Anyway, this is barely worthy of a post,

Shut up! This is always worth a post! We do this because we enjoy it. Not because we seek fame. Good on you for getting the job. Just keep learning and growing.

A word of advice for any one else and any future endeavors. Put your lab at the bottom of your resume. 10 year or 20 years in the game, I don’t care. Put it on there. Give the highlights and you are good. So far it has gotten me two jobs.

I mean, the entire point of VPN like that is all time online. The better solution is likely a port forward for syncing.

I don’t think that really solves the problem here. That will still use the VPN all the time when mobile. So the battery will still drain quickly. Zero Tier I admit is quite heavy compared to Tailscale but the battery issue remains.

You know, honestly… If you want to get into self hosting your stuff. The better option is to get one of those mini desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo. They are cheap and powerful. It will likely server you until the hardware dies depending on what you want to do. It also costs only the cost of the machine and the TINY amount of power it will consume per year.

Once we get a good, well priced E-ink tablet. I think e-readers are going to become much more common. But sadly every company wants to stuff them full of things that the display just isn’t really good for. Like the Huawei MatePad should have 2 weeks of battery life easily. But instead they put an OS on it that eats battery and it barely lasts a full day.

What I think would be a good thing to start looking into as you progress, is the ability to take these scans and other items and turning them into actual text. This can give you more freedom and make the user experience much better. Like the ability to take a book and turn the bright white pages into a much friendlier dark mode for night reading. This could also mean, when E-ink tablets do start becoming easier to own. You will be able to easily adapt to them.

What you are making honestly has no use to me, but I have been following none the less. It is an interesting bit of kit. Keep up the effort, it is not terrible to use for the bit I have used it. As others said of course though, a phone app would be the king. Sadly you also can’t benefit those users of other tablets for reading like Kindle. Using the email service is so hacky and just not great from a user experience.

There are a TON of ways you can do this. Since you have a NAS already it makes it super easy. You just need a tiny desktop for about $100 and you are golden.

Look on ebay for one of those mini desktops from HP/Dell/Lenovo. The one thing though is you will need to find one that has a CPU that supports quicksync. So 7th gen or newer. So you want to find as far up the chain as you can.

They are:

1. HP Prodesk
2. Dell Optiplex
3. Lenovo Thinkcenter

This is the cheapest way to get away with it.

There may also be an option to use one of the Intel Arc cards with a cheaply built desktop for quicksync support. But I have not seen anything related to comparing them to on die quicksync. I would be especially curious on the cheaper option from Arc and how well it works for video encoding.

Then you goto homelab and homeserver and they tell you X and Y things and bitch and moan about power usage. Or they suggest things that logically don’t line up with what OP wants/needs. Or they will say lines like “for just a little more” about 10 times until a build is $1000 or more.

Lets try to be helpful instead of just pushing people other places…hmm?

New tools get released every single day.

It is like this is an ever evolving space with new tools coming up all the time and people want the newer stuff to try and host.

Why not try github pages? It is free.