I solder in the garage, never indoors. My bench has a 6" inline duct fan near the soldering station and I just run the fumes out a long section of ducting. These fans high cfm and crazy quiet. Everything stows away easily when not in use.
True, more and more sites get broken, even page content for our DMV website. I've gotten used to activating the pi-hole Disable for N seconds/minutes feature regularly.
Good luck :D Honestly, it's one of my least favourite applications that I stuck with.. I find it horrendously slow (tried on linux+docker and even windows :P ).
But it looks good, does the job and stability hasn't been _bad_ :)
Hardware:
Intel NUC, running Proxmox
Synology DS920, 16 TB - used for storage and file services only. I avoid the Synology installed apps to keep this decoupled.
A pile of custom Wemos devices - sprinkler controller, digital radio to listen to my weatherstation, landscape lighting control, sensors, etc.
Zwave devices - light switches, mail delivery sensor, garage door status
Security Cameras - been happy with the Amcrest ones
Tablet - fixed display of Home Assistant status, using fully kiosk
UPS
I gave up on Pi's after suffering too many SD card corruptions, nice for playing around, but not good for stable deployments in my experience. Didn't want to bother with the usb stick approach as by then I was on a NUC and it's been great.
Apps & Services:
Home Assistant
Mosquitto
Plex
Pi-hole
Unifi
Wiki.js
sftp
VPN Server
Syncthing: primary use case is for syncing Obsidian vaults
Veracrypt: encrypted store of info, keys, credentials, financials, etc.
Hosted services:
$50/yr VPS in Netherlands - 1 TB storage, absurd amount of transfer
Uptime monitoring - healthchecks.io
I follow the reddit selfhosted sub to learn about developments in this area.
