Self-Hosting

My daughter is three. She loves one specific playlist of Korean children’s songs, and she likes it best when it plays from a small JBL Bluetooth speaker tucked under her stroller. We walk the neighborhood for about an hour most evenings. I put on her folder, the first song starts, and we go. Thirty seconds later, my phone screen goes off. One more song plays. Then it stops. I have to unlock the phone, tap the next song, put the phone back in my pocket, and keep walking. A minute later, same thing. ...

A pile of audio is a black box. You know the teacher said something about a certain verse. You can almost hear it. But it’s somewhere inside hundreds of hours of recordings, in one lecture out of hundreds, at a point you can’t remember. Without a way to search, those recordings are write-only: you can keep adding to them, but you can never really get anything back out. The bigger the collection grows, the more it buries. ...

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 wife listens to a Bible teacher every morning. After I built her an app to make that easier (the first post in this series), she asked for one more thing. It turned out to be the hardest part of the project. Could we also read his teachings, she said, not just hear them? Reading helps her study. She wanted the words on a screen. “Sure,” I thought. “I’ll just turn the audio into text.” How hard could it be? In 2026, turning speech into text is mostly a solved problem. ...

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. ...

I keep forgetting how to reconnect my NAS folder in Windows Explorer. Every time, I end up asking an AI to walk me through it again. So this time I’m writing it down — for myself as much as anyone else. And then today, the usual steps didn’t work. The folder was gone, and reconnecting it failed too, even though the laptop was on the same Wi-Fi as the NAS. That turned into a longer fix. I’ll cover both. ...

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. ...