Practical Technology

Welcome to Practical Technology. In this book are my thoughts and studies on uncomplicated yet impactful uses of modern technologies, guiding readers toward economic digital transformation. Do note that a lot of the content in the book are geared toward smaller-scale use, specifically for families and small businesses.

The Practical Technology book is available online at https://book.wnzn.dev and offline through a PDF download from somewhere.

Introduction

It's 2025, AI is seeing widescale adoption, people can't live without their phones, and the government is stealing your data. It's an impressive sight to see what used to be science fiction as a daily necessity. Despite all this however, the common folk have an aversion to working these technologies, and would defer them to specialists and engineers. It makes sense, as even after working in tech for about a decade there's still so much I don't understand and so much I probably don't want to.

Companies know this, and gladly do the "dirty" work for you. This used to be fine, in the age of CDs and license keys. Nowadays, depending on what you do for a living, you'd barely have any work data on your own workstations; the software you use now live on the cloud(s), as companies study your data and every action you do on what we now call Software-as-a-Service or SaaS for short. In other words, you no longer own that piece of software, and your data is at the mercy of its keeper.

Today, almost everything is on the cloud and costs a subscription. A few bucks a month for one license probably wouldn't hurt; but, to keep up with others and save time, our demand for software increases and so do the costs. This point is even heavier for smaller businesses, where workplace speed and efficiency are factors to customer experiences.

As a nerd myself, I enjoy developing and learning more about new technologies, especially those that are open source and self-hosted; as this exposes myself to deploying the solutions to my own problems from the ground up. With what I've learned from my home lab, I'll be sharing the most practical ways to package solutions to everyday problems for the common household and mom-and-pop shop.

Getting Started

Unlike using options provided and served by companies, the parts to the solutions we'll be exploring in the later parts of this book will need to be set up by ourselves. As I expect complete beginners or curious individuals to be using this book, the following are several guides that will serve as both a reference and foundational knowledge for operating the underlying components and tools that are used by the technologies we'll be exploring and other similar open source software.

Expect these guides to be a mile-wide and knee deep introduction to these technologies. By no means are what is written the full capacity of the tools we'll be going over, but will most likely be the parts you will encounter the most in similar scenarios when either creating your own experiments in a homelab or when deploying a tool for your small business.

Hardware

This book is intended for beginners and small-time users so hardware requirements are indeed an important factor of both the learning and implementation steps. There are many options to get you up and running, and to keep the experience as holistic as can be, I will write my opinions on the considerations for cost, deployment speed, and other important considerations in the context of the kind of audience the book is for.

For our purposes, the most important parts of computing hardware we'll need are Network Connection, Storage, RAM and CPU Cores. These components aren't created all the same, denoted by different generations. Obviously, newer and better almost always mean more expensive, and being a few generations behind in hardware won't impact us for our needs so I will be recommending either pre-loved or older parts for this guide. That being said, a good SSD for storage, more RAM and CPU cores could increase performance or allow us to deploy at a wider scale.

Your Personal Computer/Laptop

This is definitely an obvious choice for most of the users here, especially for the complete beginners; you already have it, you're probably using it to read this book and you don't need to spend any more on hardware. Depending on the power your computer is packing though, there may be reasons there could be better options.