I use cloudflare for both my domains. $17 or so each.

Honestly you can spend as little as a couple bucks if you dont care about a name. I like cloudflare but almost any registrar is fine as long as you pay for the domain.

Yup, they say its free and open source, and here is the link to their github:

https://github.com/RPTools

Me personally, I really liked using maptool. https://www.rptools.net/toolbox/maptool/

Its got a bit of a learning curve and doesnt look great, but it gets the job done and is Foss.

I actually just set up home assistant today and I personally like using a VM. Feels the most straight forward to me. I’m not a huge fan of docker, mostly cause it feels more complicated than it should be. Thats just me though. Either baremetal or in a VM is the way I like to do things, not just home assistant.

I used a cloudflare tunnel for streaming music in jellyfin. Didn’t so much else with it and it worked pretty well. Anything high bandwidth you should use something else, but for stuff that doesnt consume a ton of bandwidth like music streaming in my case, it worked fine, at least when I used it a few years back.

Cost, privacy, and control.

No matter what happens to stuff outside my network, I have full control over my data and hardware, without paying someone for thiers.

I still haven’t set up my self hosting stuff yet, still moving things in with my girlfriend and unpacking but I’ll be using my mini PCs for home assistant, nextcloud, immich, and Jellyfin to start with. May set up some arr services as well but I kinda like to just pay for things to own them if I can.

I like the elitedesk PC for smaller services. My main reason being the power draw and or heat output. The ones I have and plan to use 60w of power which is pretty damn good for a whole computer.

Noise is another factor. Space saving is a plus, helps prevent ewaste since these are almost always refurbished. Its a good deal IMO.

And you can always buy or build a big honking PC or server for something else later on.

Thats rad, thanks for the info. I may follow suit, been trying to degoogle myself lately.

Yea I’m aware but I appreciate the insight :) so far my local ai experience has been lack luster so I’m hoping that training and RAG will make up for the context size at least a little. Ifnit can answer accurately in the first place, it may not need as big of a context window.

If you haven’t tried using RAG in some form, I would recommend giving it a go. Its pretty cool stuff, helps make models answer more accurately based on the documentation you give them though in my case, ive had limited success. Tbh, chatgpt has become my last resort when I just wanna get something done but I don’t like using it due to the privacy concerns, not to mention the ethical issues I have with ai training in general from big tech.

How is searxng BTW? Would you say its good to host or do you use a normal search engine more often? Or do you just use it for the AI search plugin?

Ive actually been thinking about using it rather than duckduckgo but was also hopeful the search index they are working on would be enough to satisfy my needs, or that a self hosted AI enabled search engine would work well enough when I need it.

Thats why i was considering training my own model if possible. Ive been toying around with kobold.CPP and gpt4all which both have RAG implementations.

My idea is to essentially chat with documentation and as a separate use case, have it potentially be a AI search engine but locally hosted. I do still prefer to search myself, but fuck man, searches have gotten so bad, and the kobold.CPP web lookup feature was pretty neat IMO.

So yea you’re not wrong, I’m just hoping that if in train it and or give it documentation it can reference when answering, it will be suitable. Mostly AI has been good for me as kind of a rubber ducky when troubleshooting and helping me search for things when I have some specific question and in don’t want “top 5 things vaguely related to your question” results.

Getting ready to move from out of the woods and back to civilization with my partner.

Not looking forward to having neighbors above or below me but I’m very excited to have internet that doesnt fucking suck.

Once were moved and a bit more settled, I’m gonna start really digging into to selfhosting things. I have the hardware, a couple HP mini PCs that will run home assistant and probably a server for various docker things. Nextcloud and immich seem to be the things I’ve found i wanna use so far. I already have a NAS set up, but was having am issue with it not booting if a monitor isnt plugged in. I bought a dummy plug for it but haven’t tried it out yet.

Will also be setting up an AI server for local LLM use. Hope to train one to fit my needs once I pull the trigger on 3060 12GB card but need to figure out what other parts I’ll use. Might upgrade my main rig and use the parts from that, or maybe I’ll buy a old dell and fix it up. Not sure yet.

Lots of ideas, so little time lol.

Man where was this post when in was DMing? lol.

This is super cool though. Rn I’m doing some film editing work for my friend, and this could probably be useful for subtitles too. Thanks for sharing.

Yea not super thrilled with bambu lab for the privacy concerns but the printer itself is good. I just use it in lan only mode and block any outgoing network traffic on my router.

But there are other brands that are good. Ive heard prusa is nice but never tried them.

Yea you’re in the right place lol. Like others in this thread, ive also thought about this a lot.

I watched a video recently of someone using a pi for android auto: https://youtu.be/Puk_pzMGd7c

I think the only problem you’ll find is that the software would need to be more custom if you didn’t want to use Android auto. Some kind of customized launcher for the pi or something akin to that to mimic a infotainment system.

IMO, using a pi for android auto would be the easiest way to do this but totally get wanting to do it on your own.

I think as long as you use something like organic maps and have a GPS module, a pi should be able to at least do GPS. That said, I think you have to use downloaded maps in that case. I can’t say for sure but that’d be my best guess.

As for screens, my advice is just buy a screen from pi. I looked extensively for a screen that you can hook up to a pi with usb c or anything else and from what I saw, a lot of the options for touchscreens are worse and or more expensive than what pi offers at $65 and its about as plug and play as it gets since they built it.

In all I think its very doable hardware wise. Software would maybe be your only hurdle depending on how exactly you want this set up. If you wanna throw a couple weeks of work at it, I’d be interested to see it so def post again if you do.

I’m known as the “spreadsheet” guy at my work since I’ve done a lot of upgrades to our existing tools and or made new ones. I’m learning coding just doing that through app script and am toying around with some game Dev ideas in godot but this sounds super interesting. Thanks for sharing.

TL:DR, yes you can. But its not nearly as reliable as wired internet and is dependant on where you are.

I’m currently living in a place where only DSL is available for wired internet and its 1.5 mbps down at maximum so this is essentially my situation. I dont self host anything currently as I’m kind of in between projects but I could in theory self host something and access it remotely.

What I’m currently using for internet is a load balanced connection between starlink and lte. I’d recommend just using lte if possible. Starlink is good but it can be very spotty.

I’m surrounded by trees and the towers near me are old and go down more often that I would like or get bogged down so I need starlink but due to the trees it goes down frequently. Every minute or so. Sometimes I get 5 minutes of internet through it and thats fun.

IMO, the more self hostable options we have for services, the better. This sounds like a good idea to me.

Good luck with your project and thank you for taking the time to contribute to the free and open source community.

I love this idea, because I often have questions like this as I transition away from proprietary software to open source alternatives

I think listing what software equivalents it might replace listed in the card.

I do see its listed when you click on the info card in the main list, but having it be visible before that might be helpful.

I know a lot of people won’t like the little ad cards when you do click on a software to review its page, but I think the way you implementted it is good. Its not intrusive and clearly states its an ad.

Edit: removed bit about categories.

If i can figure it out I’ll be sure to post something lol.

So far, i found a python project that is supposed to enable RAG but i have yet to try it and after a reinstall of my linux pc to Popos, im having less than success getting ollama to run.

Me personally, i use my AMD 7700XT to run ollama on my main pc. Can be helpful for troubleshooting as the internet gets worse amd worse to search especially if i dont know what the issue is. Thats my main use case for it but id like to set up something with RAG and use it to help me with documentation if i have questions.

I don’t think its super worth it to use a VPS for an LLM if you already have a decrnt gpu that you can run it on. If yoy dont already have the hardware, plenty of older gpus can run the models pretty well. My 1070ti still kicks ass all these years later and you can find them for $100 bucks or less on ebay used. Ive used it for ollama as well and it does just fine.

Will it be super fast or a really big model? No, but if its for personal use, i dont see any benefit to paying a monthly subscription for it and like i said, works well enough for me.

Its also more secure and private to host it yourself if thats worth anything to you. Thats one of the biggest reasons i self host.