Start with a problem. What you trying to solve. Hosting music is different from backing up your computer. That is different from a home dashboard.

Because I have no idea if the questioner is going to do that beforehand

problem is a phone only works if you have it on you. Grandma falling often is a case where she doesn’t have a phone (often grandma in this case is in mental decline and wouldn’t think to use the phone if she had it).

A privacy respecting device that can hear “help” and general cries/grunts to get help when needed is what the world really needs. This is much more complex than the ask, but it is the real need here. For me what the OP was asking is enough, I just need to inform a kid in a different room dinner is ready.

Oak doesn’t like to bend. It can be done, but maple would be a better choice if that would work for you. You only need to steam the section that needs to bend - luthiers often bend around an a “hot pipe” instead of making a steam box, look at what they do for inspiration of a different way.

A local hackerspace will probably take pity on you and find someone to do this for you.

When IPv6 was first created, the dream was that your machine would get a new IP address any time the whole network felt some need for that. The idea was, as someone added a network, we may need to change the way your systems are numbered in order to make the backbone routing a lot easier to fit in memory. This hasn’t seemed to work out, but that was the dream.

I assume your ZFS system has plenty of redundancy. Thus, I would enable snapshots and do a regular rotation because ZFS snapshots are so easy to recover from for most disasters. What that leaves is the catastrophic losses from, say, your house burning down. So you still need something off-site, but the ZFS will cover most of your backup needs.

I did the monthly arch upgrade and had to reboot to get some service to come up. Took an extra 5 minutes this month.

It might be but it is risky - if anything goes wrong there goes that data.

The problem is people don’t want a focused community. They want a broad community so when they have a question they can ask and find an expert - but not so broad that the noise means they can’t follow anything. We do focused communities because the world (or even internet) has too many people and so the noise of all the discussions is too much. However that isn’t what we want.

If one dimmable color (or color change to red on dim) is not enough then you need room lights and spicial effects lights as separate things.

N100. Cheap enough (last year) and plenty of power to run things like jellyfin on it as well. linuxserver makes great docker images.

Only phase 2 trial, but still hopeful.

General advice is smart switches, dumb bulbs. Switches mean that you can control the light without getting out your phone, or whatever it is you use to control the bulb. Sure HA can talk to many bulbs, but only if the switch is on. Guests will not have the ability to control your bulbs - either there is too much work to install an app for a short stay, or the system is a security nightmare (often both). Use a smart switch because they have a control on the wall that guests can use to get what they want done without having to worry about apps.

Most often you can choose bulbs with the right color temperature, but if not some dimable bulbs change color temperature. If this is not good enough two lights: a general room like, and a separate special effects light, don’t combine them (HA can control both, but they are separate systems generally not used at the same time)

A shelf is a bad idea in a bench - you need easy access to the bottom to adjust clamps all the time. Now an assembly table can benefit from shelves and such - but they don’t need the strength this has.

I try for yesterdays date. Kids get some legal protection I want.

I use grocy for chore /task management. Then home assistant to put it on a dashboard that looks nice. I’m not totally happy but it is the best I’ve found.

I’m working on a button to push when we feed the cats per my wife’s request. It doesn’t do anything when push because she can’t figure out why she wants the button

That is out of date. Someone should look up the law in Iowa that just went into effect and update it. I’m too lazy to look up the required details.

I had a few cousins who took and finished all my grandma’s unfinished quilts. They were already into quilting though. YMMV, but it is a good example - if there is someone who can understand/take this over give it to them.