(I will find a better title for this series. Honest)
“The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about”
Agent Smith – The Matrix (1999)
As a teenager in the nineties, this quote was always hilarious to me. You’re telling me that this is the peak of civilisation? The late nineties?
And yet here we are in 2025, and you know what? The machines were right.
This is the start of a small series of posts based on my personal approach to the modern internet. The goal is really to share how I’m trying to take back control of my media consumption, social media, news and just how we can all move away from the large internet conglomerates.
This has been inspired by the fantastic posts of Phil Watson and the excellent video from Struthless.
And where better to start than with my home NAS. Over the past 13 years I’ve bounced between QNAP and Synology with their all-in-one hardware and software devices. However, with Synology deciding to limit what hard drives that consumers are authorised to use, means I needed to look for a new solution.
So, this time around, I’m going to roll my own solution. In terms of hardware, you can reuse any old computer you may have, or you can build something new. I’m going to be using a AMD Ryzen 5 7600 to give me balance of low power and good performance, alongside 32GB of memory.
In terms of software this is a great time to be building your own NAS device. TrueNAS, HexOS and Unraid give us a range of options to find a solution that works best for you.
For me, I’ve went with Unraid. This is purely from a tinkering perspective, where I want something that gives me the flexibility to spin up services that I need on the device whilst not having to manage what is effectively an enterprise grade OS.
This doesn’t mean Unraid hasn’t been without its own challenges. Having to create docker containers for every service is going to be daunting for entry level users. However, the support has been excellent, with the community having a range of images available that can quickly be installed.
And how can I prove it works? Well the family hasn’t noticed that Plex and our photo hosting had moved across as it’s just continued to work for them.