https://yetch.store/products/every-day-goal-calendar For a physical/digital device. … way more expensive than I remember it being (especially given it’s single-user), but it’s a pretty good incentive to keep up with less-fun habits

https://www.zimaboard.com/

recent blog from hacker news

I can’t personally attest to the “easy to use self hosting OS” since I immediately installed Ubuntu (soon to be Debian) but the hardware is good and the preinstalled OS should let you get a feel for things.

IIRC, the biggest issue with TrueNAS SCALE + Docker is that they really run the containers on a ‘hidden’ kubernetes cluster and obfuscate the standard docker and docker-compose way of doing things behind a gui with limited customization and poor field descriptions.
I found it much easier to spin up a VM on SCALE and run docker through that, although then you have to deal with multilayer networking.

… To be fair, this was when SCALE was still in beta, so it has possibly improved since then.

It’s not just every tech company, it’s every company. And it’s terrifying - it’s like giving people who don’t know how to ride a bike a 1000hp motorcycle! The industry does not have guardrails in place and the public consciousness “chatGPT can do it” without any thought to checking the output is horrifying.

I’d recommend OPNsense over PFsense due to multiple shady moves by netgate (the parent company of pfsense), including moving to closed-source:

• pfsense is falsely open-source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26476030
• pfsense botched/rushed their wireguard implementation: https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/migration-from-pfsense-to-opnsense-drama-about-wireguard/12798
• pfsense squatted on competitor domain and used underhanded/defamatory practices: https://opnsense.org/opnsense-com/

If you don’t mind the drama, both PFsense and OPNsense are perfectly competent router OSes.

Regarding hardware:

• OPNsense also sells rack-mountable server hosts.
• OP may not actually need a rack-mounted server – I have several machines just sitting on a 2u rack-mounted shelf. My opnsense install runs on a cheap protectli box, and there’s enough room for a handful of raspberry pis and their power bricks on the shelf next to it.