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 a 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.