You can buy a used office computer from businesses that are upgrading (downgrading) to win11 for less than 50 bucks. They tend to be relatively low power, relatively quiet, lots of PCI slots and USB ports so there are many upgrade options, yet low entry price for a decent computer. If you plan on using as a jellyfin server: either mind the chip now for transcoding capabilities (there’s lists out there) or know that if you want that, you’ll have to put in a GPU at some point if the onboard can’t transcode well.

I have a mix of external and internal SSD’s. Some are running way not as fast as they theoretically could, but it all works well enough for me. You can start with what you have, storage is still expensive.

Well in places like UK, people are installing AC instead of trying many other, passive cooling options first. They don’t plant a single shrub next to their building but do put in highly inefficient portable AC units meanwhile asphalting/concreting there driveways… That’s exactly what got me on my high horse. AC can be needed, but it’s definitely not the first way to go in a northern-ish European place if the building doesn’t have outside shutters, very non green streets around etc. It’s not the miracle solution, AC adds to climate change, other ways of dealing with heat do not.

Exactly this, it’s a last resort measure. More important is that every passive cooling option needs to be tried: outside shutters, more big green around the buildins, minimize concrete and asphalt around buildings, closing and airing at best times, etc. Some people just skip all that and go airco, especially in the USA. They are actively adding more BS to the shitstorm that is climate change.

Why would they need more airco when many houses and apartments still don’t even have proper shutters for windows and many people still don’t know you should keep your windows closed during peak heat hours, many roofs still barely insulated and they turned all their yards and driveways into concrete and asphalt hellscapes. A nice adult tree in your yard does more than an airco, fight me.

Public torrents suck for music these days. Little available and a lot that is there is FLAC only, no mp3-320

What’s the name of the app you tried?

the coordinates aren’t there i think, but there are github projects out there that “detect” the panels and suggest split based on that. For most of the panels of most of the comics, that would be more than enough to do a clean split. I just can’t find a real relatively easily deployable service that incorporates it.

https://maxhalford.github.io/blog/comic-book-panel-segmentation/

The main mess is genres. That is non existent in the folder structure (I do have it: artist > albums), and still very hard with Picard etc. But genres is very convenient for Autoplay, auto generate shuffle playlists

A good movie in 720p will always be a good movie. A crappy movie with shitty story and shitty acting will still suck in 4K or 8K or 4D or whatever will come. Like good vinyl LPs from 60s-70s never really went bad if they were well taken care of…

Best podcast app I’ve ever used.

I would only switch to another app if that could remove the ads from downloaded podcasts :')

Fujitsu Esprimo here… 50 €, before the extra RAM, SSDs, … Relatively low power usage, lots of SATA, PCI slots, lots of USB ports… Works very well for all except transcoding. Could put a GPU but it would really make power consumption go up

Why not a second hand small “business” or office pc? There are so many on the market now because businesses are replacing because of windows 11, while the hardware runs perfectly fine with Linux for probably many years to come. Buying one of those is cheap and reduces e-waste.

You should absolutely avoid using the same folder for downloads and media library. If you want such a setup, you should use hardlinks.

It’s a niche where AI helps because there’s just decades of so many forums and videos full of how to do stuff in excel and with AI you get the right answer quicker with less noise around it. I use ai assistance for excel formulas all the time, works pretty good for that.

Yeah it’s a bit nuts that in a “democracy” 1 nutcase has all the buttons and can seemingly decide almost anything by “executive order” outside of parliamentary control, not even fake voting on policy in parliament.

Shit might hit the fan harder and faster in USA, but don’t be fooled: Canada and every other country in the world will be gravely affected: less trade, prices inflate, some goods become hard to find at all at any price, etc. US $ after all is the big reserve currency and all international trade was de facto protected by US military hegemony. Probably countries like North Korea or Iran will see least influence from all this… It’s insane to watch this happening. Their main goal really just seems to be to create chaos. And from chaos… rises whatever authoritarian state they want to create after declaring some state of emergency shit and after the superwealthy gobbled up all the failing companies at bargain prices. It’s like they’re organising a reenactment of the “shock therapy” that crashed the Russian economy on a speedrun after the soviet union fell apart.

SSD’s as far as I know mainly degrade from writing, not so much from reading or idling. If you fill an SSD, delete all files, write again, delete, etc, that is when they can wear out fast. If you’re just stacking on top slowly filling it and occassionally reading from it, it should theoretically last for many years. I don’t buy brands i’ve never heard about before and I read many customer reviews. Slightly higher price for way better reviews wins. Reviews like “it’s too slow” are not very relevant to me. Reviews like “I used it twice, got very hot and smelled like fire, broke, lost all my data”: those are the important ones. I never buy latest generation tech, I buy older generations. They’re cheaper, but more importantly they have more review information available about what you can expect from it slightly longer term.

I avoid buying anything from aliexpress, amazon, … out of principle, don’t want to support those foreign (Europe) giants. Any other webshop might get my order if they seem okay to me.

No we weren’t! - Belgium.

That ease of outside LAN access poses a big risk tho. Plex can and eventually probably will share, be forced to share, get hacked etc Those cloud accounts imply the possibility of very detailed reports about who’s streaming what, when, where, from which source…

It’s quite easy without docker to get lots of it running with a dietpi install. Runs on rpi and alike, but also on any “normal” old low end pc. Just select jellyfin, arrs, … It handles it all for you, no need to learn Docker (I know people will argue about the advantages of docker, which are valid points, but ease of installation is more important to many people). The only difficulty remains the streaming outside your own LAN (because it’s risky). VPN, tailscale, … there’s options but it always keeps on feeling risky to open up outside LAN. Local setup for jellyfin can be really really easy tho, if it’s just for yourself and you mostly watch at home anyway… And in some jellyfin compatible app like Finamp and Streamyfin you can just download a few music albums, episodes or movies to your phone before you travel…