Been lurking for the better part of the last decade and finally have something that I can even call a "lab", but I've been feeling so giddy about even putting anything together that I wanted to share this post.

The setup:

Pi 4 Model B | 4 GB RAM | 16 GB SD | Ubuntu 26.04

WD MyBook | 4 TB

Pi is from 2021, before prices went all dicko mode and everything, and the MyBook is probably from around 10 years ago, lying around in my parents' home being unused. All the lab does right now is run dockerized Navidrome, but every time I stream a new song from it I get this little burst of satisfaction from the fact that I'm not paying Spotify anymore!

I'm sure as many people in this space did, I'm getting into self-hosting because I want to reduce how much I depend on big tech companies, regain control of my own data, and also better control where my dollars actually go in the world (because why tf is Spotify investing my subscription funds into AI drone defense companies)

So the plan is to upgrade slowly, and only…