You don’t need to pay $10/month for Google Drive. Or $3/month for 1Password. Or $8/month for Notion. You can run all of this at home, on a single Raspberry Pi if you’re careful. But here’s the honest part: some of it is worth the effort. Some of it isn’t. I’ve run a self-hosted cloud at home for three years. This is what I’ve learned. ...
I wanted a personal AI assistant. Not a chatbot. Not a copilot. Something that actually does things — controls my desktop, reads my screen, talks to my smart home, answers questions in Finnish or English, and never, ever sends my data to a server I don’t control. The cloud options are good. They’re not mine. So I started building one. This post is the architecture document for that project. It’s a work in progress — the docker-compose is ready, the Ollama instance is running, and the first agent is next. I’m writing this because the design decisions are interesting, and because someone else might want to build the same thing. ...
If your parents have discovered ChatGPT in the last year — and statistically, at least one of them has — they are probably using it the way most people do: asking medical questions, pasting in emails to “make this sound nicer,” asking it to summarize bank statements, and getting it to draft replies to family group chats. None of this is malicious. All of it is potentially a privacy problem. This guide explains what actually happens to a chat log after your parent hits send, which AI tools are safer than others, and the three settings you need to flip on their account the next time you visit. ...
Once you understand what AI tools actually do with your parents’ chat logs, the natural next question is: what should they use instead? The honest answer is that there is no single “best” privacy-first AI — there are three good options, each suited to a different household. The right choice depends almost entirely on what hardware your parents already own, how technical you are willing to get, and what they actually want to do with AI in the first place. ...