Are you able to dive into some extra enjoyable homelabbing initiatives for this weekend? Nicely, you’re in luck, as a result of I’ve three enjoyable (and simple) initiatives so that you can check out, together with constructing your individual net archiving platform, maintaining together with your funding portfolio, and constructing a customized homelab push notification system.
Again up your favourite web sites regionally and routinely with ArchiveBox
The web is disappearing, so it’s best to do one thing about it
There are components of the web that I want I had saved endlessly in the past, however I didn’t, in order that they’re gone endlessly. Certain, the Wayback Machine exists, however it’s not good and there are undoubtedly instances when it doesn’t even have an internet site (or model of an internet site) that I need, however ArchiveBox fixes that.
With ArchiveBox, you possibly can set your homelab as much as routinely again up varied components of the web, from (public) Fb or Instagram pictures to content material from YouTube or Soundcloud. You too can set it to obtain the general public parts of complete web sites.
That’s actually the important thing limiting issue to ArchiveBox—it could possibly solely obtain issues which can be public, and it’s a snapshot in time of what the web site is displaying. It doesn’t preserve dwell hyperlinks to databases to repeatedly present up to date information once you go to, it’s simply purely a snapshot from when it final archived the web site.
Simply know that you simply’ll undoubtedly want a good storage system to deal with backing up bigger web sites or movies, so be sure you have a NAS deployed in your homelab earlier than going too loopy with ArchiveBox.
Monitor your funding portfolio in non-public with Ghostfolio
Know your return on common funding and extra with out sacrificing privateness
Outdoors of well being privateness, I view monetary privateness as some of the necessary facets of my life that I don’t need anybody else figuring out about, together with different firms. Ghostfolio is designed with that thought in thoughts, however from the angle of maintaining observe of your investments and their efficiency.
With Ghostfolio, you’ll have the ability to handle all your wealth belongings like creating, updating, or deleting transactions, seeing the ROAI (return on common funding) for in the present day, week so far, month so far, yr so far, and extra. The analytics that Ghostfolio supplies may help you determine and handle dangers inside your portfolio.
One other nice characteristic of Ghostfolio is the truth that it could possibly work as a progressive net app with a mobile-first design, so, for those who put it behind a reverse proxy (or Cloudflare Tunnel), then you possibly can add the web site to your telephone to maintain up together with your investments from wherever.
So, whether or not you’ve gotten a big funding portfolio already or are simply beginning, be sure you deploy Ghostfolio in your homelab in the present day in order that method you possibly can all the time know what your investments are doing. Now is perhaps the right time to spend some additional time money on a couple of new shares, however with out some sort of monitoring system, you’d by no means understand it.
Add customized notifications to your homelab with ntfy
No extra silent failures
Credit score: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek | tsingha25/Shutterstock
Have you ever ever sat there and puzzled, “When was the final time my system backed up?” solely to seek out out that backups had been silently failing for weeks? I’ve, and ntfy may help with that.
With ntfy, you possibly can arrange a customized self-hosted push notification service that runs within your homelab to let you understand when varied issues occur. As an illustration, you possibly can arrange notifications at any time when your system begins, completes, or fails a backup. Having one thing like this configured would permit you to know in case your system is correctly backing up or not.
One other use case may very well be figuring out when a Docker container updates (or when updates can be found), getting warnings on disk area, CPU, or RAM utilization, and far more.
Utilizing ntfy is pretty easy, as it really works by sending a PUT or POST HTTP request by its REST API, which integrates with the iPhone or Android app that you could set up in your telephone.
Model
GEEKOM
CPU
AMD Ryzen 5 7430U
The GEEKOM A5 mini PC packs 16GB of user-replaceable RAM, a user-swappable NVMe SSD, plus two different storage slots, supplying you with loads of user-upgradability on this compact system. The Ryzen 5 processor packs loads of energy for normal duties, and it is even nice at light-weight gaming and CAD work too.
Storage
1TB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe 3.0 x 4 SSD
CPU
Intel Core i9-11900H
The ACEMAGIC M1 Mini PC is a compact productiveness workhorse.
Model
KAMURI
CPU
i5-14450HX
The KAMRUI Hyper H2 Mini PC options an Intel Core i5-14450HX 10-core 16-thread processor and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. The included 512GB NVMe SSD comes with Home windows 11 pre-installed so the system is able to exit of the field.
You don’t have to spend a ton of cash to start out a homelab
You is perhaps taking a look at different folks’s homelabs and assume, “That’s simply unobtainable by me, it’s too costly to homelab.” However you’d be utterly mistaken.
It’s really fairly simple to start out a homelab from scratch with out spending a single dime. Merely seize one of many outdated computer systems seemingly sitting in your closet or workplace and get Linux put in. Even when it’s a actually outdated laptop, it’ll seemingly be an awesome place to begin for a homelab.
So, for those who’ve been laying aside making an attempt any of those weekend initiatives since you don’t have the money to purchase a brand new laptop to start out a homelab, cease letting that get in the way in which and simply use what you’ve gotten.

