My Pi 4 runs a handful of always-on services: a small web dashboard, some automation glue, a media helper or two. (If you’re buying today, get a Raspberry Pi 5 instead — same idea, much more headroom.) Every few weeks it would go completely dark. No SSH, no services, and nothing short of pulling the plug would bring it back. I did that twice, which is another way of saying I fixed nothing at all. ...
I wanted to print to my home printer from my phone while I was out. The printer only talks to the local network, my phone was on mobile data, and I didn’t want to expose anything to the public internet. It turned out Tailscale has a feature for exactly this, called subnet routing, and I had been ignoring it. The idea: you nominate one always-on machine on your home network. In my case it’s a small Intel N100 mini PC that runs 24/7 anyway. You tell Tailscale that this machine is a gateway to your LAN, say 192.168.1.0/24. After that, any device on your tailnet can reach any address on your home network through it, as though it were plugged into your router. No port forwarding, no dynamic DNS, no holes in the firewall. ...
When you install an Android app from an APK, outside the Play Store, it never updates itself. The Play Store won’t touch it, the OS won’t check for new versions, and your users stay on whatever they installed until somebody tells them otherwise. I maintain a small app that’s distributed as a direct APK download. Every release meant messaging people to go and download it again. That stops being viable at about three users, so I built a basic over-the-air updater into the app. ...