A while ago I bought an OpenStick on a whim for 10 dollars (including shipping!) because it seemed like such a cool novelty piece of hardware.

Now, you might look at this hardware and think “my watch is more powerful than that”, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had with a device this size, and it’s a great gadget to get started with self-hosting.

The installation process is a bit involved, but once you’re up and running it runs Debian, which brings all the classic goodies such as systemd (among other things, a scheduler and service monitoring for Linux) and Podman (lightweight containerization). For 10 USD you basically get a home server with minimal power usage and zero noise!