I had an old Lenovo laptop and a spare 40 inch TV, so I repurposed them into a small home server and kitchen dashboard.

The laptop runs Ubuntu Server. The TV sits near the kitchen and displays a local dashboard through a Mi Box running TV Bro.

Current setup:

Ubuntu Server

Docker

AdGuard Home for DNS, DHCP, and network wide ad blocking

Tailscale for remote access

Samba file share backed by a 6TB external SSD

Custom Python dashboard

Google Calendar integration

Five day weather

Two week family calendar

Upcoming events

Local DFW events

Vegetarian recipe page

QR codes for opening events and recipes on a phone

Rotating display between dashboard, events, and recipes

I originally tried MagicMirror, but moved to a simple custom app because I wanted tighter control over the layout. The dashboard is just plain HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a Python backend.

The best part is that it is actually useful. It is not just sitting in a rack doing nothing. The family sees it every day in the kitchen.

Claude helped me build and troubleshoot a lot of it, especially the Python server, layout fixes, AdGuard setup, and moving away from MagicMirror. Biggest lesson was to keep the setup simple and avoid clever configs.

Still a work in progress, but I am pretty happy with how much use I got out of old hardware.