Oh and you can put Adguard on home assistant too as an add on.

I started my home assistant journey with 4 smart globes, a Google home speaker with a pi 4. I learned how to use it and started integrating things I don’t need hardware for, such as shopping/Todo lists, weather, Spotify, last.fm, calendars, basically anything I can learn without hardware. Right now I’m working on getting a shopping list sent to me when I enter the shops zone.

Then I bought a bunch of NFC tags (they’re cheap) for medication reminders, kitty litter reminders/tracking. I have a music poster in my house I’ve stuck an NFC tag to and it opens up the album on Spotify, turns on Bluetooth and connects to my speaker.

I’ve slowly been adding more devices as I go along due to cost constraints. Not that smart home stuff is expensive, I just can’t afford to do it all at once. Which also gives me time to consider/research smart devices before I buy.

100% recommend. It’s addicting actually.

Thank you for all of this. You are right, I do have a set up currently. It’s an old repurposed amd PC which is fine for direct play but it stuggles to transcode. I want to use ErsatzTV which needs transcodng and it can’t handle it. It’s all set up through docker-compose on Linux Mint which has been fine so far (first Linux distro). You’ve gotten me quite interested in Unraid/OMV though.

Other containers I run are Immich, Mealie, Dozzle, Tubesync as well as the arr stack. Likely to run more containers (you know how it is). Current PC sits on about 10-12 GB ram.

I’m in Australia if that helps, little more pricey than US, harder to get parts and I definitely have had decision paralysis. in saying that though, all your comments have given me clarity for a plan.

Thanks for that, have also considered this. What would be the benefit of going this way?