Please forgive any typos, my brian is still very much recovering. I’m not promoting anything cause nothing I’ve made yet is really worth much to anyone but my self,and everything is far from polished. I’m just sharing what I’m doing. In November '24, I had a mid level stroke. I’ve had issues with motor skills, headaches, and short term memory, but for the most part I’m doing quite well. For the last 6-8 months, I build a home server, (AMD 3700x, 64GB of RAM, 6TBNvME, and 2x 12TB HDD, old NVIDIA 2060. I setup up Jellyfin, ripped our 400ish Blu Rays, DVDs, and TV Shows. Setup Navidrone, and ripped our CDs, Home Assistant, AudoBookshelf, ConvertX, MeTube, and several other apps mostly discovered here. I also wrote my own app to track our large physical Media Collection that has a few api calls for pulling info about the items., a dashboard app in the style of the old iGoogle, and I’ve started working on 2 other apps, one to track medical information like blood pressure, glucose, doc appts, care team, medications, etc. The other app is for TTRPG GMs to run games that will basically be a digital GM Screen with a dozen or so tools.
I was a web developer for 20 years before the stroke so I had some previous entry level experience with this type of stuff, but not on this level. Mine was more for like corporate websites. My doctor believes this process has indeed sped up my recovery significantly. So this is just a post to say thanks for this community that has given me tons of ideas for things to try.
Been there done that. It’s much harder than it seems from this post. Your brain suffered severe damage, getting it to work again as good as possible takes huge amounts of energy and will power. Good job bro! (Watch yourself, don’t over do it)
I hope you get better! Im not active in community, not even a tech savy. I also didnt come up with something to share with community but I like the homelabing hobby (or movement if I can call this like that).
Jellyfin is such a badass app! I borrowed huge DVD’s collection from my grandpa (he had a store back in days) so I have like a bunch of movies only on my Pi5 with Radax (wchich is my only homelab device lol).
Again. I hope you get better fellow stranger from the internet!
I’ve been in a similar position to you. I was in an accident and woke up missing a quarter of my skull.
Props for getting back to servers and code as a part of your recovery. The recovery process for me took a long time and a lot of work. I imagine you are in a similar position and question whether things will ever be the same again, the same way I have. I don’t know your particular situation very well, true. But for me, recovery not only took a lot of exercise, balance routines, relearning vocabulary, and a couple of surgeries; but it also took a lot of faith.
Shoot, you mentioned your projects, I did something similar. I found a hypervisor on Craigslist and set up Apache Cloudstack. I pushed myself to learn DevOps skills on it, Jenkins, terraform, cloud-init, and I’m still working on a AWS DevOps Cert.
But I would like to say kudos on your work. I think that doing it during your recovery is an extremely difficult prospect, but I do think that it pays off in the long run.
tldr; I think your recovery is coming along great. You may have quite the ways to go down that road, we don’t really know. But until you’re fully recovered, you will be in our hearts, minds, and prayers.
Love this. Thanks for sharing.
I’m in like an inverse of this situation; ol’ pappy and grandpappy before him had early onset dementia.
i am trying to get all this set up, backed up, documented and slowly showing my kids how to access and troubleshoot some of the services. it is a race against time!
and a “dead man’s” or “brain is melted” switch set up to hand over the keys to the significant other when that time comes.
i am proud to be part of the same group as you though! you’re very inspiring.
Relearning old abilities after nerve damage is not the most fun I have had. I hope this is something you enjoy. Good luck on your recovery!
I had a stroke very young, early career and was paralyzed for a bit. I did something similar to regain function, keep it up. Don’t forget to sleep and exercise as you can (exercise bikes are usually safe) they provide a cumulative effect with what you’re doing. Feel free to DM if you ever need a chat.
Best of luck in recovery!
Don’t forget to sleep and exercise
Even mild exercise, like getting out and walking, works wonders for me. Gets all the happy chemicals roused and flowing.
Good luck with everything. Go at your own pace, hosting is just leaving a computer on. Add more things as you need and that’s all there is in my opinion. But of course you’ll learn security, backups, and other things as you need.
That’s one thing I especially like about self hosting: You can do it at your own pace. But at the same time there are almost no limits. With today’s technology you can do anything you want.
It helps me if depression hits because you can set your own goals and actually achieve them.
You might think your apps aren’t worth sharing, but I think most tabletop GMs are constantly looking for the perfect set of tools for their purposes and I bet yours would probably be just what some people need! I mostly end up just using Obsidian and keeping notes in markdown files, but I know some people want/use a lot of other tools.
Congrats on bouncing back from such a hard thing with such vim and vigor! I hope your recovery continues to go well.
And they’re still leaps and bounds above anything I can do
Wish you a better health, soon
I can totally see how this has a positive impact in cognition and general well-being. Personally, I wouldn’t want a day in my life where I consume short form content and giving free reign to all the other behavioural mind-killers.
Props for going down the right path.
Excuse me for not having too much to say besides everyone else in this thread. I just wanted to check-in and say something that I felt upvoting everyone isn’t enough. Wish you all the recovery you can get, and thank you for inspiring too. You’re doing great, at least your grammar is quite good for the situation. Cheers!
keep up the good fight and keep on keeping on!
You’re a real legend, wish you the best
