If you’ve got a VPS at your disposal, many of the homepage softwares I’ve tried over the years have some amount of caching to make them quite fast or even operate offline(“Homer” for one required me to deeply purge my cache as it would still appear when my site was offline…despite having replaced it long ago! 😂). Or, if you wanted to roll your own static HTML page, you can absolutely add a Service Worker for your own offline caching.

That’s where I’m at now. I use a custom ServiceWorker static HTML for my homepage and tab page on all my devices. This page is a bouncer, checks if I’m at home or not(or if my local dashboard is offline) and either redirects me to the local homepage which has all my HomeLab services on it, or if it fails just tells me I might be abroad or offline and lists a few public websites.

And yes, this works offline or over a shitty connection. Essentially the service worker quickly provides the cached page from the browser storage, then tries to take the time to check the live version. If it gets one, it updates the cache, if not, enjoy the offline version.

Might be a bit over the top, but I set up a custom homepage startpage, and then grabbed the New Tab Override extension so that it opens on new tabs as well as being my homepage.

So if you can think of any websites that might do what you want like cardd or link tree, or are interested in making your own little webpage and hosting it somewhere free, that might work and as a bonus will be the same across all your browsers and devices. Could even load it up on someone else’s computer if you remember the link.

Now would be a good time to look for a .com you like, or one of the more common TLDs. And register it at Namecheap, Porkbun, or Cloudflare. (Cloudflare is cheapest but all-eggs-in-one-basket is a concern for some.)

Sadly, all the cheap or fun TLDs have a habit of being blocked wholesale, either because the cheap ones are overused by bad actors or because corporate IT just blacklists “abnormal” TLDs (or only whitelists the old ones?) because it’s “easy security”.

Notably, XYZ also does that 1.111B initiative, selling numbered domains for 99¢, further feeding the affordability for bad actors and justifying a flat out sinkhole of the entire TLD.

I got a three character XYZ to use as a personal link shortener. Half the people I used it with said it was blocked at school or work. My longer COM poses no issue.

Plug it into a monitor or TV and keep an eye on the console.

I have an older NUC that will not cooperate with certain brands of NVMe drive under PVE…the issue sounds like yours where it would work for an arbitrary amount of time before crashing the file system, attempting to remount read-only and rendering the system inert and unable to handle changes like plugging a monitor in later, yet it would still be “on”.

Genuine curiosity…what are some proposed solutions we think Valve can implement to solve this crisis?

I ask because the line about VAC being a joke gave me a thought…VAC is such a joke because it is so simple and un-invasive. Do we really want VAC “upgraded” to the level of more effective Anti-cheats, where it cuts down the bots but is now a monitoring kernel service? Just a few weeks ago people were in an uproar about the new Vanguard anti-cheat…do we want that for Valve? Or do we think they can do it a better way?

As an aside, honestly in my mind community servers with a cooperative ban list plugin might be the most effective solution of all…it would still be a game of whack a mole since they can always churn out new accounts, but that’s what gives me pause about other solutions because the only real solutions to slow cheaters start to sound like charging for the game(to make account creation costly) or implementing a bulletproof system of hardware bans, which means invasive solutions that can be certain they aren’t virtual machines or such.

I recommend Dockge over Portainer if you want a web admin panel. https://github.com/louislam/dockge

It’s basically docker compose in a website, and you can just decide one day to turn it off and use the compose files directly. No proprietary databases or other weirdness.

I use Minio https://github.com/minio/minio, though there are others. As someone who never worked with s3 before but wanted to try it and use it with some apps that supported s3 as a storage target, it’s been working fine for me though I’m certainly not using it to its potential. Has web access and all.

Others might be:

https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

As someone with video glasses like those included here, it might be a step forward but it has a lot of room for improvement before it will survive mass market.

For starters, unlike a screen, these glasses must be tailored to your eyesight. If you wear prescription, you will need to fit double glasses or have some ability for the video ones to be prescription. And a huge problem in the market right now is pupil distance, or eye spacing/head size. Mass market wants one-size-fits all, but that means those outside the designed size will have difficulty using them if they can at all.

These are problems currently experienced with the current market like Rokid, XReal, and Viture.

And then of course there’s power, if we keep to 1080p we’ll need more computing power and battery than a Steam Deck screen, which some handhelds might be able to accommodate, maybe more so depending on the weight and shape trades of the new style. But so far it might be disappointing, especially if it has the appearance of a huge screen and still needs to low-res upscale/FSR to meet performance.

Just my thoughts. Still cool, but no confidence in it as a winner yet.