I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.

There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.

I’ve been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.

First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you’ve not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don’t want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.

I also recommend Pihole - it’s an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It’s really improved my experience on all my devices.

Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.

Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.

Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.

I’ve never had toilet paper like that. I buy supermarket own brand stuff here in the UK. Even when I’ve bought cheap stuff I’ve not had that issue.

Switch to a different brand. The paper they’re using is bad of it’s flaking off all the time.

Yeah the urinary bladder doesn’t just stop working and burst. There will have been an underlying cause, but it was not picked up at the time so now all we have is a garbled version of how he died.

People can go into acute urinary retention - where they are unable to pass urine. That can be extremely painful and it can lead to rupture if it’s totally untreated.

But it doesn’t just happen - and choosing not to go to the toilet is not going to cause it. Underlying causes might be prostate enlargement (common), a kidney stone getting trapped in the urethra or bladder neck, or cancers of the prostate, bladder or bowel, amongst others.

In the modern era urinary retention is easily diagnosed with an ultrasound and usually a CT to assess for causes. Urinary catheterisation can be performed either through the urethra or a suprapubic catheter through the skin to bypass the blockage.

None of that was available when he was alive - he’d just have been in extreme agony and there was little anyone would know to do. When he died they might have done an autopsy and found the burst bladder but workinf out what happened would be difficult and depend on the skill and knowledge of the person who did the autopsy.

So it’s extremely unlikely he died because he didn’t go to the toilet during a banquet. Something else happened that precipitated his urinary retention and eventual bladder perforation.

Once the bladder perforated he was a dead man as there was nothing they could do to repair the bladder or clean out the abdomen in that period. He’d have rapidly become more ill and died from infection and organ failure.

Some good advice already in this thread.

Also worth considering QEMU as an alternative to VirtualBox. The Virt-manager tool is decent way of managing machines, and it’s relatively straight forward to create a base machine if you’re duplicating it. Virtualbox is perhaps initially more user friendly for absolute beginners, but once you have any familiarity with virtualization I’d suggest QEMU offers much more.

Also I find integration between the guest and the host linux system is generally more straight forward. Most linux systems already ship with samba and other relevant tools QEMU uses to interact between host and guest. There isn’t a need to faff around with the guest-additions stuff. Plus KVM virtual machines can run with near native performance.

I have one of these, it’s a decent mini PC. It’s decently powerful - I used to play some steam games on it; a bit equivalent to steam deck or a bit more powerful. I used it for streaming on my home TV. I upgraded to a even better one as I liked it so much - and wanted to do more gaming.

It’s a full PC basically. Whether it suits your purposes really depends on what you want to host? It could be overpowered and a bit redundant for a lot of self hosting uses.

I have a Raspberry Pi 5 which is cheaper than this, and am hosting docker with Home Assistant, Sync thing, and fresh RSS running on it at the moment with plenty of spare memory and cpu resource.

This mini PC is considerably more powerful and will have a higher power use at idle. You may struggle to use it at capacity so may be a bit wasteful?

And even the rasp pi 5 is over powered and expensive for a lit of common home server users.

So whether this PC is a good price and choice really depends on what you want to do with it. It’s at the end of the spectrum of being able to comfortably play 4k video. So it’d likely be a decent Jellyfin streaming host if that’s what you want?

PCs are generally based around the X86 chip architecture which is an open standard. PCs are basically modular and lots of manufacturers make components that are interchangeable, creating a huge variety of possible hardware. Hardware suppliers also sell to both big manufacturing companies and individuals. It’s therefore in their interest to distribute their drivers freely even if closed source. If hardware breaks it can be replaced and the PC keeps going, and some components can be kept going for years as a result as people dot have to throw the whole machine out everything something breaks or becomes obsolete.

Mobile devices are closed standards. They use a more limited range of off the shelf components which are deeply integrated into a device, and the hardware suppliers provide their drivers to the device manufacturer or the device manufacturer builds their own drivers and custom version of the os. Hardware can have very long retail lives selling for years and still being functional, so the manufacturers have an incentive to keep drivers available and even update them.

It means mobile devices are more locked down, and the hardware drivers harder to come by. This makes it hard to build custom OS for them and therefore when the device comes to the end of its support from the maker there is limited options to keep it running securely.

It’s effectively a type of planned obscelence that keeps the mobile industry going. Manufacturers stop supporting old devices (because it provides no income) and then consumers have to buy new ones as no one can provide the security patches to keep them secure.

So for mobile there is nothing to force Android or IOS to be kept up to date for old devices. The money is in new devices, and for Android manufacturers are responsible for the mobile device anyway. While for PC it’s in Microsofts interests to keep updating and keeping devices secure via Windows becuase devices have long lifespans and old components can be in the PC ecosystem for decades. Similarly Linux is able to support hardware for a long time because drivers are more freely available and long lifespans to hardware incentivise people to put the effort in to write open drivers when they’re not there.

Microsoft is trying to force an upgrade cycle at the moment with Win 11 though. And the laptop industry ia more like the mobile industry than the desktop pc industry with more propriety devices and locked down hardware.

Its a glitch.

Its important to understand that evolution does not “design” anything with intent or purpose. Its all chance and survival of the fittest does select for traits that confer greater survival.

But plenty of traits are neutral or minimally negative in their survival benefits so also suriviveor develop. And it only affects traits that impact reproducing and passing on traits to the next generation. So many traits may be totally unaffected by evolutionary pressures as they have no relevance to survival of the fittest.

Plus the other species being competed woth over time and the environment generally shape what traits are desirable versus detrimental.

Basically not everything has an evolutionary purpose or function.

So no this is not safe. Once ypu have a system it is easier to crack because if someone has 2 or more of your passwords they can work out there is a system and it’d make it much easier to crack others if they’re determined.

It is unlikely that someone random would specifically target a person and systematically try and crack their passwords. If that were to happen it’d most likely he someone they know - and this does happen sometimes. So while the passwords are definitely flawed it may not be something that anyone takes the time to exploit. But you can never say never.

The best way to manage passwords probably remains a secure password manager and randomly generated series of characters for each site. If its truly random then there are no shortcuts and every single password stands independently. The password manager gets round the issue of memorising them.

You can try a site like justwatch.com to see if the film is available on a streaming sire you could use.

You can also search for rentals online so you can pay for it.

You can look on eBay or similar for cheaper second hand copies.

Or piracy.

It’s a javascript app that uses the react library - which is an open source library originated by Meta. It’s supposed to be easier to maintain and port cross platform apps. However it is not as efficient as a native app and given the Start menu is so frequently used it’s probably not a very efficient way to program it (or parts of it - I think the start menu has reactive native components rather than entirely made in it).

Yeah its wine/proton and linux together. Wine/Proton efficiently handles translating the Windows programmes API calls into POSIX calls while Linux seems to offer a lower OS overhead so there is more system resource available for the games.

I do think Proton gets a little too much credit. Its wine plus faudio, dxvk and other open source projects combined. Proton is great but it is standing on the shoulders of giants.

It is an absolute crock of shit.

There is plenty of research on magnetism and humans and it doesnt need a new title and niche “research” from a frankly failed state like Russia.

We use high Tesla fields routinely every day worldwide in hospitals in Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Safety of this technology has been and is continuously investigated. There has also been extensive investigation of magnetic fields related to power lines and other use cases.

There does remain some uncertainty and controversy around potential effects of long term exposure to low T electromagnetic fields but its long established that short term exposure is safe.

This “research” is more on the realm of autism vaccine science. A lot of money can be made in niche fake sciences both in the industry of research itself and then the crap they can sell to ignorant people as a result.

Russia as a state has been systematically destroyed over the past few decades and most of its institutions have a terrible reputation now. While there are undoubtedly still good scientists in the country, they are working in a gangster state and many of the best minds have long fled for better opportunities abroad.

As per your other thread, incase others are interested. I dont own one but on searching options seem to be limited. It can be jail broken and Kodi installed.

That may be a jumping off point for doing more but I can’t see that anyone has successfully installed linux on it for example.

https://github.com/NSSpiral/Blackb0x

It honestly seems very unpredictable. Anecdotally the worst behaviour seems to have been at the most republican states but not exclusively.

For example the Australian who had a work visa and lived in the US for years flew in to Texas where it was arbitrarily nullified. There are plenty of stories of people crossing southern and northern borders and being detained by ICE. Thats included British, German, Australian and French cirizens that ive seen in the UK press coverage anyway.

As a US citizen you shouldnt have an issue but I’d probably travel through a major hub like JFK in New York to be safer. I wouldn’t re-enter through Republican states like Florida, Texas, nor probably Washington DCs airports. Obviously travel on your US passport.

You should he OK as a US citizen but it does look like there is a breakdown in the rule of law in the US. People imagine that means riots and the police not able to keep control, but in this case its the government and government agencies doing whatever they want and the legal system unable to stop them.

I’m a UK citizen and am not intending to travel to the US - I often cone for a major conference but having seen what happened to the French scientist who had his phone searched and then was denied entry for criticising Trump I won’t be risking it. I’m sure a lot of other UK and Europeans feel the same way.

Sadly the only 100% safe option for you is to not leave the country. Its madness as youre a US citizen but at this point things are still going through the courts and its not clear where this will stop.

Windows intuitively making you jump through 7 steps to not have an online account. The reality sadly is most Windows users will just be pushed by Microsoft to use a Microsoft account to access their own PC.

Only 1% of Windows users who are IT people and enthusiasts will find out how to avoid being forced into internet based accounts.

I work in a hospital and the worst days to work are weekends. The hospital is still full of patients but most staff are off so its busy. And its much harder dealing with sick patients and emergencies on a weekend as a result. Also all your friends and family are off on the weekend so you can’t see them.

Meanwhile if you have days off in the week, it’s great because everything is open (unlike a sunday) and all the kids are in school. So you can go out an enjoy the parks, or venuesnlike gyms or shop freely etc. But most of your friends and family are also at work so that limits things.

I would definitely take 2 days off together, not split them. If I were to have 2 days off and work every weekend I’d either take Mon/Tue off or Thu/Fri. I think its just preference and howbbusy your job is. It could suck being in work on a Friday while everyone else is gearing up for weekend off and discussing their plans, plus also people head off early where they can - I’d probably take Thu/Fri off so I didn’t have to put up with all that.

I personally work 80% of full time and do 3 long days plus oncall. It works out 3x 10 hour days and 2 hours pay per week is for my weekend oncall work every 16 weeks. I end up with 4 days off every week and its glorious. So aiming for a 5 day week may be a mistake. When I was 100% full time I did 4 long days for a bit - it was OK but I had Tue off, worked the other days and had the rhythm of weekend off then on/off/on - it didn’t feel like i was really off for 3 days a week. I’d definitely recommend always stick off days together.

But it may be longer daysnis the real best option if available. Even working 100% hours you have 1 less day commuting on 4 days, and if you work 10 hours so you start early and finish late you can even miss rush hour. I used to stay late or come in early to miss traffic when i was doing normal 9-5 work so switching to 10 hour 8-6 was easy. Depends what your role is and your own stamina for long days is though.

Yeah, I’m not sure the BBC have. I think users have been uploading all that stuff. The BBC makes much of its archive available in the UK via iPlayer but not internationally as it has to use then commercially to help fund the organisation.

Copyright infringement is the biggest threat to the internet archive. Its already been through a case with book publishers and now its facing an existential threat woth a $400m lawsuit from the music industry.

It’s also aesthetically pleasant which is a big plus.

How is it misleading? Plex Pass is a subscription? It would be confusing to many people if it said “Plex pass” instead of “Subscription” as not everyone would necessarily even know what that is. Subscription is very clear.