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’s still worth it.

The current setup consists of an old laptop with Ubuntu, running Pi-hole and Home Assistant in docker-compose. Pi-hole is the first step and is here to stay. I’m still figuring out whether HA has the degree of customization I want. But there is a long list of to-dos and ideas before I really start with the smart home part.

This whole website is 52Kb!