I ran both on the same network for a month in 2025, switched one to the other, and then switched back. Neither is a trap. One of them is just a much better fit for a house with a child’s tablet in it, and the difference comes down to a single checkbox that one project ships with and the other one makes you build. Here’s the honest comparison, checked against both projects’ own releases and documentation on 10 November 2026. ...
My old Plex server stopped working for my parents the moment they left the house. Not broken — working exactly as designed. Remote streaming had become a subscription, the person watching from abroad needed their own pass, and I had become the family’s IT department for a media server I’d already paid for. That is the whole story of Plex in 2026, and it is why the answer for most people is Jellyfin. But the interesting part is what the paywall does and doesn’t cover, and how much hardware a free media server actually needs. I have moved two households off Plex and the second was much easier, because I’d already made the mistakes on the first one. ...
The moment I moved my parents off Google Photos, the free 15 GB of Google One became 200 GB of headroom, and I got back the photos Google had been helping itself to. That part was easy. The part nobody mentions is that Immich is a real server, not a web app, and it has requirements Google quietly pays for on your behalf. Six gigabytes of RAM, a disk you will back up separately, and a public endpoint on your home connection — which is where most of the sharp edges live. Here is what actually happened for me when I replaced Google Photos with Immich, checked against the official documentation on 10 November 2026. I’ve run it on a Pi 5 and on an N100 box, and both taught me something different. ...
The Phone Call That Started This A client’s junior admin called me last month. Their company had just rolled out a new password policy — 14 characters, three character classes, rotation every 90 days — and the helpdesk was drowning in reset tickets. The admin was proud of the policy. The users were writing the new passwords on sticky notes stuck to their monitors. That is the entire password industry in one story: we keep making the rules harder without making the passwords better. ...
You need an AI assistant that runs on your own machine. The cloud options are good, but they are not yours. You want something that actually does things — reads your screen, controls your smart home, answers questions in Finnish or English, and never sends your data to a server you don’t control. The local LLM trend is about as practical as it sounds. It works on mid-range hardware if you pick the right model size. A sub-3B parameter model fits comfortably on consumer gear and handles everyday tasks without needing a dedicated GPU or a rack of servers. The trade-off versus cloud options is that the response times are slower, but your parents’ conversations do not become training data for a future model owned by a third party. ...
You need an AI assistant that runs on your own machine. The cloud options are good but they are not yours. You want something that actually does things — reads your screen, controls your smart home, answers questions in Finnish or English, and never sends your data to a server you don’t control. The local LLM trend is about as practical as it sounds. It works on mid-range hardware if you pick the right model size. A sub-3B parameter model fits comfortably on consumer gear and handles everyday tasks without needing a dedicated GPU or a rack of servers. The trade-off versus cloud options is that the response times are slower, but your parents’ conversations do not become training data for a future model owned by a third party. ...
My mum kept leaving the iron on. Every visit, I’d find it still plugged in, sitting on the ironing board cover she’d forgotten to put away. She’d been doing it for years — a habit so ingrained she didn’t notice anymore. But I noticed. Every time I drove home, that iron sat there like a small fire hazard waiting to happen. So I bought a smart plug. Problem solved. Now the iron turns off automatically at 9 PM, whether she remembered or not. She didn’t have to change anything. No new habits, no new apps to learn. Just a plug that does the right thing. That’s what this guide is about: finding the one or two smart devices that solve a specific problem, without turning your parent’s home into a science project. ...
You don’t need to pay $10/month for Google Drive. Or $3/month for 1Password. Or $8/month for Notion. You can run all of this at home, on a single Raspberry Pi if you’re careful. But here’s the honest part: some of it is worth the effort. Some of it isn’t. I’ve run a self-hosted cloud at home for three years. This is what I’ve learned. ...
I wanted a personal AI assistant. Not a chatbot. Not a copilot. Something that actually does things — controls my desktop, reads my screen, talks to my smart home, answers questions in Finnish or English, and never, ever sends my data to a server I don’t control. The cloud options are good. They’re not mine. So I started building one. This post is the architecture document for that project. It’s a work in progress — the docker-compose is ready, the Ollama instance is running, and the first agent is next. I’m writing this because the design decisions are interesting, and because someone else might want to build the same thing. ...
If your parents have discovered ChatGPT in the last year — and statistically, at least one of them has — they are probably using it the way most people do: asking medical questions, pasting in emails to “make this sound nicer,” asking it to summarize bank statements, and getting it to draft replies to family group chats. None of this is malicious. All of it is potentially a privacy problem. This guide explains what actually happens to a chat log after your parent hits send, which AI tools are safer than others, and the three settings you need to flip on their account the next time you visit. ...