No budget. No upgrades. Just vibes.
I’ve spent enough time chasing new gadgets, tuning my homelab and looking for the next thing to configure. This time, I wanted the opposite: a little corner in my office where I could switch off, put on a film, watch some anime or play an old game.
I didn’t want to buy a new TV or sound system. I wanted to see what I could make with things I already owned.
Previously on isoul.uk: Why I Started Wanting My Data Back — two decades of online accounts accumulate quietly until an account stops feeling like an account and starts feeling like infrastructure.
Some people name servers after their function.
docker01.
nas01.
backup02.
That is sensible.
I name my machines after spaceships from stories I love.
This is less sensible.
I recommend it.
A homelab is already unnecessary enough # Most of what I run at home could be replaced with hosted services.
Previously on isoul.uk: From Veoh and Justin.tv to Self-Hosting My Own Media — streaming solved the convenience problem, but it did not solve the ownership problem.
For a long time I treated online accounts as permanent.
Why wouldn’t I?
I had used the same main account for roughly two decades. Over that kind of period an account stops feeling like an account and starts feeling like infrastructure.
Email goes there.
Previously on isoul.uk: Why I Self-Host — a technical curiosity became a practical choice about ownership, privacy, learning and keeping data in systems I control.
It is slightly ridiculous that one line can connect watching anime on Veoh around 2007 with running Docker containers on a mini PC in my house today.
But there is a line.
Back then, I was interested in one thing: finding something I wanted to watch.
Previously on isoul.uk: The Internet Used to Feel Different — forums had addresses, communities had places and discovery was active before feeds took over.
There are much easier ways to use technology than self-hosting.
If I want photo storage, somebody will sell it to me.
If I need file sync, there are dozens of services.
If I want media streaming, I can pay a subscription and install an app.
Instead, I have ended up with NASes, Docker hosts, virtual machines, DNS servers, monitoring, backups and enough cables to make the “easy” option look extremely sensible.
Previously on isoul.uk: Discovering Anime on the Wild Internet of 2007 — the internet stopped being a reference tool and became the place we went to find what to watch next.
I don’t think the old internet was necessarily better.
It was slower, less reliable, full of broken links and often much harder to use.
But it did feel different.
The easiest way I can describe it is that I used to feel as though I was moving through the internet. Today it often feels as though the internet moves through a handful of feeds towards me.
Previously on isoul.uk: How Toonami Changed What I Watched — television opened the door before the internet showed me how much anime existed beyond the British schedules.
That next phase began with Naruto.
Toonami had taught me to recognise anime as something distinct, but Naruto was the point when somebody effectively said to me, “This is anime. Watch this.”
That somebody was my brother. We started watching it online, beyond whatever British television happened to schedule, and I fell in properly.
Previously on isoul.uk: When Renting a Movie Was an Event — the ritual, artwork and scarcity of rented VHS tapes made individual films matter in a way that streaming has made difficult to remember.
I watched anime before I really knew what anime was.
Like a lot of children growing up in the 1990s, Pokémon was simply a cartoon on television. Sailor Moon was another show. I wasn’t thinking about where they came from, how they were produced or whether they belonged to a separate medium.
Previously on isoul.uk: It Only Took Me Twenty-Odd Years to Listen to Harry Potter — a Year 6 recommendation I ignored finally found me through audiobooks more than twenty years later.
There was a time when watching a particular film began with somebody leaving the house.
My brothers would go to Blockbuster or one of the local video shops and return carrying whatever the household would be watching. I was younger and not always part of the choice, but that only made their return more interesting. A film did not simply appear in a menu. It arrived through the front door.
Sometime in the late 1990s, my Year 6 teacher recommended that our class read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I ignored her.
It wasn’t a protest against Harry Potter. I wasn’t taking a principled stand against wizards, boarding schools or popular books. I simply wasn’t a reader. A teacher telling the class that a book was worth reading was not enough to make eleven-year-old me pick it up.
More than twenty years later, I have just finished listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.