Self-Hosted Awesomeness

**Adam** (0:00)
Welcome to episode 10 of BitFlip. This is the show where we take a pragmatic look at infrastructure in the wider world of technology. Sometimes not so pragmatic when I'm leading the show. You guys are welcome ahead of time. My name is Adam.
I'm Jeff.

**Stephen** (0:15)
And I'm Stephen.

**Adam** (0:18)
And today we're doing something a little bit different, guys.
So we took on a little challenge here that we wanted to talk about our version of the S-tier, two S-tier self-hosted apps per host. And the challenge included that we couldn't go with some hometown favorites, such as Home Assistant, and we couldn't go with Plex or Jellyfin.
I don't know if it was restricted to all media, but...

**Stephen** (0:45)
No R stuff.

**Adam** (0:45)
Generally that was kind of...

**Jeff** (0:46)
No R stuff, which basically rules out most of the media stuff.

**Stephen** (0:50)
R.

**Adam** (0:51)
Correct.

**Stephen** (0:52)
R.

**Jeff** (0:52)
And also for those wondering, Alex is not feeling well tonight, which is why he's not joining us. But we have some of his suggestions at the end of the episode, so we'll talk about what he was going to talk about.

**Stephen** (1:02)
Everyone can click off now.

**Adam** (1:06)
Or send him all your love and good vibes so that he gets better quickly. You can do both of those things if you want. 100%. So, Stephen, you're going to lead the way here with your two S-tier picks, correct?

**Stephen** (1:20)
Yes. It's not going to be two, because I'm horribly overworked because I'm self-employed. But before we get going, I just want to bring a attention to our stream sponsor for Snemgoi. If you're looking for alcoholic wipes, you can do no better. They don't actually sponsor us, but everyone that's on Patreon does, and I like you.
So I have in my topics something that I don't know how to say, because it's one of those internet things that I read. And in my mind, it goes one way, and I'm sure someone will say something else. But we're going to go with Hermes or Hermes. The thing is, do you think so? Because if you go to their website, it sure does look like a bunch of French guys built it. But hey, I could be wrong.

**Jeff** (2:05)
Fair, but I say it's the Greek god, and the Greek god here for us English speaking people is Hermes. Okay, so let's go with Hermes.

**Stephen** (2:12)
That's fine. Okay, Hermes. So I've been using this lately, and it has quickly become the best self-hosted thing that I have going for me.
I have been playing with, you know, Claude, and I've been playing with...

**Jeff** (2:26)
What is it first for those at home who may not know what Hermes is?

**Stephen** (2:29)
I'm getting there, I swear to you. And I've been getting to... So I've been using Claude, and I've been using ChatGPT, right? And so the problem that I've had is that which AI model have I been using for what conversations and what projects, right? And so I was thinking like, how do I get to a point where I either have to keep a silly list of what I was talking to who about and such, or is there a way to just bring everything into one? And so Hermes sits on top of these LLMs, and keeps all of your contacts local. You can self-host it or you could put it on a VPS or whatever, but basically it's kind of like a gatekeeper to the conversations that go out to Claude or ChatGPT.
It will remember things pretty much infinitely. I'm assuming that there's like a database limit, but I don't think I'll ever get there. But basically you can build your own personal assistant that remembers all of your conversations without having to worry where you had them. The big thing for me has been that I've linked it to Telegram, and I understand that ChatGPT or Claude, I'm not sure can work kind of in the same way where you have like a mobile connect thing. But I really like it being on Telegram because I just use that app anyway.
Just today, I was out at a client's location and I wanted to take notes about the infrastructure that I saw and what I need to do here to implement a phone system and whatnot. And I was basically just taking notes and talking directly to Hermes.
I would put in a bunch of information and I would say we're doing a phone quote. What are some of the other things I may not have touched on? And because I've created a document that I shared earlier in the morning about what the main things that I go over for each one of these quotes, it was able to say, hey, don't forget to ask the following things or look for the following things. So normally, I really only have boring self-hosted apps like Home Assistant and whatnot, but like this one is pretty recent and has made a bigger impact in my daily life than I ever thought that it would.