DontTakeMySky

It really isnt bad. I do most of my computer at home so I really only need a small cloud box to pipe things through when needed.

And I could reduce the B2 price a lot with some deduping of my data, but that’s an ongoing and painfully slow process since I was too reckless with my local backups in the past, so $7 to avoid that process is worth it.

And for electric I suspect it’s pretty low. I’m running 3 raspberry pi, a 4 bay NAS, and one micro PC and I live in an area with pretty cheap electric already. I think my gaming machine probably takes more power in a few hours than the rest of the system does in a day.

I largely run raspberry pis so my electric costs are likely minimal (I’ve never calculated it). Besides that:

• PIA VPN: ~$4/mo

• Digital Ocean Droplet + Backup snapshots: $7/mo

• Domains: ~$25/year

• Backblaze B2 backups: $7/mo

I’d also recommend installing whatever quality of life mods/romhacks/emulator settings you can find. Gaming has changed a lot over the years and our brains expect different things than they used to.

I used to love Gen3 Pokemon growing up, but playing it now feels unbearably slow, but it’s a lot nicer with a fast forward setting. Same with adding text speed up cheats, faster running cheats, etc.

That, and I’d recommend starting with remakes of popular retro games to get hooked. Usually they have some revamping of control schemes or graphics that match your expectations a bit better. Then once you get the momentum going, expand from there.

Technically I run OpenHAB not HA, but I’ve struggled with this too.

I’ve been wanting to dockerize my Openhab for a while but have found similar issues with compatibility and network discoverability so I’ve avoided it. My current setup is their official Raspberry Pi os (openhabian), with a Conbee II via Zigbee2mqtt for zigbee with Hue, Tradfri and Sonoff devices an Aeotec Zstick Gen5 (no plus) for Zwave with mostly Zooz devices, way too many WiFi devices (mostly TPLink Kasa) and probably some other things I’ve forgotten.

To be honest though I haven’t fully nailed reliability. It works for months straight with no issues but every so often I get a bug that requires resetting a device or two, or an update stomping over my SSL certs, or some intermittent slowness, but it’s reliable enough. I specifically avoid any cameras or security devices (beyond some door sensors for non-security reasons) so that I don’t have the headache of high reliability.

The whole setup is a patchwork of whatever happened to work at the time and wasn’t prohibitively expensive for me. I decided a long time ago that the flexibility was worth more than paying a bunch more for a single highly reliable system.

It sucks, but it works better than manually switching on my lights all the time, so it’s good enough for me.

While you’re getting started, put anything effemeral in Docker and keep anything meant to be persistent on the host directly.

Docker is great, but the number of times I’ve accidentally blown away data before I learned what I was doing… Just give it some practice before you put anything out there that you can’t remake quickly.