The money in calligraphy is usually made on wedding invitations, diplomas, “fine fining” menus, and corporate award certificates

literally no one will ever have that problem, but lets humor your ridiculous made up bullshit

Wow, your username really fits.

Actually, it’s a description of some of the issues I’m dealing with right now. And yes, we’re DIYing it with RJ45 wired switching outlets on a separate vlan and subnet. And yes, we use a chest freezer.

And yes, there are more automatic and passive ways to do some of these things, like planting deciduous trees to shade your south wall in summer but not winter. Not everyone owns their home and land though.

There are problems they can actually solve, mostly heating and power related:

• In summer, lower the blinds on south facing windows when the sun comes up to reduce solar heating, then raise them in the evening to increase air flow against the window panes. This reduces the need for air conditioning, resulting in a surprising amount of power saved.

• On a home solar system, start the washing machine, dishwasher, and dryer that were loaded in the morning when the batteries reach 80% charge. Allow them to run off the inverter rather than taking the charge/discharge losses involved in battery storage, reducing the size of both battery bank and solar array needed.

• Lower the freezer temperature when there is a power surplus, and raise it back to normal when not so that cooling energy is used when it’s cheapest/most available

If you don’t work from home, you can’t do the second two yourself. They require automation. Reducing baseload requirements and battery storage needs can make a transition to renewable power much cheaper and more efficient. With mass adoption, that extends to power grids and not just off-grid homes, and has significant effects on things like the amount of lithium that needs to be mined or the number of coal and LNG power plants that are needed for times that are off-peak for wind and solar generation.

For a privacy friendly OS, surprised nobody has mentioned Freedombox

It’s designed explicitly for your use case, along with an easy path to other self hosted services. When you’re ready for more than it offers through the web interface, it’s a full Debian install under the hood - so you can install whatever you need to. Privacy friendly and super stable, with smooth upgrades to new releases and security updates for old versions several years after the new one is available.

As far as hardware, your old computer is probably more powerful than a Pi and can support more drives, but the Pi will be more power efficient. As others have mentioned, if you care about your data long term then backups are a must, so a separate NAS or a Pi with a large drive for backup storage is a good idea as well, whatever OS you choose.

I can’t take credit for writing it, but here you go!

https://workaround.org/