three days ago this server didn't exist. now it runs 28 subdomains, 12 services, encrypted backups to a storage box in germany, and a monitoring system that texts my phone when anything goes down.
i didn't plan this. i just kept saying "what else."
what started as a birthday project — a blank ubuntu box and a terminal — turned into something that looks suspiciously like an operating system for my life.
dashboard with live terminals
blog with no cms
photo gallery with 580 pictures
wisdom dropper for catching thoughts from my phone
morning briefing with weather, quotes, server health
meditation timer with breathing patterns and gongs
pomodoro with session tracking
analytics tracking every public page
uptime dashboard with 72-hour history bars
live log viewer streaming from journalctl
self-hosted git server
movie theater streaming from a 5tb vault
retro arcade with 60+ games in the browser
pong, tetris, flappy bird, snake, 2048, minesweeper
matrix rain that spells my daughter's name
everything is raw html. no frameworks. no build steps. you make a folder, put an index.html in it, and it's live with tls in seconds. the cert validator approves any subdomain that has a directory. caddy serves it. that's the whole deploy process.
the backups run at 4am. borg, encrypted, compressed, pruned. 7 daily, 4 weekly, 6 monthly. the storage box has 5 terabytes and i've used 3 gigs. my phone buzzes at 9am if there are updates pending or a reboot required.
the wisdom directory has everything. my voice. my identity. my teaching frameworks. 435 personal notes spanning four years. 580 photos. 40 of my best lines. it's all sitting there waiting for the day i connect claude to n8n and let the machine write in my voice.
that's next. the content pipeline. drop a thought on my phone, AI polishes it, i tap approve, it publishes. remove the keyboard from life.
but tonight i'm looking at the status page. nine green dots. all systems operational. 64gb of ram and i'm using 3%. a server that runs my photo gallery, my movie collection, my games, my git repos, my notes, my meditation timer, and my daily briefing — and it's barely awake.
the best systems don't sweat. they just run. quietly. in the background. like breathing.
i built this from mazunte, oaxaca. 3am sessions with the jungle outside and the terminal inside. my daughter sleeps in the next room. the dog is on the couch. the mezcal is on the shelf.
28 subdomains. one domain. one server. one guy who couldn't stop saying "what else."
systems online.