I love most of what the internet has to offer these days. It educates me, informs me and entertains me. It makes life much more interesting. For me though, social media not so much. I know it’s a great way to share your life with family and friends but I think it’s too much at times and misinforms at times. I mostly avoid it.

I’ve used videos and websites to resolve tons of everyday life issues – stuck doors, new car brakes, clothes washer error codes, health and diet issues, household finances, shopping, food recipies to name just a few.

I’m in the midst of virtualizing several servers on a hypervisor for a homelab. I’m using ProxMox on a 2013 Lenovo M73 ThinkCentre tiny computer. I’ve viewed hundreds of videos and articles that have gotten me well along with my project.

Much of my objective is to get biggest bang for the fewest bucks. I’m ecstatic with my progress and where I expect it to go. My expenses have been $50 for the computer, $45 for an SSD upgrade, $40 for a CPU upgrade and $30 for a memory upgrade totaling $165. I’ll have media servers, home automation, VPN, ad blocking, file servers and more. I’ll run more than a dozen virtual machines with processor power, memory and storage to spare for about a dollar a month of electricity.

I contrast, I just watched a fascinating video with some great ideas for a homelab. This guy had rack-mounted servers, networking gear, storage devices and more. He had 50 terabytes of RAID storage configured for speed and redundancy, redundant hypervisors and double or triple redundant servers. His home automation was not likely to fail! Guys and their toys! In my younger days, it was a Holley carbs, Hurst shifters, Edlebrock headers and ’57 Chevys that showed your masculinity. Times have changed! Then again, maybe I should pay more attention to Frank Thomas. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of rack mounted servers and tens of terabytes of storage. Hmmm.

In any event, I’m really happy with my project and I think it will be really useful and fun. It makes me anxious to get up and get with it each morning.