I think everybody on here is constantly keeping an eye out for what to host next. Sometimes you spinup something which chugs along nicely but sometimes you find out you’ve been missing out.
For me it’s not very refreshing or new: Paperless-ngx. Never thought I would add all my administration to it. But it’s great. I probably can’t find the thing I need, but I should have a record of every mail or letter I’ve gotten. Close second is Wanderer. But I would like to have a little bit more features like adding recorded routes to view speed and compare with previous walks. But that’s not what it is intended for.
What is that service for you?
Actual Budget a selfhosting budget software. It helps me keep track of my finances
Been using anytype.io (self-hosted) for a month now and it has been amazing.
Using it as a journal, bookmark manager, general note taking, etc…
Never knew I needed? Another vote for Paperless-ngx. I still feel like I’m living in the future using it. The trick I’ve found was initially setting up a good document naming & management convention & following it religiously for every document. The search function is fantastic at narrowing down results. Used in conjunction with specific coloured tags I can immediately see what I need from search results.
Fired up Immich recently. Amazing. Will be donating as I like their stance.
I also enjoy Linkwarden. Switched from the also excellent Hoarder as I prefer the UI.
Most used? Nextcloud with Joplin.
That’s easily Home Assistant. It got me into the whole home automation stuff and I have gradually included more and more parts into it - including some health related stuff. It really makes my family’s life easier and helps us organizing it.
I host Immich, Jellyfin , readeef, and open-webui for myself. From those, Immich is definitely the unlikely hero of the bunch
IIRC immich is like a google photos replacement. I use nextcloud for that on android but it’s not so simple on ios. How’s immich for ios, do uploads work automatically in the background? How’s performance?
The one that was way more useful then expected is immich. I have over 100,000 photos I took during my life and it usually takes me DAYS to find a specific picture I need.
I installed immich and let it AI scan everything for a week or something. Now I can search for something specific like “it’s a black square in the middle of the photo and has a little knob on it” and it finds me the photo I need.
It’s also cool to see photos of people, organized by the individual by searching their name or clicking on their face.
Is this local only? No clouds reported data?
Of course it is.
You can download different models as well. For me, without a GPU, searching for example ‘cat’ takes a few seconds, and it is not the most accurate, but still works OK.
This is exactly why I’d want a GPU in a home server.
That and transcoding. Wonder what the best option would be without breaking the bank/wasting too much idle power. All the GPU talk online seems to be for gaming.
Recipe manager and meal planner which can pull recipes from the web. I started using it after a few recipes on sites disappeared. My families most used app (besides plex).
Syncthing. Decentralized data backup that works with minimal setup. Now I can add cloud sync to most any app.
Watch out to enable “keep on delete” features. I didn’t do that and didn’t see that gigabytes of personal photos got deleted which I had to recover from an old backup. Still don’t know how it happened as I only found out a few weeks after the fact.
Sync is not backup! If there’s a software bug or a wrong setting sync can delete your files. Syncthing is pretty mature so I doubt this was a Syncthing bug, however you shouldn’t only trust Syncthing. I’m doing btrfs snapshots weekly and delete them after three years for important folders nowadays.
Paperless - Pay slips, Bank statements, MOT records, Insurance policies, User manuals, restaurant menus. All filed and searchable. Letters I get are photographed, uploaded and immediately disposed of, zero stress.
Something a lot of people miss with paperless is its automatic import options.
There is a folder called ‘consume’ that you can place files in and paperless will import them just like you’d uploaded them manually. Combined with tools like FolderSync or SyncThing you can have files on all sorts of devices automatically upload to paperless.
Sitting down to use the flatbed scanner is a hassle, so I use GoogleLens to take multiple photos of a document, save them as a single pdf, then FolderSync moves that to my server automatically where paperless imports it.
Along side this; Paperless has an smtp mail importer. You can add your email accounts and paperless will automatically import new emails based on whatever criteria you specify. Imported mail will then be flagged, moved, or outright deleted from the mail server.
You’re right, I don’t take advantage of any of these features. I should.
Partly because of lack of know how on my part. So I don’t trust myself to successfully have it log into my email, get what it needs and leave everything else untouched. My main uploads, payslips and bank statements, are behind their own apps too.
Partly because paperless is isolated in it’s own little container (in my setup at least) so access to the consume folder is behind another step, I could syncthing it… I just haven’t.
And partly because I use the android app as my main interaction with Paperless. The app uses my phone as a good-enough scanner.
And partly because I use the android app as my main interaction with Paperless.
We taught each other something new: I didn’t know there was a mobile app. Imma go check that out :)
Partly because paperless is isolated in it’s own little container (in my setup at least) so access to the consume folder is behind another step, I could syncthing it… I just haven’t.
For this, Bind-mounts are your friend:
Volumes:
- /srv/paperless-ngx/consume:/usr/src/paperless/consume
Files get dropped in /srv/paperless-ngx/consume on the host and import to the container.
As far as setting up mail goes: it’s pretty straightforward. Add an account, then create a rule for each type of mail you want it to manage. Specify filters like who it’s from, what’s in the subject/body, how old is it, etc.
And until you are comfortable, just leave the action set to mark as read. Worst case, if you didn’t set your filters right; it’ll unnecessarily mark mail as read. No big deal.
I just have mine move processed mail to a folder on the mail server called ‘Paperless-Imported’, which I manually clean out now and again.
Thank you. Setting it up seems less daunting now. I’m going to try for setting up emails.
The android app is fairly functionally complete, and I only interact with my phone or tablet. In fact, for desktop tasks I have a Linux Mint VM I just console into from my tablet, a sort of sudo laptop.
In anycase, for manual uploading files my phone is probably easier. But, your advice is good for everybody that’s not me, sensible people.
Your comment about bindmounts might have solved my biggest problem with Paperless, in that it doesn’t write to my 3-2-1 back up folder directly so I end up 3-2-1ing the whole machine. Which is fine, but I keep multiple snap shots of my LXCs so it’s multiples of multiples.
/zpool/important/paperless:/use/src/paperless/originalSpecific file paths aside, would [path to zpool]:[path to originals] have paperless saving the originals to my zpool so I would only have 3 copies instead of 3*#of snapshots?
Indeed it would. That’s exactly how I have mine setup; with borg backing up the originals folder from the host.
If you are making this change to an existing installation; remember to copy the contents of the current originals folder out of the container and into the host folder you intended to bind mount, before you change the mount.
So, copy the contents of container:‘/use/src/paperless/original’ place them in host:‘/use/src/paperless/original’, THEN add your bind mount to the container config.
Otherwise you may lose the contents of the folder within the container and have to retrieve it from a backup.
Joplin.
Ive been paying for Workflowy and honestly, I’ve reached my limit of cost vs value.
I needed a way to do more than just bullets, like Evernote without the bloat, or OneNote/Notes without the megacorp, something I can export and read 100 years from now.
I was surprised how often I use it, and slowly weening off of Workflowy.
I love Joplin on the PC, but i hate the phone app. I don’t want to do markdown on ny phone.
Immich! Backs up my phone pictures for my family with automatic backup through an easy app interface. Knowing my large album of photos on my phone won’t be tied to an endless growing subscription fees for…ever?!
https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF
Happens to be more useful than I originally thought.
I’ve installed it as well but the blackout/redact feature didn’t work as expected…So not sure if it will be that useful for me. But since I ditched Adobe, I now at least have a PDF editor.
I was disappointed with the automatic redact feature too, but saw that they just updated and added a graphical one also.
Thanks, that’s good to know. Going to update it right away, hopefully this will solve my problem.
Would recommend putting a memory limit on the container.
I had it crash my server by eating it all up.What limits do you set on yours?
1 gig IIRC
Easily set up, and easily attached to other things. Simple notifications about whatever is needed, like service health or updates, new posts on public platforms, etc. A simple
curlis plenty to send and receive notifications, and it works on Android without requiring FCM (Google infrastructure).Alternative: Gotify
Forgejo. There are so many things that can use a git repo but I don’t want to have them out in the wild, so I host them myself, safe and sound behind my firewall.
I also mirror other github forks so they don’t go away whenever those services decide to rugpull them.
Do you manually mirror and keep the forks up to date? Or is there an automation for it?
There’s automation and you can do it manually if needed. For example I have a couple of emulators that pull every 24 hours from GitHub just in case nint tendo gets a little lawsuit heavy. I also have one offs from GitHub that pull down when I want.
You can also mirror a public repo from GitHub into a private repo so it does not gets indexed/ai trained.
I’m hodsting my own Matrix server with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord (you don’t need a bot for that, you can just share your login with the bridge) and Messenger bridge. I have all my IMs in one app, don’t have to install spyware on my phone, and I can make bots that troll annoying people that message me on any platform.
Hosting it was super simple, thanks to the Ansible project that’s extremely robust and well done, I literally just got a hosting, domain amd changed like 5 config values to enable the bridges I wanted, gave it an IP and ssh key, and ran it. And if I need to update, I literally “just update” (it’s all wrapped up into “just” tool), and it eve handles cases where I didn’t update for a while, failing graciously and telling me what I need to do maually, usually just rename some config values.
I wholly recommend it. You probably wont convince your friends to switch from <insert app here>, and this is the best compromise.
I’m using a small instance on Hetzner, for 6$ a month. You could in theory get a free oracle cloud instance for it, but I didn’t manage to get one.
And you can easily share it with anyone interrested, make them an account, so they can also consolidate their DMs. I’m sharing it with a few friends and colleagues.
Would you recommend the Discord bridge? I’ve always wanted to install that as well. Is there anything I want to know before putting in the effort to install and configure it?
- A puppeting (personal account) Discord bridge basically requires your own homeserver. You are trusting the homeserver owner / bridge host fully with your Discord account.
- It is technically against Discord ToS. While I don’t think anyone’s been banned yet, several people have started receiving warnings that they “spammed”, most of them after sending an attachment. These warnings are on your account for 2 years, and could contribute to an account ban.
- Voice chat is not, and probably will not be supported.
- Do NOT bridge a “large” server. You are essentially re-hosting the chats, which can be extremely taxing for large and active Discord servers.
I use mine for a single channel in a “medium-size” server (~2k people), a friend group server, DMs, and a few channels that follow a bunch of announcement channels on other servers.
Those are certainly valid points. But do I want to care about that? Honest question… Discord also doesn’t care about my privacy. Or making the internet a better place. So I think -in turn- I feel quite alright to ignore whatever client they like me to use. And their exact ToS.
What’s with the “taxing for large and active Discord servers”? Does it lead to issues if I’m not using their Electron app or website? I can’t imagine where this additional strain on their servers would come from?! I run my own homeserver, by the way. So I shouldn’t weigh down on anyone else’s server…
When you use the official discord client, it only sends to your device whatever chat channel you have open at the time, and when you click on a different channel, it just downloads the last 20 messages, and downloads more when you scroll etc. If you bridge a discord server to a matrix server, it sends all of the contents of all of the channels in real time across. If the server had 50 channels, bridging it to matrix would be the equivalent of you having 50 official clients open, one to each channel. Hence the additional load on discord’s side to send you a lot more data than they usually would.
(Disclaimer: this is all conjecture based on a general understanding of how the systems work, I could be getting some details wrong)
Thanks for explaining. That makes perfect sense. I was under the impression there might be something else.
I’m not interested in forwarding spam in the first place. I don’t think I have any use of channels where messages just fly by… So I think I should be safe.
