One of the gifts for my birthday this year was a Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM :3
I booted Raspberry Pi OS using a micro-sd card I had with 16GB, but I intend to get an SSD soon. Using SSH all went very smoothly in setting things up.
The first things I did was install pi-hole Things I got to recap:
Admittedly, I use Zen with uBlock origin and Brave on my phone, so the most annoying ads - YouTube ads, are not even part of the pi-hole’s thing, as the DNS for the YT ads are the same as for YT’s content… Less trackers at least.
As an experiment I also tried using Jellyfin, and all went smoothly:
rsync was helpful here, as I could transfer files between my mac and the pi.
In a similar fashion running navidrome would be awesome. Edit: self-hosting-music
Tailscale is also something I tried, with my mac, the pi, my old laptop running Fedora, and A’s mac. Life-changing to be honest, as I was not aware this could be be possible before.
Regarding the IoT side of things, would be great in the future to set something up with a mic and use voice commands for things, even for a music player, to simulate something like an Alexa assistant, Siri etc.