I have a relative with a haunted McMansion. They’re rich, they bought a slot in a brand new subdivision, had the house built for them. We joke that it’s on an Indian burial ground. Everyone’s had some kind of experience there, voices in another room when you’re there alone, electronics turn themselves on and off, they’re spouse interacted with a demon child thing and it left marks, rooms losing electric like the power went out but other rooms on the same circuit breakers are fine, I’ve personally heard a bloodcurdling scream come from upstairs while I was housesitting for them…

That place is the reason I’m agnostic, and not fully atheist.

Aye on the notepad. Everything but passwords, every change gets a journal entry.

Get a cheap pcie 1Gbit Intel NIC from ebay, cheap switch, Ethernet cables.

Throw the NIC and proxmox into the SFF, make a VM for OPNsense, use the switch downstream from the SFF. Get the NAS and laptop onto a separate LAN firewalled from the ISP.

Set up another VM in proxmox for a workspace, connect it to the NAS file shares, do the same with the laptop. Set up syncthing on laptop, workspace VM, and the NAS if it supports it. Make a keepass database, start organizing all logins to keepass, keep everything synchronized with syncthing.

Set up tailscale, add it into OPNsense to allow easy and secure(?) remote access into your subnet. (I use tailscale, but don’t trust them much and want to switch away.)

Its very daunting at first, but this is the path I took, not really a guide. All this will take a few days of constant effort to get right, but you absolutely don’t need to do everything at all once, just a slow migration. I’ve been slowly building mine up for about 5 years now, and there is no one “right” answer to anything.

Only move forward when you get comfortable with each step. I personally run everything from a stack of thin clients I got from some kid off Craigslist. Think they came out of a bar and grill, filled with grease and cigarette tar, but they cleaned up nice. A full Arr stack with jellyfin runs great on an Intel 6500t with 16gb DDR3 ram.

Slowly get comfortable with the CLI and general security updates, next thing you know you’ll have 3x smart switches, better/faster NICs for the proxmox box, a WIFI6 AP for better throughput. Its endless. I try to focus on minimal wattage, my full stack pulls a steady 80 to 100 watts 24/7. You’ll get a “gut” felling for what runs best on what hardware. I spent too much on Raspberry Pi’s in the past, should’ve tried thin clients sooner.

Gotta vote to keep a clear conscience for what comes next

“A straight line is the edge of a circle with an infinite radius” type energy

I’ve never liked how the pyramid is arranged, as if the ones on top are living the ‘right’ way, or are ‘better’ somehow.

It should be the other way around, with 8 billion people hanging to a ledge,  trying to improve the state of the world, while roughly 6.5k are throwing a tantrum, desperately clinging to the ankles of the masses, threatening to drag everything into the void if they can’t get their way.

“Hmm… I’m good with statistics, scripting, and I have some extra cash on hand…”

“I can just mix all these into the cauldron, stir it up a lil bit, aaand…”

“oh my god it’s gone. it’s all gone. i owe money now…”

Huh. I’ve… already done everything on the list. Very slowly, over the better part of a decade, piece by piece. It’s nice to have a sanity check to know I’ve kept up with the jargon. The work is never done tho, almost have a site-to-site intranet set up to make it easier to loop family in.