For some time now I've had a setup with OpenVPN that provided connectivity back to my house and allowed me to optionally send my internet traffic through the VPN tunnel and my house. Wireguard is an interesting project that provides a simplified peer-to-peer VPN tunnel capability that I've been interested in trying out. Pi-Hole is a project that provides "network wide ad-blocking" by providing a caching DNS server and blocklists.
I've been listening to a few Linux podcasts lately and heard some rave reviews of Nextcloud. Dropbox has recently introduced some new charges for their services and this prompted me to take a look at my options to see if I want to continue using Dropbox and start paying for advanced services (more storage, more devices, etc) or do something different. Nextcloud presents an alternative with a lot of the key features and benefits of Dropbox and similar services with the added benefit that I own the service myself.