I'm back on Linux and going down the Open Source/Self Hosting rabbit hole.
28 July 2025 - I've spent a good amount of time this week playing around with my Pi and planning my next projects
As I sit here my desktop is running Folding@Home across 15 cores and a GPU, My NAS and Pi Hole are running updates and I'm playing around with setting up a Mumble server properly. Honestly it's been really refreshing to actually do something with all the cool tech I've accumulated over time and was likely the natural next step of me trying to remove Google and the other big corporations from my life.
After some technical difficulties that had me crawling back to Windows (and some playing around with the amazing AtlasOS) I have finally got both of my machines back running Linux. This time pop!_os as it is the only distro that essentially allows me to jump into all my worksflows out of the box. The biggest point of contention is the inability to access the smb share that my NAS relies on for communication with non-Windows hosts. This hasn't worked without a lot of hassle or plaintext passwords being stored in almost every distro I've tried.
Anyway, I could complain for hours about how simple things like that have driven me to the edge of sanity. So I'll move on. I set up Folding@Home because I remembered it exists for the first time in a while and quickly realised that I could go flying up the scoreboard. Starting at 169,xxx I've moved my way up to 134,932 as of now. Although I'm having issues getting my GPU to pick up work units on Linux. It's nice to know that my expensive computer that I no longer play games on is being used for something and it's probably helping heat my house too. Looks like to use my GPU I will need to duel-boot Windows 10 for now which sucks.
Mumble was a fun experiment that I set up so that I could talk to my kids while they play Minecraft on their PCs without using an internet service. This is especially important for my six year old who has no right using Discord or anything similar. It works well but man the documentation sucks. Trying to work out basic configs and usage was all trial and error. I am thinking about making it public facing (Without listing it) but honestly it just seems like a lot of effort and everyone I know has pretty much resigned to using Discord for everything.
On that note actually! I have been trying to get away from Discord for some time and figured the easiest thing to do would be to move to the open source alternative Revolt. However this has turned out to be impossible to do. I managed to create an account and log in once, however I never got the verification email. Since then I haven't been able to log in to that account with multiple errors including the rather curious "Unable to send email" when trying to login. I've tried recreating it but it doesn't even get angry the account exists, it just doesn't do anything. I've tried oher email addresses too and even turned off my Pi Hole. I'm actually at a complete loss with it now and I've just decided to give up on it completely. It's one of the wildest issues I've ever had.
The next thing to play with is accessing my NAS from outside - if that is something that I even want to do. Honestly, I'm not sure. Other things include a self hosted password manager which should be fun. I've got a long list of things to explore as I get through them all.
Perhaps the wildest thing I've come up with so far is that I plan to completely retromod an old Toshiba CDT480 laptop I have that was garbage when it was new in the late 90s. It had a 100Mhz Pentium, no touchpad, little I/O, no floppy drive and an 800x600 screen that was bad even when bad was the standard. Anyway I've made a shopping list of a Pi, batteries, controller boards, and all sorts and intent to fully replace the insides with a modern machine. I intend to use it to do exactly what I'm doing now, and with the battery I'm looking at using and a Pi 5 I should get all day battery life out of something that looks like a fossil. It would be such a novel thing to behold. I am including USB-C charging, reusing the original keyboard and trying to make everything as original looking as possible otherwise. I'm actually concerned that it will be too light and the screen might not stay up with artificial weight in the base. Anyway I will be sure to post updates and pictures when I have them as I don't imagine there's much else like it out there.
I could go on forever but I think that's a good place to leave it as it's now 2am. Remember to do things for the sake of it, it's more fun that way! - Jake