Self-Hosting & Privacy

You want smart lights and a heating schedule in your German flat — but is one drilled hole the thing that costs you your Kaution? German tenancy law is stricter than the US no-drill guides admit, yet almost everything you want is reversible and needs no permission. Here's the line.

Chrome, Firefox, and Brave all leak something by default. This guide scores them on fingerprinting resistance, third-party cookies, telemetry, and DNS-over-HTTPS, then gives the exact settings to fix each one — plus why Chrome lost the full uBlock Origin for good.

Proxmox VE remains free with no per-core fee, while Broadcom's VMware now bills a 16-core-per-CPU minimum and Hyper-V requires a paid Windows Server 2025 host. A worked 3-year homelab cost table and feature matrix compare all three.

For most people the best password manager costs nothing. An honest, affiliate-free 2026 comparison of Bitwarden, 1Password, KeePassXC and Dashlane on cost, open source, self-hosting, sync and security — with a matrix and a which-one-fits-you guide.

Remove Windows 11's preinstalled apps and turn down telemetry safely: the one-click WinUtil route, manual PowerShell (including the provisioned packages most guides miss), and the registry/Group Policy truth about AllowTelemetry — with copy-paste commands and a restore-point first.

Benchmarks are the wrong question below 100 connections. How the four homelab reverse proxies actually feel to run — config styles, TLS automation, Docker workflows — with the same service configured in each.