Why bother?

A fair question, since most of this replaces things you could get for free or
cheap from a big company. A few honest reasons:
Privacy. The voice assistant, the automation, and the AI all run at home.
That's genuinely rare, and it's worth something to me that they aren't
feeding a data broker.
Learning. Every service here taught me something I now use at work. A home
lab is the best sandbox there is — when you break it, you fix it, and you keep
the lesson.
Control. Nothing gets discontinued, enshittified, or hit with a surprise
price hike. If I don't like how something works, I change it.
It's fun. That's the real one. It scratches the same itch as a model
railway or a project car, except the trains are Docker containers.
If any of this sounds interesting and you want to start your own, ask me — I
love talking about it, and everything I use is open-source and well-documented.