I had an old mini laptop lying around that had been gathering dust for years. It’s too old to run modern operating systems and its screen doesn’t work. It doesn’t even have a storage drive inside. It sounds like it belongs in the bin, but it’s not useless. I turned it into a tiny home server, and it now runs a handful of Docker containers. It consumes very little power (no screen) and it has perfect uptime because of its built-in battery backup.

Memos

If Google Keep and Obsidian had a baby

With a tiny potato server like mine, it doesn’t have a lot of resources. My half laptop only has 3GB of memory, so I can’t run heavyweight Docker containers. However, it is perfect for running lightweight services like a notes app. Memos is a free and open-source Google Keep alternative. It’s a wonderful project with an active community developing and maintaining it. On my server, it takes up less than 20MB of memory.

Obsidian is a popular Markdown notes app. What makes Obsidian special is that it gives you open access to your actual notes in the form of plain-text .md files. The notes in your Vault are organized in folders on your disk drive, and you can work on them directly in any app that supports the Markdown format (which most note-taking apps do.) Most mainstream apps lock the notes away in the cloud in a proprietary format, so if you lose the account, you lose the notes too. Plain-text files are easy to back up and read anywhere. Memos uses plain-text markdown files too. It gives you open access to your notes in .md files and you can take them anywhere.

Memos lets you quickly capture notes with a forward slash and create to-do lists, links, code, and tables. You can tag them with # and it’ll automatically organize your notes by those tags. You can type in Markdown and get beautifully formatted notes. It can even import notes from other note-taking applications. There’s even a Memos Telegram bot that takes the messages you send and turns them into Memos notes.

If you prefer Markdown, you should absolutely try Memos. It’s one of those incredibly underrated open-source apps that could be mainstream if it had the marketing budget.

SearXNG

A truly private search engine

Google pays billions of dollars to Apple and Mozilla to make Google the default search engine on their browsers. It really wants to use Google Search because it collects and trades your data. Google Search logs and tracks your search queries and ties them to a profile they have on you (the profile might even be linked to your government name).

It’s not just Google. Pretty much every mainstream search engine uses this business model. DuckDuckGo claims to not track or log your activity, but you have to take their word for it. The same is true for paid search engines like Kagi (which cost as much as $10 a month), but once again, you have to take their word for it.

The only way to get a truly private search engine is to host it yourself. SearXNG is an open-source meta search engine that doesn’t have ads, trackers, or logging. It’s fully self-hostable. The way it works is that SearXNG aggregates results from some 70 sources and ranks the results on the search page. It doesn’t track your IP address or location. In fact, it anonymizes your requests through proxies, so the search engines can’t tell where the requests are coming from. The results are pretty decent, especially compared to DuckDuckGo.

It takes up very little RAM (about 50MB) and barely uses the CPU when idling. You can run it as a single Docker container and use a reverse proxy like Caddy or Tailscale to access it anywhere. I’ve pointed my SearXNG instance to a subdomain I own. That way I can just type this address and use my private instance of SearXNG.

search.mydomain.com

Vaultwarden

Get Bitwarden perks for free

Bitwarden Premium usually costs around $50 a year for a family plan. With the premium plan, you get features like built-in time-based 2FA codes, secure password sharing, emergency access, file attachment and file sharing, and vault health reports. You can get all those features for free by using Vaultwarden. Plus, all your data stays safe and secure on your private server.

Vaultwarden is an open-source implementation of Bitwarden, compatible with the official Bitwarden apps and extensions. You can host it with as little as 100MB of memory and barely any CPU usage.

By default, Vaultwarden doesn’t handle HTTPS, but you need an HTTPS connection to access it. So I use Caddy to point my Vaultwarden instance to a subdomain.

vault.mydomain.com

Dashboard

The dashboard of my dreams

I always wanted a dashboard, but I could never find an app or page that had everything I needed. I even tried self-hosted dashboards like Flame, but I never ended up using them for more than a day. So I built my own.

This dashboard has all my bookmarks and I can always add new ones, alongside custom search engines. I can also add more. It has a custom timer to track my writing sessions. I need a stopwatch to track how long it takes to write and format my articles. I also need a break timer that tracks my breaks automatically. I built a writing tracker that does exactly that and plugged into my dashboard. The dashboard uses the Asana API to automatically pull my active tasks and puts them in a list with stuff like Asana comments and tags.

Also, the page tracks my work stats and streaks at the top, and at the bottom of the page, I’ve added a music player that plays tracks from my focus playlist.

I’ve hosted it using a lightweight web server called Lighttpd. It runs in the background and barely uses 10MB of memory.

7/10

Brand

MSI

Storage

512GB SSD (M.2 SSD (NVMe PCIe Gen4 x4 / SATA auto switch)

CPU

Intel Core i7-1255U 1.7GHz

Memory

16GB (8GB x2) RAM (DDR4 2666 / 3200MHz SO-DIMMs)

The MSI Cube 5 12M mini PC can handle everyday computing tasks and takes up minimal desk space.

There’s room for even more self-hostable services

Despite running these services 24/7, my server is only using 400MB of memory when idling. I’m sure there are more projects I can find to run alongside these four. Let me know if you have any recommendations.