whattocook VS paperless-ngx

I literally made one to scratch my itch with home cooked meals: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/09/21/what-to-cook-launch...

Honestly, I don’t have “a stack”, if I’m trying to learn a new thing I’ll use that to build a new project, or if I don’t I’ll default to the most suitable option.

i.e.: What to Cook? was built in Java because I needed a refresher, otherwise I’d likely use PHP/Symfony because I could finish it quickly. If the project is non-web/fullstack, I’d default to Go. If im building something that will use React, I’d default to NodeJS+Express.

If you’re curious, i have a few write ups in the projects section of my blog

I have a few:

https://www.ytemail.com/ - e-mail notifications for YouTube uploads. I was in the 0.01% that used and liked e-mails, and built this after Google killed the e-mails. If you want to use, please get in touch, I'm happy to onboard free users if the amount of notifications you'll get isn't big.

https://github.com/kassner/whattocook - Recipe chooser, but it works the other way around you'd expect. In a household of depressed people, it's common that we can't get to agree on the meal, so this project decides it for us. You can exclude ingredients in case you don't have them at home, but that's the only way you'll get a different recipe.

https://www.kassner.com.br/projects/money/ - Personal finances project that only I use. Never had the courage to open it to the world, and there isn't anything innovative in it to be worth the hassle either. Only pluses are single-binary web project and DBs are password-encrypted by default.

I steered a friend towards Paperless (and away from an LLM solution) as a way of searching/accessing GBs of architectural PDFs recently - so far, it’s apparently working well for them.

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can find your physical documents easier. With features such as tags, full text search, multi-user permissions system, this is a dream for those who like to keep an organized folder of files and documents.

Since last year I’ve been configuring and maintaining my homelab setup and it is just amazing.

I’ve learned so much about containers, virtual machines and networking. Some of the self hosted applications like paperless-ngx [1] and immich [2] are much superior in terms of features than the proprietary cloud solutions.

With the addition of VPN services like tailscale [3] now I can access my homelab from anywhere in the world.

The only thing missing is to setup a low powered machine like NUC or any mini PC so I can offload the services I need 24/7 and save electricity costs.

If you can maintain it and have enough energy on weekends to perform routine maintenance and upgrades. I would 100% recommend setting up your own homelab.

[1] https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

This has been posted a few times already, but I cannot tell you how life changing Paperless NGX is for organizing PDFs. As someone who wrangles all of the insurance and bills for my house, this open source software is so damn good.

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/

I maintain Bash script to quickly set it up locally on Linux with Podman. Give it a spin if you want to kick the tires.

https://github.com/jdoss/ppngx

Personally, I use https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup to archive all my emails and then only keep them on the remote server for as long as I need to (basically until I read them and respond or download an attachment into https://docs.paperless-ngx.com )