I’m an English teacher who wanted to “cut the cord” wherever I could, so I started learning about domain hosts, containerization, .yaml files, etc.
Since then, I’ve been hosting several pods for file sharing and streaming for many years, and I’m currently thinking about learning kubernetes for home deployment. But why?
If you aren’t in development, IT, cyber security, or in a related profession, what made you want to learn this on your own? What made you want to pick this up as a hobby?
Former English teacher here. My self-hosting origin is that I had 20 years or so of teaching materials I’d collected in OneNote over that time and simply wanted to have offline copies so that I could feel that if ever something went wrong with Microsoft like getting permanently locked out of my account, then I had a means of restoring everything. Microsoft makes it practically impossible to export to a working backup.
After spending a LONG time trying everything to get back ownership of my materials, I understood the need to move my digital stuff away from big tech. I bought a Synology NAS, learned how to use Docker and then took more steps. About the same time I started using Fediverse apps and learned a great deal from the discussions and links there. My greatest “learn” has been keeping notes in plaintext files (and not getting seduced by nice shiny new apps that are actually horrors that want lure you into a future subscription).
I use Obsidian as a OneNote replacement because it’s built around markdown, which is just a a text file that includes structure and formatting.
I don’t use their subscription syncing service, just sync files to my own phone and server. Obsidian is great for organizing, but I can still read all the files as text.
Yes, that was a red flag for me. Ever have your materials “removed?” I once lost a few Kindle books because Amazon pulled them off the shelves. After that, I learned how to strip DRM off the books and save them offline.
Ditto about the notes. Are you using any specific apps to edit them? I’m just using nvim with markdown plugins.
That’s one of the other big issues. I have the same worries about how digital-only gaming has become. My kids seem to prefer digital downloads and really don’t believe me when I warn them that they have absolutely no control over what they “buy”. But they look at me like one of those crazy old-timers who just doesn’t understand the modern world.
I started with Logseq and then quickly moved to Obsidian (which I think is great). Over the last couple of months I’ve started using Emacs with Org (partly for the challenge and partly because it seems to be able to do pretty much everything).