Introduction

Way back in the day (circa 2000) I was introduced to Unix-like operating systems in the form of Sun Solaris running on a Sun Sparc server. I was intrigued. And wanted to know more. Of course, at that time running a Unix-like operating system at home, on an x86 machine, meant Linux, not true Unix. Why? Well, to start, Unix simply didn’t run on x86. It has been ported to x86 in recent years, but at thetime it wasn’t. So, I started playing with Linux and have spent the last quarter century mucking my way around that system. And I think I’ve got a reasonably good handle on it.

Memories of Summers Past

Summers in the South are hot and humid. I grew up in a time when air conditioning was not common. I had already graduated high school when we got our first home with central A/C. Prior to that we only had window units – one in my parent’s bedroom upstairs and one in the downstairs den (if we had A/C at all). The rest of the house was generally hot and sticky. Nowadays, though, air conditioning is the norm and we forget sometimes what the real world is like.

An encounter in philosophy

Planning for 2025

So back in January my wife and I began talking about our plans for 2025. We knew that 2024 was going be a year of getting a handle on finances, tending to some changes we wanted to make to our home, and really just getting a good feel for what our life in retirement was going to be like.

With 2025 on the horizon and a much better sense of how things were going to be, we began making plans for the coming year. We knew that we wanted to take a few trips around the US. For example, we have grandkids in Arizona so a trip out there seemed reasonable. I’d love to explore the Southwest more, so that was definitely on the list. My wife visited Vermont a number of years ago and has wanted to return for many years. We thought this might be the year. And I’d like to do a number of additional short trips just to explore our state and those surrounding us a bit more.

Hello and welcome!

If you are retired and are even minimally technically inclined or would like to be, enjoy using a computer, and find yourself using a number of services such as Google docs, RSS readers, photo editors and organizers and so on, may I suggest that you explore self-hosting or homelabbing as a great retirement hobby.

Today I want to introduce you to the two hobbies, how they are different and how they are related. This is intended to be a fairly short video as I only want to introduce you to the concepts, give you some ideas of what you can do in this space, briefly discuss why you should self-host (or build a homelab) and give you some ideas about how to get started.