Definitely nothing wrong with that!!

What made you go with a custom solution instead of something like home assistant?

I work in emergency management but I’ve always been interested in tech as a hobby. That led me to start self-hosting Plex on my desktop about 6-7 years ago. Now I’ve got a dedicated machine running unraid with about 20 to 30 different docker services.

I really enjoy being able to figure out how to setup a service and then being able to be fully in control of how it works. Beyond just enjoying tinkering with the system to learn, I enjoy being able to troubleshoot and fix problems without relying on large companies.

As others have pointed out, CloudFlare doesn’t sell .ca domain names due to the ownership restrictions applied by CIRA. I’ve personally used Web Hosting Canada (WHC.ca) for many years, including their hosting for a while. I also have a couple of domains with Register.ca.

I then use DuckDNS for dynamic updates and the free tier of CloudFlare for security certificates and some simple access rules.

Seconding Zotero. I truly don’t know how I would be able to keep track of all the research I read through and reference. I especially love that I can highlight passages and attach notes to each entry right inside the desktop app.

The browser connector is also super handy for quickly adding papers to read-through at a later date.