My last mac computer bit the dust a few years ago so I was using my iphone, ipad, and icloud. For mt things then stuff happened and I stopped using iCloud and do not have the money to replace my other devices quite yet so I have a hand full of raspberry pi’s attached to HDD’s, NVMe drives, and SSD’s. I currently have pihole running on 2 of them, I have a pi zero 2 running wireguard so that I can access my dns hosts, but it is not strong enough to access my self hosted Nextcloud on the go, for that I am told I should use at least a pi 4. My pi’s do a lot more than host nextcloud, pihole, and wireguard though!

In the not to distant future I will be retiring wireguard from that pi zero 2 and turning it into a pots server. I have grand ambitions to make a better home lab with a few more pi’s and to help me get away from big tech more.

The only thing google I have is an email I do not use but so I can watch YouTube, but I use unwatched to block ads.

The only thing apple is my iPhone and my iPad, when it becomes time to replace those I will have to figure out graphenOS and some Linux distro for a tablet of some sort.

I actually have Wireguard running on a pi zero 2, all it really does is provide me my pihole DNS.

Edit:

I should say I have pihole running on a couple of pi 5’s currently, overkill yes but one of my pi 4’s was sacrificed to the whims of magic smoke another was donated to a friend and another now hosts HAOS, I have a few pi zero 2’s (only one was sacrificial) the one that hosts wireguard has one of my last few working SD cards. The pi 5’s host many other things other than just pihole.

I have a .ca domain at hosthero and a .ca domain at easydns if you are in Canada I would recommend them. They offer more than .ca if you are not in Canada.

So my home lab has been raspberry pi’s of varying shapes and numbers for a few years. Recently my single floor condo flooded so half of my place has been ripped up and so much crap has been stuffed in the other half I decided I should get around to planning out a more complete home lab setup. Money is a bit tight but I called up my ISP and it turns out my internet package comes with two static IP addresses so I decided to snap those up. I will be building up a firewall with a pi 5, I will continue to use a pi 4 I have running HAOS, as I try to get out of all the ecosystems. I was born into the Apple ecosystem, the first computer I remember using was some old Apple DOS computer, so breaking out of that walled garden is going to be tough but it helps that Tim Apple gave Trump a golden Apple plaque so it hurts less with every service I turn off.

Any who because I have had a lot of time to make plans and game through my plan with AI I have decided I am going to self host my domain and email (Simple blog and 200+ annonomized email addresses) on a pi 5 that will be the third pi 5 after my firewall the first pi 5 will host things like immich, nextcloud, and the other things it is already doing one of those other things is pihole and that is where my DHCP is currently, I am on the fence about moving it to opnwrt or not. The Second pi 5 after the firewall also hosts a secondary pihole as a back up dns and all my high seas (like sonarr.tv) things and jellyfin.

To top it all off I am going to get another pi 4 with a hdd and I will ask for it to be hosted some where to do off site back ups.

I am curious how many times have you gone to court? You obviously have access to internet or else you would not be here, you are on one of the more private places on the internet (fediverse) sure so the likelihood of “them” finding you on here is slim. If you are concerned about your privacy on line as I am sure many of us on Lemmy are look into getting an internet connection to your home, accept that you will have to pay taxes and invest in a really solid Pihole or Adguard home setup.

I started with pihole years ago, and when I was still on reddit people started switching over to Adguard home because they thought it was better. I still see people saying they are switching to Adguard because it does one or two things better, I just find out how to do it with pihole sure there are things pihole doesn’t do that Adgaurd home does but I am of the understanding there are things pihole does that adguard home does not do.

Open source it do not go with Adobe, unless you absolutely have to.

I am a fan of the *arr apps like https://sonarr.tv/.

I am going to guess you are not using linux so I bet the windows and mac installers explain things a lot easier than what I have running on a raspberry pi.

I was a Mac girl back in the 90’s and there were not many of my friends who also used Macs, so pirating was not much of a thing until I discovered emulators. I really enjoy NES games particularly Super Mario Bro’s 1 and 3 so I had emulators to play those. My parents would not let us get a system until I was in like high school, but I also became disabled before grade 8 so I got a Windows laptop and let me tell you did I ever pirate stuff then, in the early 2000’s.

Then I grew a conscience thinking artists made money from sales of their music, and I started paying for stuff. I understand things so much differently now a days, so I have gone back to the high seas!

🤣