M4 Pro Mac Mini with Spigen Classic C1 case.
I recently got a Mac Mini (M4 Pro, 512GB SSD, 24GB unified memory) to use as my home server. For me, that means two things: Immich and Clawdbot OpenClaw.
In recent years I've felt the need to own all of my data and rely less on things attached to my Google accounts. My photo storage has been an ongoing saga. I've gone through every stage of grief: I've had multiple NAS setups with cloud backups, cloud-backed up local SSDs, and everything in between. Google Photos never had all of my photos as I didn't upload everything from my camera to it, but it definitely had years of mobile photos.
Some of my previous posts on the topic:
I wanted to test the waters by trying out Immich, a popular self-hosted media management solution... it's basically exactly like Google Photos. And that's exactly what I was looking for. I've been running it for a while now and it's been perfect. I plan to write more about the setup in a formal blog post later.
But it was the flurry of news around OpenClaw that had me pull the trigger and purchase the Mac Mini. It's a simple way to run your own remarkably powerful agent that can do just about anything you text it, if you let it. I'm still dabbling with it, so don't have much to share about how I use it right now as I figure out what I want it to do for me. I've dabbled with daily digest texts that fetch everything from the gas level in my car to remind me to fill up, to summarizing topics of interest from my recent web bookmarks to Hacker News and Twitter news.
But that's the most boring thing it can do. It can build anything you need and run it for you.
And as you might have noticed, I got the Spigen Classic C1 case to match my iMac G3. I initially thought I'd like the Mac Pro-inspired Ulanzi case but the build quality didn't feel great so I returned it.
M4 Pro Mac Mini on top of a 1st and 2nd gen Mac Mini
