Papa's Homelab Story

I thought I was done. The tablet was in his hands. The ownership was his — his domain, his account, his server. A lifetime of teaching, gathered and searchable. I’d built a legacy and given it away. The end. And then, at that very handover, the eighty-year-old man told me what was missing. There were teachings, he said, that we didn’t have — recordings that belonged in his life’s work but weren’t in our collection. He knew, because it’s his life’s work, and no one knows it better than the man who lived it. So the “finished” gift wasn’t finished. The tablet is back on my desk right now, plugged in, getting its update. On Sunday I hand it back: Version 2.0. ...

Everything in this series so far — the app, the tablet, Termux, the transcription, the search — was really the how. This post is the why. And the why is a person. He is eighty this year. For decades he has studied the Bible and explained it to others, twice a week, online, asking nothing in return. He once told his listeners that you shouldn’t walk out your front door in the morning before you read the Bible. That’s the kind of man he is. He gives people their daily bread, every day, and then steps out of the way. ...

I built an audio app once. Then I built the same app again — and the second time took an afternoon. Not because I’m fast. Because I didn’t really build it again. I cloned it. I took the thing I already had, copied it onto a different machine, pointed it at a different home, and turned it on. That sounds ordinary until you notice you can’t do it with the apps you use every day. You can’t clone Netflix onto a relative’s device. You can’t copy your Spotify and hand it to a friend. The big apps are sealed boxes you rent access to. But software you build is yours, which means you can make copies of it the way you’d copy a key. ...

My daughter is three. My phone takes about 6,000 photos and videos a year — maybe more. I don’t have 6,000 interesting shots. Most of it is accidental taps, blurry motion, seventeen near-identical photos of the same bread I was about to eat. But somewhere in that pile are the clips I actually care about: her first steps, her laughing at something she found hilarious at the time, moments my wife and I know we’ll want to see again when she’s older. ...

My phone has backed up about six thousand photos and videos from 2025 alone. On my PC, I run a local browser tool — pick_yeju.py — that lets me scroll through them, pick the ones worth keeping, and copy them into my daughter’s media library on our NAS. The files are sorted oldest-first. Six thousand of them. That’s about ninety pages at sixty per page. The problem: every time I restarted the tool, it opened at page one. I’d have to scroll back through to wherever I’d left off the previous session. Ten, twenty, thirty pages — just to find my place again. ...

My three-year-old daughter has a favorite show. Baby Shark. She could watch it every day, and often does. Last week, I showed her something new. Fifteen short videos of herself as a baby — the first year of her life, played one after another. She sat still for one hour. Smiling, then laughing out loud, then quiet and focused. She didn’t ask for Baby Shark once. My wife was watching from across the room. She didn’t say much. She didn’t need to. ...

In the same week, I bought two computers from the same company. One was a Lenovo laptop — a nice everyday machine I picked up at Costco. The other was a Lenovo tablet, bought to be a small home server. They had the same 128 GB of storage. And the tablet cost less than a third of what the laptop did. That gap made me stop and think. Not because the laptop was a bad deal — it wasn’t. But it showed me something I’d never really thought about. For the job of being a server, most of what you pay for in a “real” computer just sits there unused. ...

My three-year-old daughter would press play in Kids Player and wait ten seconds for the sound to start. That wait is why I upgraded my NAS from 2 GB to 10 GB of RAM. So: did it work? The honest answer is two answers. On paper, the upgrade was a triumph. In daily life, it made things about one second better. Both are true, and the gap between them is the most useful thing I learned. ...

In the last post, I ordered an 8 GB RAM module for my Synology DS224+. I paid ₩76,000 (about $55) instead of ₩68,000 (about $49) for a bulk one, because I wanted to avoid a used or unpackaged module. Then it arrived. A plain brown box. Inside, a bare green board wrapped in a sheet of foil and some bubble wrap. No Samsung retail box. No sealed blister. It was bulk after all. ...

Here’s a question that sounds odd at first. Could the cheapest, smallest, quietest computer in your house be your home server? Not a Raspberry Pi. Not a NAS. Not an old laptop on a shelf, fan going, getting warm. I mean an ordinary Android tablet — the kind you’d hand a three-year-old to watch cartoons. It turns out it can, and I’ve been running one this way for a while. A $100 tablet sits in my home right now, plugged into the wall. It runs a real Linux server that serves audio to a web app, over its own secure web address. It’s silent, about the size of a paperback, and it uses very little power. I’m as comfortable leaving it on as I am leaving my phone on. ...