I have a Steam Deck sitting in a drawer and a nagging suspicion it could do something more interesting than run games I never finished. So the plan is to wipe it and put Proxmox on it. A handheld console is, underneath the plastic and the thumbsticks, just a small computer with a decent processor and a battery that doubles as an accidental UPS — which strikes me as too funny a coincidence to leave alone.The idea is to run the household's infrastructure off it. Home Assistant would handle the smart home side, talking to Zigbee devices through an SLZB-06P10 coordinator that sits on the network over PoE instead of dangling off a USB port. Nextcloud covers file storage. Immich takes over from Google Photos, which is the service I'm most eager to stop paying for and most nervous about trusting to my own backups. AdGuard Home blocks ads and trackers at the DNS level for everything on the network, including the devices that won't let you install a blocker. Tailscale gets me in from outside without opening ports to the internet. Uptime Kuma watches the lot and tells me what's broken, which I suspect will keep it fairly busy.The shopping list is a 2TB SSD, a USB 2.5GbE adapter because the Deck's dock networking was never going to keep up, and a separate VLAN so that if I break something at three in the morning, I've only broken the part of the network nobody else uses.