BartyDeCanter

I use Tailscale for this, with my own Headscale server so that I am in control of everything. It’s a much easier approach that is more likely to pass the spousal acceptance factor.

I’m going to echo what others have said here but hopefully clarify it somewhat. For most FOSS projects you can contribute by code, documentation, writing/reviewing bug reports, or other project management tasks. The projects probably have a “Contributing” section on their website that will help you get started and might even have an “easy tasks” or “good for beginners” section.

If you’re primarily interested in contributing by writing code, then you need to learn to code. Pick a language that a project you care about is written in and find the beginners tutorials.

You going to want to learn the basic tools the project uses even if you’re not writing code just so you can interact with the project’s community, so probably git, their bug tracker, and whatever they use for documentation and translation.

And don’t be surprised if it takes a while to get that first contribution in. FOSS developers tend to become grumpy with time and generally have high standards, and due to the massive amount of LLM slop being thrown their way these last few years have often become even more so. But your work will be appreciated if you stick with it.

Just use Tailscale for your VPN. If you want to be 100% FOSS self hosted, set up Headscale as your control server somewhere. It’s simple, secure, and has excellent performance.

EDIT: And also check what your upload speed is from your server. It sounds like you’re running off your home internet connection and many ISPs have terrible upload speeds, particularly for sustained traffic.

I use Hetzner, they’ve been easy to work with, reasonably priced and I’ve never had a problem.

NAS

• Arr stack
• Jellyfin
• Navidrome
• Immich
• Forgejo
• Paperless
• Mealie

RaspPi

• PiHole

VPS

• Tailscale
• TaskWarrior Sync
• Vaultwarden

Personal Workstation

• Forgejo runners
• Immich image detection
• Paperless OCR

And of course all the basic security measures and Borg backup on everything.

I hate to be that jerk, but did you consider just implementing this as a front end to TaksWarrior? It has everything here, with 20 years of experience, testing and community, except for the nice GUI/PWA front end.

Honestly, this is one of those things where you need to define what AI means. Paperless 2.x used a machine learning-backed OCR library called Tesseract that has been in development since 1985.

The current version of Tesseract does use a LSTM neural network, since 2018. Is that an AI? Fuck if I know because AI is a basically meaningless term.

It’s not an LLM or a diffusion model, which is what backs a lot of the things people are calling AI nowadays.

Exactly, that’s the “in theory” part. In theory, 802.11ax (aka WiFi 6) can hit 1.1Gb, and 802.11be (WiFi 7) can hit 23Gb(!!) with an expensive router, while most common cheap Ethernet devices support 1Gb, though fancier ones support 2.5 or 10, and if you have the money you can get 40Gb or 100Gb devices. But you’re only going to hit those WiFi rates in an anechoic chamber with perfect antennas, placement and no other devices. And that speed is shared between all connected devices.

But a $20 Ethernet switch can support 8 devices getting a solid 1Gb connection simultaneously.

Related, I have a Roku TV that only has a 100Mb Ethernet connection but generally reports several hundred Mb over WiFi. I still only use the Ethernet connection because a 4k show only needs about 60Mb, and I never have had a problem with the Ethernet connection, while WiFi would drop out several times a week.

It does, and they work well.

The basics for anything:

• ssh key access only
• and a hardware key if available
• disabled root
• fail2ban
• rate limiting
• unattended upgrades
• calendar reminder to run full updates

After that, it really depends on what you’re running and who needs access where.

If it’s just you, or a small group of devices that you have access to and can maintain, Tailscale is the easiest best first step, or your own headscale server.

In theory, yeah, modern WiFi and gigabit Ethernet are about the same speed. But WiFi will always be less reliable, the bandwidth is shared rather than per device, and if you have neighbors you will lose some to interference. Also, cat6 can get you to 10 gigabit, so is much more future proof.

If you can reasonably easily get to the runs, put in the Ethernet beside the cable. It will be more reliable, future proof and cheaper. If it’s a major pain in the ass, MoCA will be fine.

I use PorkBun. I didn’t have to upload any id, but I pay with a credit card so they do have my name and whatnot. They have a pretty decent API to manage whatever you need.

Immich is great. I run a small friends and family instance on a NAS and I’ve never had a hiccup that took more than ten minutes to fix. My backup system is borg to a Hetzner storage box nightly with a healthchecks.io check set to email me if it goes more than 48 hours without a success. Cheap, reliable, and fast enough for me.

In iOS there is an app called ShutterDeclutter that every day shows you the all photos you took on that day of the year in your collection and has a swipe left/right to delete or keep each one. It makes the job of reviewing photos manageable for people with multi decade long albums. I really want Immich to add that feature.

You mean run TaskWarrior and host a sync server, right?