little project ideas

Just found a need to access my home server… however, it’s powered down… how can I overcome this problem in the future.  To answer my own question…  I should go lookup how to send a wake-on-lan command to the box. As well as know what my IP is…
project ideas:
1.) Current IP notifier – send to my webserver, what my home server IP is. (Dynamic). I could use a dynamic dns service… this maybe interesting to learn how to do this, if I have my own VPS… have the home-server, notify the web-server to update the DNS setting. So I would have something like: homelan.lloydleung.com or whatever.
2.) wake on lan commands.
3.) vpn to the network instead… with a combo on 1. This way, everything is encrypted…