What is this?

This is a handbook for our (Maggie and James) house and, to some extent, parts of our life.

I (James) primarily wrote this as a reference for myself.

Our family values control over our data and I like side projects so as a result our home, computers, WiFi and other parts of our digital lives have a lot more going on behind the scenes that we (primarly me, James) are responsible for.

For the most part this stuff works fairly well, and that's good and bad.

It's good because, well, it means things are reliable and rarely need to be tinkered with. There's a bit of survivorship bias here, but I'd also like to think that I have decent instincts for choosing reliable software to run the services we decide to host ourselves.

It's bad because touching services and parts of our house less often means that I forget the details of maintaining, operating, whatever the service in question. That's part of what this document is attempting to address.

TLDR

This handbook exists to make supporting our vast and complicated digital lives easier.