TonttuNet

a small digital homestead in a Finnish forest

TonttuNet is a self-hosted ecosystem of art, tools, and experiments — built and run by one person, from one place. A network of small helpers, each with its own task, all rooted in the same soil.

It is not a company, not a product, not a service. It runs on open-source software, owns its own data, takes no subscriptions, and answers to no algorithm. The purpose is creative — the technology is only the soil where the art grows.

Four quiet principles

🌱 Local first. What can be done at home is done at home. No cloud unless there is a reason.

🔓 Open source. Every tool here is something anyone could use — Linux, Ollama, Grav, Mandelbulber2, Kiwix, and others — chosen for what they do, not for who owns them.

♻️ Second-hand only. Every piece of hardware is bought used: laptops, GPUs, audio gear, instruments. Recycled, repaired, given new life. Open source for software, second-hand for hardware — two halves of the same principle. No new gear bought, no proprietary software run.

🌍 Earth-aware. Technology should listen more than it shouts. Many of the projects here take their inputs from the planet itself — solar weather, the Schumann resonance, the rhythm of light and dark — and give them back as art.

The named projects

Each project on TonttuNet has its own page. TonttuSETI turns space weather into fractal video. TonttuStudio is a folk recording studio that fits inside a laptop. TonttuLibrary is an offline reading and listening archive. Alongside them lives a local LLM — a private, offline AI helper. Each one a small step toward a slower, more rooted way of computing.