I have to agree with this. It’s your mom. If she isn’t hurting you, or asking you to watch them, and you have the space and bandwidth, just do it.

THIS.

Home Assistant is the brain of the operation. Your smart phone is just an arm or hand in the operation. It’s the same for any of the services you perceive to be just using your smart phone. They actually call out to servers owned by the various companies, and then return requested operations to your devices at home. So with Home Assistant you have the opportunity to use devices and a server that all remain in your own network. Your data and information aren’t being sent to a third party. This, of course, depends on the devices you buy.

But that’s the power behind Home Assistant.

This. 100%

I’d like to highly recommend QOwnNotes with. File system sync like Nextcloud. Superb.

I’m kind of loving Zabbix, but not sure if it’s the right solution for your needs. I’d say it would definitely work, but does take a bit of setup initially. This article is interesting, and seems to have a lot of what you want. Not sure if you want to do all of this. https://opensource.com/article/23/3/build-raspberry-pi-dashboard-appsmith

iOS / iPad game called “Flight Pilot”. Dumb, not even a simulator, just get off the ground and hit hot air baloons for points kind of game. It’s just a mindless time for me to relax a bit. You can run “missions” if you want, but you don’t have to, and if you’re patient, you can level up without making any purchases using real money. It’s really great.

If you want to self host check out Wireguard options like Netmaker, Headscale, Netbird, etc. these all allow you the ability to setup a machine as an exit node into a LAN, and allow LAN to LAN communication. If you are just looking for a VPN and don’t have to self host, then Tailscale might be a good starting point. Figure out the setup you like, then move to a self hosted headscale setup later using that as a model.

I run OpenSprinkler Pi on my raspberry Pi 3 and HomeAssistant on my Pi 4. Works incredibly well for both.