Oh! I also use SyncThing quite a bit. It’s one of those things that “just works” in my experience, and has clients for every device.

yt-dlp is my go-to for interacting with YouTube. Super helpful.

LibreOffice Draw can be used to modify PDFs, so I typically use it to fill out forms (whether they’re “fillable” or not).

A lesser known one: QDirStat helps visualize the size of different folders on your PC. Great when trying to figure out how you managed to fill up that new 2TB drive in a couple months.

Looks cool! How does it compare to something like Warpinator?

Truly autonomous driving (on general purpose roads) is a lot further off than the hordes of venture capitalists want you to believe. Not sure which state is letting them loose, but I can’t imagine it’ll end well.

I believe this is called a “stand up”. That is, you’re standing up your real work for an hour so a useless middle manager scrum master can feel like they’re contributing.

The answer also depends on your level of experience and how much you want to learn doing this. You mentioned you haven’t done this before, but are you otherwise comfortable using computers and figuring things out? Are you familiar with Linux and/or the command line? In addition, are you hoping to tinker around and learn a lot from this, or are you more concerned with just setting it up so you can use it?

There are options for all levels of expertise and technical interest, but I recommend starting with any hardware you already have or can aquire for cheap/free (especially if you’re hoping to tinker and learn more). As another commenter suggested, finding an old desktop or laptop and putting a NAS operating system on it would be a great starting project. Then once you play around with it, you’ll know if/where you want to spend some cash on something better. If you don’t have old PCs laying around, check on whatever you use for local buy & sell listings, you can probably pick up something for pretty cheap.

If you’re mostly looking to play around and you don’t have any extra hardware, you can also try things out in a virtual machine (download VirtualBox), which will let you learn without any monetary investment.

I’m using my old desktop from 2010. There’s no such thing as a server that can “do it all”, but any computer from the last 10 years would probably be a fine place to start. The more you do, the more likely you’ll be to hit some sort of performance limit, and by that time you’ll know more about what you actually want.

In short, find old cheap/free hardware and start playing around.

I’m not an expert, but any time I’ve needed to do this, I set up my own router as a client to the parent router, and I set my router (client) as the DMZ in the parent router. Effectively you end up with two routers that are both (more or less) connected directly to the internet, without the two networks messing with each other. It’s also minimally invasive to the parent router (even old stock firmware has always had a DMZ option).

The tricky part then is using the wireless connection as your “WAN port,” rather than a physical one. In which case, as long as you can install OpenWRT on it, you should be fine.