I use foam sound deadening panels from Amazon. I used 3M contact adhesive to stick the panels to plywood panels and hung them on the rack and placed on the top. I also made a panel that sits behind the rack to reduce the sound reflected off the wall. Been running this way for nearly a year.

I use pfsense CE. I am a bit worried that Netgate will be less interested in maintaining the community edition now, but it just works. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles. So I'm staying put until I see a decent reason to switch.

I setup an Nginx container and created my own html page for family. Even added a Google search bar to it. It only has a few links to services that I want my wife to use. Everything else goes on Homer.

Instead of using VIM or some other Linux editor to edit files in the command line, I recommend setting up VS Code or Code Server so you can make changes there. This is what I currently do. I then push the changes to my Gitea instance and then use wget to move them to my homer directory. Allows me to keep track of changes I made that may potentially break homer AND if something happens to corrupt the file, I always have a backed up source. I need to get into the habit of doing this for the countless number of container compose files I've got all over the place.

This is exactly what I did for awhile. I switched to qBittorrent just to try it out and I liked it enough I swapped everything from Transmission to qBittorrent. *arr stack still handles everything though.