raspberry pi and an HDD with family (remote)

Is this the way to go for off-site backups w/ family? In terms of low power draw, uptime, etc.

It just can’t. This candle is burning fast at both ends.

I hope you’re right b/c right now feels like the classic “market can stay irrational longer than we can stay liquid” type situation.

you can use one of a million Jitsi instances (Element has a publicly available one)

Is there a list of public Jitsi instances? I know about https://meet.jit.si/, but otherwise I’m stumped. Searching DDG for jitsi instances returns a bunch of results about self hosting.

10 commodity SSDs through a powered USB hub forming a poor man’s NAS with snapraid + mergerfs

How did you end up with this setup? Did you just already have a bunch of SSDs from over the years? That’d be cool af if you posted a photo of it.

For the NAS, what do you use for storage? Do you have an external drive hooked up via USB or something else?

Thanks for clarifying. If I understand correctly, you’re saying that in terms of energy usage, a thin client + external docking station for HDDs might have a smaller footprint than an ITX build, but at the expense of future upgradeability. On the other hand, an ITX build would likely draw more power than the thin client + external HDDs, but enables me to upgrade individual components down the road. Did I get that right?

I would only consider those thinclients if AI is something you are planning to run.

Do you mean b/c AI would require a beefy host for the thin client to connect to?

Thanks for clarifying that. One last question if you don’t mind – some listings (such as this one) say “no OS,” and “You must reload the unit to gain original factory functionality.” Are they just talking about installing my own OS or does “reloading” mean something else in the context of these thin clients that I’m not aware of?

Gotcha, although I’m in the US, so would something like this DELL WYSE 5070 THIN CLIENT Intel Celeron J4105 1.50GHZ 8GB RAM 64GB SSD No OS ($34 w/ free shipping) be comparable?

Gotcha, the one you linked is sold out, but what about this one?

it being ARM based will cause various headaches when learning compared to something x86

Hmm, this is just enough to give me pause. Thanks for the heads up. I’ll have to think on this some more and maybe do a little more research.

What made you want to switch from docker to podman?

Beelink ME Mini

Would something like this be suitable as a NAS + Jellyfin + Home Assistant box?

That’s pretty slick.

What are the HDDs plugged into? Would you mind posting some photos of the back?

try to sneakily make me register passcodes

Can you expand on this? I’m not sure what this means. Is it like instead of a full fledged password, just a four digit PIN or something? Thanks.

How does one find such retired laptops? As an individual hobbyist in the US, would I just monitor eBay, Craigslist, or Facebook?

I do this as well—I’m currently automating a repetitive workflow for work using python. What’s the latest project you’ve generated boilerplate code for?

So you’ll copy and paste the URL for an eBay listing and it’ll go out and fetch the price and quantity and calculate unit price?

That all sounds pretty neat. Do you do these things locally or is there a cloud service for that?

Care to expand on sound manipulation? Are you talking about for removing background noise from recordings or something else?