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My motivation for starting a homelab:

Take advantage of technology, not let technology take advantage of me:

Control the network (block ads using pihole)
Avoid subscriptions (self host media services w/ JellyFin)
Build simple things for myself only

There will be many more Ideas as I implement the basics. Surely, there are challenges related to growing hardware prices, but it is still worth it.

Current set up consists of old laptop with Ubuntu, running pi-hole and homeassistant in docker-compose. Pi-hole is the first step and is here to stay. The HA I’m still figuring out if it has the degrees of personalization I want. But there is a long list of todos and ideas before I really start with the smart home part.

P.S. This post is sponsored by procrastination. I really need to study for the computer vision exam!