Good to hear!

However I may have spoken too soon with Colota… it stopped registering my location after a first trip, and wouldn’t restart tracking until I restarted my phone (GrapheneOS Pixel 9). I need to look at the logs and maybe raise an issue.

Dawarich has had some great updates in the past few weeks, and I’m hoping Colota + Dawarich is my future family tracker system as they both have a very nice feel to them.

GPS Logger + Reitti is my background system atm while I mess with Colota & Dawarich.

I’ve been using Colota this weekend sending data to a Dawarich server. I like that you can filter out inaccurate GPS readings by setting an accuracy threshold, so this removes any false points that I tend to get with other location apps.

I’ve tried GPS Logger for Reitti, and the new Android Dawarich app, but so far, Colota seems the best (early days). It has the nicest ui as well.

In terms of what to enter, you need to find out what HA requires for the URL to receive data, then set that in the Colota app. Colota will just store the location data until you set a remote end for it to connect to.

I haven’t tried TBH. Because the VPS is restricted to my home IP for SSH using Hetzner’s firewall, I wireguard to home, then SSH to the VPS direct. I’ve been updating Pangolin since last summer, but haven’t really played with the newer features. I should have a proper look really.

I do this currently. I have a Hetzner VPS with Pangolin, giving access to family services like Immich etc, and my own nerdy services I keep locked to my home IP, and if I’m away from home, I tunnel in with Wireguard and hence then the home IP kicks in and they work.

You can issue traefik IP rules with Pangolin as well to limit what IPs can access services.

I have Pangolin and all family services behind Pocket ID with passkey only auth.

The VPS I protect with Hetzner’s firewall, so only SSH is allowed from my home IP.

The whole setup is as secure as I can make it. My family would just roll their eyes at any VPN I asked them to use, so it has to be publicly accessible for some things annoyingly.

I also have private services coming direct to my home firewall away from the VPS (for speed efficiency), and for truly public services (websites), I have those tunneled through a Cloudflare tunnel that can handle Google Auth for WordPress login pages etc.

It made me uncomfortable to start with using the VPS, but in time, confidence grows.

Moved all my Unraid ‘apps’ to Dockhand, and linked my Pangolin VPS with the Hawser agent. I had Dockge for a while on newer container deployments, but wanted something a bit more playful, Dockhand is it.

I degoogled my GMail last year to Infomaniak, which was OK, but moved to Fastmail last week, which I now love! Setting the custom domain pulled in the sites favicon for the Fastmail account header, which made me smile too much for such a simple thing. Think I’ll be on Fastmail for the future. (Background syncing with the new Bichon email archiver).

Thanks for your comment. I’ve had Infomaniak for the past year but find the UI/UX annoying. Same with Mailbox which I used for a few months before that. I’ve just tried Fastmail and love it already. Does everything I wanted Infomaniak to do. Davx with auto configure, Google calendar sync. And like you say, the apps are slick.

That’s a BBC link. A website with zero ads.

I was just thinking this week, that those who self host (and more importantly, those who program the code we self host), are at the front line of the modern digital resistance: in the sense that the world is burning due to the greed of the tech bros that run our daily lives. Convienience for the masses is what gives them power over us, and any one who rejects their systems is helping to fight back.

Voting with your wallet helps, so not giving them your money is the first step. Then managing and keeping your own data private is the next one.

2024 was the year I got more serious with self hosting and migrating away from the cloud offered by Google etc. But 2025 was the year I pushed to run all my own services and get the family on board as well; trying to educate my kids with running our own services (the wife is so not interested!).

There were some really cool projects released last year and some oddly well-timed ones as I was looking for various services, and Jotty was one of those!

Thanks so much for you work and rest assured amongst the negativity you may receive in certain corners of the web, there are people truly appreciative of yours and other like you hard work.

Sometimes all it takes is a random comment from a fellow self-hoster to put me on another journey… Thanks for the tip on passkeys and Pocket ID! Love the Pocket ID guides on all popular services. This looks to make it much easier for family logins to all my services. I’m starting the migration now already from Pangolin and inward.

I love the seemingly never-ending journey of self hosting!