Best bet is to keep your eye on RPI locator: https://rpilocator.com/
IndeterminateName
Jesus Christ that hit hard, also nearly gave me a cry!
Absolutely adored Orphan Black!!
I've done this for vertical blinds using this: https://github.com/kp-bit/xblinds but for my big roller blind I used a commercial solution, the motor on the DIY version wasn't strong enough even with a planetary gear box added.
Then for the automation I'm using home assistant
This was the commercial one: https://amzn.eu/d/hdkUyNh
Oh good shout! Thank you!
Spending the day with friends setting up their place to play D&D and consume copious amounts of barbeque tomorrow!
passes the garlic bread
Silly things like r/nononoyes or r/musicaljenga
I'm running a Cyberpunk flavoured 5e oneshot which has so far turned into a three shot (yes I know I'm sorry I should have used cyberpunk to play cyberpunk but my group already knows 5e and we needed a game quick while our normal DM took a break)
I'm also running Wild Beyond the Witchlight and playing Curse of Strahd and 2 5e campaigns in homebrew worlds.
It sounds like a lot but we don't get to play any of those very frequently! Usually one or two games every couple of months.
I've only played and run D&D 5e. I did get the Pathfinder 2e humble bundle so might play that at some point. My party also owns two copies of the Call of Cthulu starter set which I would love to get around to one Halloween.
For small stuff we've played Honey Heist which was a huge amount of fun!
Definitely think that content specific instances with more niche communities within them is the way forward. There's no reason for lemmy.ml to have a raspberry pi community if computers.social has a raspberry pi community.
I'm doing basically all the things you've just listed using a Dell Precision Tower 3620 you don't necessarily need new hardware for it and could save quite a lot if there are used workstations in your area.
For software I'm using esxi with truenas core virtualized and photonos as my docker host with everything managed through portainer. I would not suggest using esxi unless you want to learn about it, I wish I'd gone with Proxmox at the start.