For a while I was self hosting whoogle but it's been kind of problematic and gets rate limited very quickly. I have been looking at switching to searxng. For both of these you can find some hosted for the public but their security may not be as robust as a company like duck duck go would be. It's a shame too that duckduckgo does actually collect data and send it to Microsoft as part of their agreement in order to use bing as their backend.
IR blaster. I could control just about anything in my house with my old Galaxy S6. Made it so convenient to have a universal remote built into the phone. Especially when you end up in a hotel or at a friend's house and can't find a remote.
I use Arch too btw