I’m already hosting pihole, but i know there’s so much great stuff out there! I want to find some useful things that I can get my hands on. Thanks!
Edit: Thanks all! I’ve got a lil homelab setup going now with Pihole, Jellyfin, Paperless ngx, Yacht and YT-DL. Going to be looking into it more tomorrow, this is so much fun!
As far as changed your life, there are not too many that i really love, that made a massive difference to how i do things. But there is one:
Paperless_ngx
ALL of my paper work, receipts, transcripts, tax, shares, council rates. Everything goes in there. We no longer have paper lieing everywhere (well, my wife is another matter, still keeps grocery shopping reciepts…). when i get soimething in the mail, i used the paperless app to “scan” it, upload it, then bin the paper.
An actual life change that i didn’t know i needed.
Oh nice, thanks!
Is it possible for the scans to be stored as files that are readable should paperless crash and I’m not around to get it up and running, or are files stored as weird non-standard file formats?
edit: looks like scans are saved as pdf’s. Thanks for the insight!
The files are stored in a directory and you can define the default path with an environment variable ( file-name-handling ). If you need a more fine graint solution you can also use storage paths and select it on file level ( storage-paths ). I’m using syncthing to sync the folder structure to my other devices.
That looks really cool. At the moment I scan everything with OneDrive, and sync it with my NAS. However, it doesn’t have e.g. OCR features, it’s pretty basic. Will have a look, thanks!
definitely try it out. You can auto-ingest from the scanner folder and it will do all the rest of the sorting for you. I go in every few weeks/months and look at the recent documents to sort and fix up any meta-data/sorting.
How is your work flow from scanning to paperless? Does it support some kind of upload folder?
Yeah paperless supports an upload folder. My scanner has an ability to scan to a network drive, so I scan things onto a shared drive on my homelab box, paperless consumes the scanned PDF and places it into the paperless “inbox”.
Why is this better for you than using a folder structure with a decent naming convention? I’ve tried to get started a couple times, but I just haven’t managed to get what’s better about it. I know i’m missing something, and I feel like if I knew what it is i’d be more likely to out in the work to transition.
well, there are a few things:
- using the app to take photos (in a scan sort of mode, where it trims it to be at right angles), really quick and easy, no matter where i am.
- remote access - i can view all of my documents where ever i am.
- easy & sophisticated search. I have my documents assigned to people (me, wife, child, etc). I also assigned them to things like payslips, tax, shares, legal documents, education docs, receipts, etc. it also helps to automatically tag them to some degree of accuracy
- Automatic dating, it is quite good at picking out the date of the document, as seperate to the upload date. and it is easily updatable if it is wrong
- OCR - the documents content is searchable!
- Ease of tax time. I have some financial year views that make it really easy for me to do my tax (Australia), and i dont need to go hunting for paper that has faded in the heat and is no longer legible.
- folders - the documents are placed in a folder structure of your choosing. if you change the details in the document meta-data, it will move it to the correct place.
so, whilst a folder structure would work. this is SOOO much easier, and provides much more functionality as it is not just storage. it also has WAF!
That was a really clear explanation, thanks. Decent remote scanning would be nice. I guess I just have to wrap my head around tags for some of the niceties to make sense, though I guess i’d be no worse off if I just used folders if that’s an option as well.
i thoguht you may be a bot as there are 20-odd replies the same, but my guess is you are using an app which is a bit dicky.
can you delete all the repeats?
Honestly Plex/Emby/Jellyfin whichever you prefer is a gamechanger because if you have a large library of content then it just cuts the cord from the subscription services.
I’ve always been happy to pay for them until I went on holiday last January and realised that none of my services were working due to going to a country that was out of the way and the only way to access them was to use a VPN.
So having my own Netflix is a great thing.
Tailscale while doing the above is also really cool
Yep. 100% agree. I have a 175TB server. Sure it was expensive to set up initially, but I have all shows and movies I want, always. From all the different services I would have to subscribe to, I imagine I have recovered my initial outlay and I never have to worry about media being removed from the service or it going out of business.
I have things that aren’t even available if I wanted to subscribe. Best thing you can do for yourself.
No commercials, always high quality. Available anywhere, at any time.
Same here, 192tb, but sonarr, radarr, plex, and the source that shall not be named (I respect the 2 rules).
It’s not about outlay, I can watch what I want, when I want, how I want, without anyone tracking, even wrote my own video player interface in python so the mouse buttons handle all the settings.
Completely ruins you for normal media :/
Is it useful without piracy though? It would still be expensive to buy all that media? And usually you can’t even download movies etc that you buy online. Am I missing something?
Quite a bit of what I have on my Jellyfin server is ripped from DVDs and Blu-Rays that I already had.
Other than Disney stuff, you can’t really guarantee on your kids favorite show or movie always being available on a streaming service you’re already paying for. Jellyfin has been great for those moments. Used to use Plex, and it’s very good software, but I got tired of the non-free aspects. Made me feel like I was subscribing to one more streaming service.
But also kind of with Disney stuff, too
Probably an ignorant question but the content you use is pirated right? Should I wonder about legal issues since I would keep it at home and connected to Internet? Protected of course I just don’t see too deep into the issue
If you don’t explicitly set a DNS to allow access from outside the local network, all your stuff is private and confined within your local network. As it is with all, let’s say, wifi stuff that goes on in your home.
Edit. What @notorious said
Home Assistant. It’s a rabbit hole, but it’s great. I’ve got motion enabled lights, thermostats for “dumb” heaters, and I track device usage (tablet, xbox) of my kids.
And it’s so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.
Not necessarily, I have devices that are cloud dependent. Locally in NZ there aren’t a lot of options, all smart plugs are cloud dependent. Also things like weather integrations will stop working.
It’s up to you to make it cloudless, but Home Assistant is the only solution I know of out there that even allows this possibility. I refuse to use anything in my home that requires a third party app or cloud connection (aside from initial pairing so I can flash it with ESPHome or some other local-only firmware). Admittedly it complicates things, but the payoff is so worth it.
Theres plenty of Tasmota based plugs out there. Cloudfree.shop would probably ship to you.
There should be plenty of zigbee stuff in the market, right? Ikea and Phillips stuff are mostly zigbee and can work with homeassistant + zigbee dongle (zha). Some tuya switch and smart plugs are zigbee too and can pair directly to homeassistant + zha without using a cloud account.
Look for z-wave or zigbee plugs. You’ll need to buy a hub, but unless NZ has banned the protocol, it should get you smart switches, outlets, thermostats and more.
Self hosting nothing changed my life.
So much free time and less stress once I abandoned self hosting 😅
Vaultwarden is pretty game changing. No more reusing passwords and they aren’t in the cloud.
This is a rare one for which i wouldnt bother self hosting; i trust the centralized server provider, i can take an offline backup of my passwords and it only costs $10. And im the sort to run my own email server because i don’t trust the cloud providers.
