Same. Firefox Mobile had been a laggy mess when I used it a few years ago, but a combination of some really aggressive advertising and the announcement of manifest v3 caused me to give it another shot about a year ago. It’s a dramatic improvement in phone browsing.

Lots of good advice here. I’ve got a bunch of older WD Reds still in service (from before the SMR BS). I’ve also had good luck shucking drives from external enclosures as well as decommissioned enterprise drives. If you go that route, depending on your enclosure or power supply in these scenarios you may run into issues with a live 3.3V SATA power pin causing drives to reboot. I’ve never had this issue on mine but it can be fixed with a little kapton tape or a modified SATA adapter. It’s definitely cheaper to shuck or get used enterprise for capacity! I’m running at least a dozen shucked drives right now and they’ve been great for my needs.

Also, if you start reaching the point of going beyond the ports available on your motherboard, do yourself a favor and get a quality HBA card flashed in IT mode to connect your drives. The cheapo 4 port cards I originally tried would have random dropouts in Unraid from time to time. Once I got a good HBA it’s been smooth sailing. It needs to be in IT mode to prevent hardware raid from kicking in so that Unraid can see the individual identifiers of the disks. You can flash it yourself or use an eBay seller like ThArtOfServer who will preflash them to IT mode.

Finally, be aware that expanding your array is a slippery slope. You start with 3 or 4 drives and next thing you know you have a rack and 15+ drive array.

It seems a lot of the new ones have a cellular modem. On the surface it’s to let you remotely access the car or do a remote start. Even if you don’t pay to subscribe and use it for your purposes they can utilize it to transfer out the data.

Ditto. Mine was stolen out of my car 9 years ago and I still miss it.

I don’t think I realized that was a limitation because I’ve been using the Vaultwarden fork. https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

Same, though I’ve got a couple Decepticons sprinkled in. They all connect to the Allspark ssid.

I’ve been using the Killswitch since the non-magnetic version came out. It makes the whole system a little larger, but has a nice grip for holding and protects it well in my bag. It also takes up a lot less space in my bag than the stock case did. I haven’t had any issues plugging in USB-C cables into what ends up being a recessed port with the case on.

Seconding the Shield, for all of the above plus Nvidia’s update commitment to it. IIRC the 2015 Shield is the longest continually updated Android device ever. I have a 2015, 2017, and a 2019 at my house, and a couple of 2017s at my parents’ place. I upgraded the older ones to the toblerone remote last year. All are still working great, and continuing to receive regular updates.

Well said. I had hardware that was killed by “upgrades” or manufacturers discontinuing them from their cloud features. I now instal locally controllable hardware as much as possible and it has led to a much more stable and long term reliable smart home. Everything ties back into Home Assistant. The only remaining things I have with a cloud-reliant integration are the robovac our Nest Protect Smoke Alarms, and smart vents. The only reason they’re cloud controlled is there wasn’t a viable option that met feature and price point requirements. Everything else, (65+devices) is local Wi-Fi/Homekit ZigBee or Z-Wave

Great advice from everyone here. For the transcoding side of things you want an 8th gen or newer Intel chip to handle quicksync and have a good level of quality. I’ve been using a 10th gen i5 for a couple of years now and it’s been great. Regularly handles multiple transcodes and has enough cores to do all the other server stuff without an issue. You need Plex Pass to do the hardware transcodes if you don’t already have it or can look at switching to Jellyfin.

As mentioned elsewhere, using an HBA is great when you start getting to large numbers of drives. I haven’t seen random drops the way I’ve seen occasionally on the cheap SATA PCI cards. If you get one that’s flashed in “IT mode” the drives appear normally to your OS and you can then build software raid however you want. If you don’t want to flash it yourself, I’ve had good luck with stuff from The Art of Server

I know some people like to use old “real” server hardware for reliability or ECC memory but I’ve personally had good luck with quality consumer hardware and keeping everything running on a UPS. I’ve learned a lot from serverbuilds.net about compatibility works between some of the consumer gear, and making sense of some of the used enterprise gear that’s useful for this hobby. They also have good info on trying to do “budget” build outs.

Most of the drives in my rack have been running for years and were shucked from external drives to save money. I think the key to success here has been keeping them cool and under consistent UPS power. Some of mine are in a disk shelf, and some are in the Rosewill case with the 12 hot swap bays. Drives are sitting at 24-28 degrees Celsius.

Moving to the rack is a slippery slope… You start with one rack mounted server, and soon you’re adding a disk shelf and setting up 10 gigabit networking between devices. Give yourself more drive bays than you need now if you can so you have expansion space and not have to completely rearrange the rack 3 years later.

Also if your budget can swing it, it’s nice keeping other older hardware around for testing. I leave my “critical” stuff running on one server now so that a reboot when tinkering doesn’t take down all the stuff running the house. That one only gets rebooted or has major changes made when it’s not in use (and wife isn’t watching Plex). The stuff that doesn’t quite need to be 24/7 gets tested on the other server that is safe to reboot.

There’s a bit more to it than just the Central Perk part. They’ve recreated the apartments and a few other major scenes and have a lot of props from the show. We had just finished a rewatch of the show and found it pretty enjoyable on a rainy day in the city. I think we spent about an hour in there and came out with some cool staged scene pictures. I still thought it was overpriced, but didn’t feel ripped off.

I think about the Ameristan stuff and people being “facebooked” all the time since reading that book. In the time since I read it I feel like we just keep getting closer and closer to that reality.

I’ve been using one for several years now with one of the documented switches that add multiple ports. https://docs.pikvm.org/ezcoo/#connections First in a DIY and then with the v3 hat Kickstarter I guess total I’m at $270 between the Kickstarter HAT and ezcoo switch plus the cost of a Pi (which I already had) I can reach 4 machines over my Tailnet and jump between them reliably. I can also control power on my primary server. (others are on a network managed PDU and can be forcibly reset that way if needed)

I had an old console from a job but it was so old that it required an ancient version of Java to access through the web interface. I’m sure there may be better options, but for my homelab setup the pikvm has worked well at a price that fit in my budget.

I’ve been using obsidian-livesync for a couple months now. Works great cross-platform since it runs directly out of my Vault and doesn’t cost $8/mo. Mine is running on fly.io right now but I may eventually move it to my own machine. https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync/

I can’t help feeling like Obsidian really missed the mark on their pricing here for hobbyist & home users. I can’t justify paying substantially more than something like iCloud or Google Drive storage when I’m using Obsidian to just sync some text and a few documentation images. Something like $1-2/mo would have been an instant buy for me, but at $8 it was worth my time to investigate other ways of syncing.

Same here. The NR200 has hosted my gaming rig for over a year now with a 5800x3D and a 3090. Airflow is reversed to pull air in the back and bottom and blow it out the top, with some thin noctua fans on the bottom intake to get a little extra airflow to the GPU. It’s a super capable and portable build. My brother did a near identical build with a 3070.

Also it fits in this nice sewing machine bag. I’ve brought it to friends houses to introduce them to VR and it perfectly holds an NR200, some power cables, a controller and my keyboard. https://a.co/d/anJj9sM

My aftermarket Openpilot setup does this with a camera pointed at the driver. I’m good about paying attention but apparently if it alerts too many times that you’re distracted it will disable itself until you restart the car.

Perfect analogy. I completely shill for both Bitwarden and Brother printers because they legit are just that good. When I find products like that they’re what I push to my family and friends because they “just work.”

It’s pretty much always been this way with the HP ones. Years ago when wireless printers were not the standard, we used to connect a printer to the family Windows PC and then share it on the network. We got a new one set it up, and the printer refused to be shared. Turns out HP had explicitly blocked network sharing in their Windows software driver for that printer. Never purchased another one since. Brother isn’t perfect, but I have multiple 8+ year old Brother laser printers still in service right now and they “Just Work.”

A bunch of companies seem to be implementing that version (not being able to paste the 6 digits). It’s just asinine and makes me think less of any product / company using that style.

I’ve had the exact opposite experience historically. Of 5 Seagate drives I’ve purchased over the last decade or so, only 1 of them is still working. Meanwhile 25+ WD hard drives are still in production over the same time with only 1 that started throwing smart errors a couple years back.