In university, we were given some old servers, and we installed some services on it. This inspired me to do the same at home: with a special small computer with an Intel N100 CPU and 2 x 1TB hard drives, it is possible to have similar services at home!

I was able to install my own git thanks to Forgejo, an open-source alternative to GitHub which allows me to store my projects with the guarantee that years of work won’t disappear because of some laws that do not concern me.

I now have my own VPN thanks to Wireguard: I can connect to my home whenever I want, this is pretty practical to access my home machine, and with Wake-on-LAN enabled on my machines, I even was able to set my desktop computer on from my laptop while being in a whole other city.

I also installed Nextcloud. It required some fine-tuning to have a decent loading time, but I now have my own cloud! I can now store all the pictures and videos I ever took in my life, important documents locked behind heavy encryption, memories and savefile I want to make sure that I will never lose, etc.

I even was able to replace the Google Maps position history, since Nextcloud supports this feature. I no longer have to share my position constantly with Google to know where I was a specific day, I now have full control and privacy over these data, and even some analytics!

There are some small drawbacks, like power cut that simply makes everything inaccessible, but this still feels amazing to have everything in your own hand, having full control over everything you own.