Now that my first apps are reliable and accessible, what next?

More apps!

File server

Nextcloud has a bunch of integrated offerings, but I mainly care about the central one: a solid file server for my personal cloud. This broadly takes over from my OneDrive and Google Drive, and is a single port of call for any documents and data I want to back up that don’t fall into other applications.

Knowledgebase & Notes

There are a lot of options out there for notetaking and personal knowledgebases. I landed on Trilium Notes for its hierarchical structure, quick navigation with commands, easy to use WYSIWYG editor, wide range of note types, and template support. It is one user per instance, so you’ll have to spin up more if anyone wants a separate one.

So I’ve got my photos and music syncing and streaming, but there are a holes to patch before I can actually rely on these services:

• How safe is my data now? Not very, it’ll be safer with Regular Backups
• How do I access my services when I’m not on the local network? I don’t - A VPN would help.
• The first time I know a service is down is when I need to use it and can’t. Container & connectivity monitoring
• And how will I know if I’m over-extending my little N150? Real-time system resource monitoring

It’s time for some Infra!

So I got into self-hosting…

I like configuring things, and hate subscriptions, so I’d been thinking about it for a while.

Hating subscriptions, to start I only had two to rid myself of: Google One Basic, and Spotify Premium (which got a bump in October).

The Hardware

Looking for a small, quiet, power efficient box with easy storage expansion, I landed on the Bee-link Me Mini. It has an Intel N150 processor, a pretty common (and powerful for its size and efficiency) little chip for mini-PCs with a base power usage of 6W, six M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs, two 2.5Gig ethernet ports, and barely makes a sound with its single fan.

At the start of this year (2025), I had a lot of fun following some tutorials on Raytracing. Regardless of how much I’ll use this knowledge down the road, I can’t stress enough how interactive and engaging writing code for graphics is as someone who hasn’t before. Even if not the same one I did, I really do recommend trying it out.

This also served as an excuse to try to firm up my very loose C++ ‘skills’ and gain some more knowledge around how to work with it performantly and safely.

As a lover of science fiction and the time travel stories, in 2022, I started trying to write up the types/styles of fictional time travel I’ve encountered.

By no means is this exhaustive, but it’s where I got to:

• Predestination - deterministic, will always be that way
• Butterfly effect - changes beget exponential changes
• Time as a force - resists change, often forcing a predetermined outcome
• Predictably changeable - changes what you’d expect

There are also some common scenarios: