I could hear the hard drive spin up if somebody accessed the machine, and a little chug-chug-chug while Festival (the open source text-to-speech engine I’d installed) generated the voice. Like footsteps approaching before the door opens.

From I wish my web server were in the corner of my room. I enjoyed the Hacker News discussion on this, lots of early 2000 throwbacks about hosting some stupid script on a laptop plugged into a university network, but also some good options if you wanted to serve something from home in the year 2022.

Do you? Probably not, but I do miss thinking of a server as a thing that I can physically know and not some amorphous cloud entity.