I set up Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi along with Frigate to act as an NVR for a handful of Reolink cameras that I installed and hard-wired. It's also set up with a reverse proxy to a domain that I own. This makes it a fully private home camera system that can be viewed from anywhere in the world with no monthly fees besides internet and power.
I've been getting more interested in web hosting and currently have seven websites online including this one. I won't share them all here, but a couple examples are my documentation site which can be found here, and my email domain which can be found here (this one's really simple since its only real purpose is for email). I also have a status site that tracks the online/offline status of each of my sites.
I liked the idea of having a vacuum that could map my house but I didn't like that all of the mainstream options were cloud-based, which meant that these cloud providers would have access to a map of my house. So, I found Valetudo which is a cloud-free software solution for robot vacuums. It involved soldering some components to a PCB and opening up the vacuum to connect to it and reimage it. I bought a Dreame L10 Pro for about $100 and now have a vacuum that I can schedule to clean specific rooms. The software has support for both the vacuuming and mopping functions.
I set up a World of Warcraft server with a customized version of the Playerbots module. This project introduced me to MySQL database manipulation and also introduced me to the GitHub process. Through this project I learned how to fork a repository, clone it to my local system, create a new feature branch, edit the C++ source code, test it locally, push it back to my GitHub repository, and submit a pull request to have my changes be merged into the master branch of the original project. I'm very happy to say that my first pull request was approved by the main developer. You can see my completed pull request here.
I've been learning a lot about Linux since late 2024. Up until that point, I had only used Windows in my personal life. I first set up my laptop to dual-boot to Kubuntu, and then I tried the same with Fedora and Kubuntu on my desktop (before deciding to stick with Kubuntu there). I switched my server machine to Ubuntu Server (no GUI) and also eventually swapped both my laptop and desktop from Kubuntu to Arch Linux. I've been enjoying it a lot. Only on rare occasion do I ever need to dual-boot back into Windows for anything. Tools like Wine, Lutris, and others make it very easy to run Windows applications on Linux. For example, I originally made this website using Microsoft FrontPage 2002 running via Wine on Linux (maybe you can tell).