the whole house instead of that one place the dumb thermostat was based.

The display unit for it died after less than a year, replaced that for another £20 on eBay and synced the new unit to the Thermostat on the wall.

So for less than £50 and some smarts I’ve upgraded my heating, and saved money on the bills (since it only comes on when we need it to rather than based on the temperature of one location).

I’m not particularly recommending Nest since I have no experience with other manufacturers, but I managed to do it all on the cheap and I’m quite pleased with the results

2 things, one of which has already been said

Get an SSD and a usb cable for it. Boot off that. Be aware that not all cables are the same (have a Google for usb 3 SSD cables for home assistant before you buy one). There’s a little song and dance you have to do to boot off ext SSD but it’s not hard and doesn’t take long (Google).

That combo will eliminate the SD card issues in the future. But you also need to look into the Google Drive backup add-on. Get that for when shit goes down.

With those two things you should be all set and eliminate this ever happening again. If it does you have a backup.

I’ll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.

I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I’m not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.

I have a Spotify family account I’m trying to phase out with resistance from the children.

To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt

Yeah my wife’s Granny would buy me some every year. Then she died and now I don’t get socks at Christmas and it makes me sad. Not because I want socks, I want Granny Babs back

Yeah I know, I use Gluetun now, I was just answering OPs question.

I ran a Linux VM and just had Mullvad app installed and always on, and that was all I needed

Yes

I think you should have a thin sheet of steel kept in your car or somewhere safe, so you can just use that like a locksmith.

Plex was easy enough to set up. I use plexamp on my phone but can access the Plex server via a browser, which includes my music

Douch or turd sandwich?

I had a friend bring up this very topic this weekend and I replied “What would be more creepy and more likely is that the ad giants have algorithms for working out what you’ll buy that are that good that they know what you want before you do and you’re just noticing how good it is”

Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.

The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.

Great comment btw, it’s a good idea to have a list of the services you’d like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.

I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker

I see a lot of posts like this and it’s always people overthinking something they haven’t tried to do yet.

So my advice is to just do it.

You may lose everything at some point in the future, Satan knows I have a few times, but because you’ve actually done it, you can do it again.

Now, because you’re just thinking about doing it, it seems like a massive deal because you’ve not gone out and done it yet.

As for recommendations, I use a Proxmox VM with Debian and Docker. My Proxmox does backups, but my Docker compose is also a text document on my PC so I can recreate it all from scratch from that. I also have an idea what I did when I was learning how to do it, and have retained a good bit of that info so I could probably do it without either the backups or the Docker Compose, it would just take longer.

Just do it

Commenting just to add “nofail” to the fstab.

I didn’t do this in Proxmox and then the drive stopped working and so did Proxmox. As a noob I ended up starting fresh and losing lots.

After adding nofail the services start up, just without the NAS attached. Without nofail it just doesn’t boot.

Nofail for the win

I’m running Proxmox on a mini PC. I have a Debian VM for streaming and a Home Assistant VM.

Runs like a dream

I got 2 expensive (over £30) ones and the worst one became my travel cube. My cheap but decent cube is my work cube. Work in a factory so I have to not give a single fuck about it.

Thing is, now it’s just sat in my pocket at work for 6 months it’s actually pretty decent. When I bought it and tried to make it decent I couldn’t. It’s like the grease and silicone has made it a half decent cube

Makes sense since the internet is made of cats https://youtu.be/zi8VTeDHjcM

I’m into home automation and self hosting services and the only time I go to Reddit is when a Google search of something I’m researching takes me there.

I don’t log in (which sometimes fucks me, weed subreddits for example need a sign in for ages verification) so if I have to log in I just nope out, and I will actively try to not use Reddit if I can help it.

Honestly the short answer is practice.

Long answer is also practice, but with information lol.

I spent a long time moving from 2 look to 1 look (oll and pll) using this website https://jperm.net/algs/pll I’ve linked the PLL but there’s OLL there too.

On this page I learned as many of these as I could. You can click on the picture and change the status from unlearned to learning to learned, then go to the trainer and you can select those 3 statuses and it will show only things you’ve selected. You can also click on the alg to get alternatives or even put your own alg in.

So I’ve gone to that page and set an alg as training, then just practiced that one alg until I have it in muscle memory. I aimed at trying to get each type of alg learned, so corners are there, or middles need moving, or headlights are there, or even that there is no pattern.

I was advised to learn PLL first then OLL algorithms, but I kinda picked out the patterns I see most in both, or algs that seemed the simplest first. So I have been learning both together and working from easiest to remember to hardest, and also making my own up for the ones that are most complicated.

This meant that I could practice a few, then go and do solves and when the patterns I knew came up I’d get faster solves for those patterns.

Ok so that’s the big time saving out of the way, takes a lot to learn all the algorithms so it’ll take time. But there’s also taking time to plan your cross. That can save you a good chunk because there’s less head scratching when you start.

Then there’s the look ahead, which I’m only just getting. I did a lot of slow solves to get this in my brain and it’s quite big. This is what I’m practicing to get from my 40second average down to 25

So as you’re solving a corner and edge into the corner, once you have it set up into a 3 move insert, you don’t need to look at it anymore. It’s 3 loves to insert, so instead of looking at it as you put it in, you have to train yourself to look for the next 2 pieces you’re putting together.

While your learning the OLL and PLL and just doing solves (not training algs), when you get one you don’t know, try and alg you do know on it. Sometimes this changes your top pattern to an easier pattern that you can solve. It’s like a stopgap 2 look (pll or oll). Eventually as you learn all the algs you’ll find that you can “wing it” with some of the harder algorithms by just doing a couple of easier ones, which is all the harder ones are anyway, a couple of easier algs with a connecting move in the middle.

Hope all that helps. I’d also advise you have a “travel cube.”

I have an extra cube that lives in the pocket of my leather jacket (yes I’m a metal-head Dad, doesn’t quite fit the stereotype does it?) and it comes in useful when I’m stuck in a queue, or at the Dr waiting room or A and E (or emergency care as it’s called in the US). This allows me to cube instead of whipping my phone out when I have time to kill out of the house.

I have up FaceFuck after Brexit and the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

They brainwashed people into voting against their own interests by “Targeted Advertising” which is basically brain washing.

Of course nothing came of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and I can’t do anything about that as a Plebian, so I just left.

I left Reddit when they took my favourite app. I used it to Doomscroll and that wasn’t great for my mental health, so it was a no-brainer

So Lemmy and only Lemmy for me. I got over my addiction to social media by taking up the Rubik’s Cube.

I’m currently working on getting an average solve under 30 seconds…

So if you use your social media time to do something productive instead, you can do some crazy shit