Purpose of this Website

My goal for this website is for it to be a public place to share projects, thoughts, and ideas.

What I'm Working On

My bachelor's degree is in Psychology and my master's degree is in Human Resources. I haven't had any formal training in IT, web-development, and coding, but since I started a job in IT, I 've found an interest in different aspects of technology.

I started with purchasing a Lenovo ThinkPad T480 online for around $200. It's pretty modest with a an i5-8350U and 8GB of RAM. I upgraded to 32GB of RAM and installed a new wireless network card for improved Wifi connection.

Soon after, I got a new (to me) computer that I use for hosting a server at home to practice different skills. It's an old desktop computer that I've turned into a hypervisor using Proxmox. I've put several Linux distributions on it to get a feel for them and practice using the Linux command line. On the Proxmox server, I've upgraded the RAM from 8GB to 24GB because it uses relatively cheap DDR3 modules.I've also removed the optical disk drive, swapped it out with a SATA adapter and installed a 1TB SSD.

I've also setup a small Buffalo NAS on my home network with 1TB of storage in RAID1 formation for some rudimentary on-site backup. I access it using my ThinkPad and use it for dupming files (PDFs, videos, MP3s, etc) that I find interesting.

Most recently, I've started getting into some email/web hosting. I wanted to own a domain and use it to send/receive emails. I bought a domain and set up email messaging to have a personalized email address. I then bought a second for hosting this site.

Plans for the Future

My end goal is to setup another homeserver with applications to host. Ideally, it would keep a backup of any saved media, both onsite and offsite, and serve the media as needed. I've thought about using Unraid OS because of its ability to mix, match, and add on disk drives as needed, but I've seen a lot of good things from TrueNAS. I also want to host applications like Obsidian or Bitwarden.

I would also like to create some kind of ChatGPT replacement for myself, and, potentially, an Alexa replacement for my home. This would need to be hosted, from what I understand, on a PC with a strong GPU. Currently, my computers all have embedded graphics on the CPU so this will need to be worked on when I can purchase a more powerful PC.

In Conclusion

I'm hoping to learn a lot and share it to this site for my own benefit and for sharing with anyone interested.