I got a cheap Nest E thermostat on eBay from a charity shop seller. It cost me like £15.

Replaced my dumb one with it, then hooked it into HA and made a sensor from all my motion sensors and door sensors which all have temperature gauges in them.

Conglomerated those sensors into one that tracks the average (making sure to only have so many per floor so as not to skew the data to one part of the house) then made a sensor called “Is it cold enough to have the Heating on?” which acts as a simple switch with a lower and upper limit.

Now my heating only comes on when I need it to based off the temperature of the whole house instead of that one place the dumb thermostat was based.

The display unit for it died after less than a year, replaced that for another £20 on eBay and synced the new unit to the Thermostat on the wall.

So for less than £50 and some smarts I’ve upgraded my heating, and saved money on the bills (since it only comes on when we need it to rather than based on the temperature of one location).

I’m not particularly recommending Nest since I have no experience with other manufacturers, but I managed to do it all on the cheap and I’m quite pleased with the results

I use Portainer to manage Docker. It’s really easy.

My are stack is just one big docker config except in Portainer it’s called a “Stack”

If you pay for your pirated content you are doing it wrong

I don’t think I am, it’s Usenet and a VPN, and costs less than my Spotify Family account.

2 things, one of which has already been said

Get an SSD and a usb cable for it. Boot off that. Be aware that not all cables are the same (have a Google for usb 3 SSD cables for home assistant before you buy one). There’s a little song and dance you have to do to boot off ext SSD but it’s not hard and doesn’t take long (Google).

That combo will eliminate the SD card issues in the future. But you also need to look into the Google Drive backup add-on. Get that for when shit goes down.

With those two things you should be all set and eliminate this ever happening again. If it does you have a backup.

A laptop with an hdmi, stremio and a real Debrid account.

Simple

I’ll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.

I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I’m not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.

I have a Spotify family account I’m trying to phase out with resistance from the children.

To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt

Yeah I know, I use Gluetun now, I was just answering OPs question.

I ran a Linux VM and just had Mullvad app installed and always on, and that was all I needed

Yes

Back when I was a streamer I used Kodi with the add-ons (I was in a subreddit where the current good ones got posted now and then) and had a Real Debrid account.

It was really convenient, maybe give it a go with your Pi. There’s an OS you can bang on it (is it openelec? Libre-elec? Something like that) and just plug it into your TV. You’ll have to work out controlling it in a convenient way, I have a little keyboard about the size of a remote with a usb dongle. It’s got a little touchpad for the mouse and cost me fuck all on Amazon.

You do have to pay for Real Debrid but it’s totally worth the price and will get you used to paying for piracy.

So the cycle goes:

Install Kodi and play with the free streams and think it’s pretty great, get frustrated because you can’t watch that one thing, finally bite the bullet and get a month of Real Debrid, tell your friends how ace Real Debrid is.

Just skip that and get Real Debrid once you have your Pi set up.

I think you should have a thin sheet of steel kept in your car or somewhere safe, so you can just use that like a locksmith.

Plex was easy enough to set up. I use plexamp on my phone but can access the Plex server via a browser, which includes my music

Meh my Usenet provider also partners with a VPN provider. Still costs me £5 a month for the VPN but I may as well use it, I like having a VPN

Douch or turd sandwich?

I had a friend bring up this very topic this weekend and I replied “What would be more creepy and more likely is that the ad giants have algorithms for working out what you’ll buy that are that good that they know what you want before you do and you’re just noticing how good it is”

I had a friend at work who said “People who pirate stuff are just as bad as burglers” to me. I had just been Burgled 2 weeks before Christmas.

I replied “Right so I’m as bad as the smack heads that robbed my kids presents, is that what you’re saying?”

He did that thing folk do when they look like a fish breathing then tried to backtrack, but that’s when he became a “work colleague” again.

Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.

The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.

Great comment btw, it’s a good idea to have a list of the services you’d like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.

I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker

I see a lot of posts like this and it’s always people overthinking something they haven’t tried to do yet.

So my advice is to just do it.

You may lose everything at some point in the future, Satan knows I have a few times, but because you’ve actually done it, you can do it again.

Now, because you’re just thinking about doing it, it seems like a massive deal because you’ve not gone out and done it yet.

As for recommendations, I use a Proxmox VM with Debian and Docker. My Proxmox does backups, but my Docker compose is also a text document on my PC so I can recreate it all from scratch from that. I also have an idea what I did when I was learning how to do it, and have retained a good bit of that info so I could probably do it without either the backups or the Docker Compose, it would just take longer.

Just do it

Commenting just to add “nofail” to the fstab.

I didn’t do this in Proxmox and then the drive stopped working and so did Proxmox. As a noob I ended up starting fresh and losing lots.

After adding nofail the services start up, just without the NAS attached. Without nofail it just doesn’t boot.

Nofail for the win

I’m running Proxmox on a mini PC. I have a Debian VM for streaming and a Home Assistant VM.

Runs like a dream