I think there one I never expected would be Kitchenowl. Shopping list, recipe list, planner for food, expenses... very useful for a joined household.
Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Self hosted Librespeed. Just so usefull to know if I or my ISP screwed up!
n8n
thought it was overkill. now does tons of things.wouldnt wanna live without it.
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...
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?
Background backup works mostly ok. There are times where I need to go to the backup view for it to get going, but those are not that common. The performance is excellent so far
Actual Budget a selfhosting budget software. It helps me keep track of my finances
Yeah I left the massively overpriced closed source YNAB and Actual is actually better.
That looks nice. Added it to my list to look at. Thanks.
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.
I setup my own with a bash script for backup years ago that uses rsync, feel too invested in that now to change
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.
Are you able to provide a few quick examples? I have it installed but don't know what to do with it really.
The easiest thing: We use a motion sensor to automatically turn on the light for the stairs. You wouldn't need Home Assistant for that, but with a little more configuration you can adjust the light levels and colour temperature based on the time of day (not as disturbing at night). We have two rooms which have problems with humidity in one a fan is automatically turned on (basic) in the other a dehumidifier is triggered based on the outside and inside temperature because there are large windows which are producing a lot of condensation otherwise. Now the really specific stuff: My daughter has Diabetes and we need to manage her blood glucose levels. There are alarms but ideally you would act before they are triggered. So we hooked her blood glucose levels to a light in our bedroom which turns on at night if her levels are getting out of bounds at night. That way she isn't woken by the alarm, but by one of us and can go back to sleep mich quicker.
You've got a good point with Home Assistant. I have automations setup so that I barely have to do anything manually. So I almoat forget that Home Assistant runs quite a lot in my home. And especially in the beginning it was nice to setup but not really needed. Know it is needed.
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.
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?!
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).
I havent done much with it other than get all our paper recipes into it and added some via import. I am looking forward to it as its my next project now that photos are done.
I landed on Tandoor. I had a bunch of recipes on one of those web sites and they switched to a subscription model and locked me out of my recipes. I don't remember why I chose Tandoor over Mealie, but having full ownership over my recipes is freeing.
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.
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.
Unpopular opinion from what I've seen in this forum, but for me it is Nextcloud followed by Jellyfin.
I use Nextcloud setup fory whole family, about a dozen all together. I even sprang for the DavX5 plugin for several people so we can share calendars and contacts as well as files and notes. We backup photos from our phones using the Nextcloud app. Several of us use it as a backend for KeePass.
We use Jellyfin for streaming; movies, tv, music videos and music. It is the backend storage and library organizer for four Kodi boxes, five browsers, several phones and tablets and a couple of Roku's. It works like a champ, even with the occasional library re-sync.
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.
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 , 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.
FreshRSS, i had it installed and setup with a fee feeds for over a year and only like this month has it become my daily read, i can get almost everything in there to just read through while I drink my coffee, sites I bookmarked but never go to can now come to me.
Also with 'five filters full text rss' to get all the images in the feed
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 curl
is plenty to send and receive notifications, and it works on Android without requiring FCM (Google infrastructure).
Immich, SearXNG, FreshRSS
PaperlessNGX Syncthing
Paperless is rEally awesome... Scan to folder, it will automatically be sorted and categorized, full text search and one neat thing: It just stores the pdf in subfolders which makes backup also usefull without paperless
I’d say the ARR suite but I knew beforehand that would need it. I just love that I can access overseerr, search up and coming and already out content, click “request”, and then magically it just shows up on my plex after a couple minutes.
A service that I host that I never knew I needed is Nextcloud. Works exactly the way OneDrive worked for me. I record footage on my phone, upload it to Nextcloud, and log onto any computer of mine in the house and can edit the footage. Sometimes I edit footage in VR while I play XPlane, then I’ll save it, turn everything off, and continue right where I left off on my laptop.
Probably super basic but locally syncing things is a godsend to the way I used to do things (KDE connect transfers footage from my phone to a single computer).