I think your local offerings can be a big factor. I grew up in scouts, loved my experience for the most part.

But talking with other people about their experiences can be a mixed bag. Each troop has its own priorities, the national Scouting organization gives troops a lot of flexibility on how they want to run their operation.

My troop, for example, was huge on outdoor activities. We had monthly camping trips, sometimes more than one a month. We did participate in organized “scouting events” as well with other troops, but that was sort of secondary.

Other troops are big on “scouting achievements” like merit badges, “scouting societies” like Order of the Arrow, medals and honors kinda thing, I felt like that would be a bit of a drag. But to each their own.

Also using Booklore with 2 Kobos, works great!

Although annotation syncing isn’t supported yet, I believe there’s a pull request for it already.

I’d recommend setting up StremIO + Torrentio + Real Debrid (takes about a half hour to setup)

About $35/year, almost flawless streaming. Nearly all content available.

Reddit guide

You can PM for help on it if needed, I’ve set them up for tons of friends

I also use Frigate!

Piggybacking to also recommend Tailscale to OP for external access. Not 100% self hosted, but solves the DDNS issue. And works well with Frigate in my experience.

Hey I did exactly this a few years ago! Uses an optocoulper for isolation. I flashed ESPHome on it and connected it to my Home Assistant instance.

Works like a charm!

I also hard wired the ESP power pins to the PC via a spare USB header. Then I enabled a BIOS setting to keep USB ports powered when shut down, so it’s a super seamless install.

Only problem I’m having with it lately is since I run a dual boot system, my default GRUB option is Linux, but sometimes (unfortunately) I need to get into Windows. It’s a bit of a pain to have to update grub to change the default then restart again. I’d rather build in some sort of selection functionality the first time it boots.

I’ve been playing around with using another ESP32 as a filesystem USB device, then having grub read the content of a file on said ESP32, either “windows” or “linux”, then booting accordingly. That’s a work in progress tho

I personally use Frigate, which is default free, but has a plus tier for $50 a year (has custom AI training/models instead of default’s standard model).

Personally has all the features I’d want, curious what BlueIris brings, I’ve heard a bit about it.