I can’t even say I have a homelab yet, lol, but two steps toward starting it made me really proud. Not much but honest work.
First was merely rooting an old redmi 9i, then degoogling it. Like I always wanted to root a phone but I’m too poor to take the risk. Xiaomi was kind enough to enforce planned obsolescense so hard on the software that for the first time in our lives my mom was forced to buy a new phone before the hardware broke, so it was the first time I had access to a truly expendable device since it was already unusable. I’m planning on flashing an abandoned custom rom I found when I have the time, then I’ll just use it for chroot experiments, since the software is no longer supported and it’s probably gonna be an open door at the kernel level. But maybe I can find some service that I could run on an untrusted device, or figure out a way to harden it, idk, I’m honestly very new to this.
Second was figuring out how to make emacs and org mode usable on my regular phone through a combination of syncthing, tailscale, unexpected keyboard, termux, tmux, and the new android port of emacs (like I can’t get the sharedUserID versions to work on this device, so I just switch between native emacs + termux emacs to make up for each other’s weaknesses). It’s a work in progress but it already made it much easier to do simple habit tracking and note taking on the go without mobile internet. Like I don’t have to worry about things getting out of sync. Again, not much at all, but a huge QoL improvement for me nonetheless.
The next step is fixing a little thin client I bought for ~30 USD in the current conversion rate. I’m pretty sure I just need to replace the motherboard’s coin battery, that’s what chatgpt told me based on the symptoms. It’s really weak, like 1 GB ram 1 GB flash storage, but it’s a real machine so I plan on trying alpine, seeing what I can run with so little resources, and then maybe trying my own LFS some day, or my own kernel experiments, idk.
I can’t even say I have a homelab yet, lol, but two steps toward starting it made me really proud. Not much but honest work.
First was merely rooting an old redmi 9i, then degoogling it. Like I always wanted to root a phone but I’m too poor to take the risk. Xiaomi was kind enough to enforce planned obsolescense so hard on the software that for the first time in our lives my mom was forced to buy a new phone before the hardware broke, so it was the first time I had access to a truly expendable device since it was already unusable. I’m planning on flashing an abandoned custom rom I found when I have the time, then I’ll just use it for chroot experiments, since the software is no longer supported and it’s probably gonna be an open door at the kernel level. But maybe I can find some service that I could run on an untrusted device, or figure out a way to harden it, idk, I’m honestly very new to this.
Second was figuring out how to make emacs and org mode usable on my regular phone through a combination of syncthing, tailscale, unexpected keyboard, termux, tmux, and the new android port of emacs (like I can’t get the sharedUserID versions to work on this device, so I just switch between native emacs + termux emacs to make up for each other’s weaknesses). It’s a work in progress but it already made it much easier to do simple habit tracking and note taking on the go without mobile internet. Like I don’t have to worry about things getting out of sync. Again, not much at all, but a huge QoL improvement for me nonetheless.
The next step is fixing a little thin client I bought for ~30 USD in the current conversion rate. I’m pretty sure I just need to replace the motherboard’s coin battery, that’s what chatgpt told me based on the symptoms. It’s really weak, like 1 GB ram 1 GB flash storage, but it’s a real machine so I plan on trying alpine, seeing what I can run with so little resources, and then maybe trying my own LFS some day, or my own kernel experiments, idk.