Where does it all come from?
I have always been a technology enthusiast, a big dreamer, and my life’s passion is to try new things that can bring added value to people’s everyday lives. In my childhood, I disassembled toys to find out how they worked and later used them to create robots. A small vibrating motor from a toy car connected to a battery or a lit bulb taken from lights brought me much more joy than the toy car itself. Various types of building sets occupied me for hours and hours. Creativity and imagination seemed endless, whereas resources were very, very limited. Some people chased after a ball, while I ran to the local electronics store to check out new phones, hi-fi equipment, and bought electronic components to later solder them together and create blinking patterns from LEDs or traffic lights for a model railway. From the Atari console to the 386, the first Pentiums with MS Windows 95 to the first computer with AMD Duron 1000 Windows XP, a 20GB hard drive, the sounds of Age of Empires III, or the action in Quake 3 Arena, visiting gaming centers for multiplayer Unreal Tournament, Call of Duty.
And today?
The enthusiasm does not wane!
As soon as I set aside the gaming PC, Arduino, and home automation, Raspberry, I began to create a concept of a modern, sustainable, and minimalist household that perfectly fits my vision of how technical equipment at home could look to meet the needs of a modern household and still be relatively affordable.
At the very heart of the household is a personal data center (server), and around it, countless mobile devices (clients). And this at a time when the trend is Cloud, which is useful but, from my perspective, only for partially encrypted backup of the personal data center. It’s unbelievable how many services can be run at home on a server. It is literally a new world that I am discovering with enthusiasm.
Choosing the right NAS, Router, Switch, WiFi access points, IP Cameras, cables, I am capable of sitting at my laptop for hours considering different scenarios and alternatives.
I believe that I am not the only one facing such questions, and therefore, I would like to use my life’s passion to lay my cards on the table and share my perspective with you. Maybe I can help you with a purchase decision or provide some inspiration.