Or a goddamn mech suit from Fallout

That’s pretty much what I just recommended aha, 12th gen or higher, or a GPU. Doesn’t have to be a large one either - my GTX 970 could handle Emby transcoding as well as blaze through speech recognition for a local voice assistant

IIRC the free version of Emby doesn’t throttle in any way, you can still have up to 10 concurrent active devices and the only thing you miss out on really is OpenSubtitles. But I’ve recently upped my game with Sonarr and it’s a dream. One day I’ll put my movies into Radarr.

You need any kind of mobo/CPU combo, I’ve heard 12th Gen Intel onwards are as capable of transcoding on the fly as an older GPU so you wouldn’t need both, but if you go older I recommend a GPU as well, just because it gives more flexibility with being able to use hardcoded subtitles without locking up the CPU, and streaming a lower bitrate version of the video if your internet is shit, instead of - again - locking up

For easy certificate management I use NginX Proxy Manager, for media I use Emby and for a domain I use Cloudflare but you can absolutely serve your server with DuckDNS or another DDNS service for free.

I paid about £200 to build my server, with a £30 CPU (Intel i6 3100), free motherboard, £50 PSU and £110 SFF case (rough costs), and holy fuck it’s so much cheaper than any subscription. Electricity is about £3-£5 a year and other costs are optional. I also sourced a GTX 970 for £90 that was more than up to the task of transcoding, but again, if you get a 12th gen you won’t need it.

I just remembered the HDD I started with was a spare (10TB Seagate Barracuda Pro, but I shucked (like shucking for pearls) an external HDD to get it, as I heard that you can get lucky and get a good drive for cheaper than it would cost to buy it. Said eHDD was about £250.

I found one called conduwuit and immediately used that to setup lol

Even better that only the first line was visible until I scrolled

I use DuckDuckGo’s email proxy service, you can sign up for one custom email and generate any amount of temporary-use addresses for the ones you don’t trust to stop spamming when you ask them to. The purpose of their system is to be the address you sign up with, and they do their best to strip trackers and garbage, and forward it onto an email of your choice. You can change the forwarding email at any point, so it can be incredibly useful for a transitioning period.

I use Mailcow dockerized for a home domain, it is actually a very acceptable price for me being able to:

• Control my own DNS rules (it was a nightmare trying to use DuckDNS for an mailserver because of the rules you need to set)
• Run through a reliable service because DuckDNS occasionally went down, making my domain unreachable and breaking external access of any server I run
• Have a personalised public home for myself, if I ever want to make blogs or provide public services or something

I used a very lovely and helpful YouTuber’s guide for it, Opentaq (here)

Same for me. Although I accepted the apparent potential of it when I was asked to provide all my contact information, I’m happy to not find any of my information public.

Absofuckinglutely, I bought ten years of a domain for £50GBP/~$67USD, unique enough that the price bottomed out and I used a country sub (.uk) which is basically half the price of a .com/.org

Plenty of apps on Android are great replacements for centralised services we’ve gotten used to, and can be installed from another source like fdroid, like clients for Telegram, Matrix, Lemmy, Mastodon, Mattermost etc. As they weren’t installed via Google Play, they can’t use Google’s notification service and instead use local alternatives.

That’s shocking. Interestingly, it only autogenerated that spiel for Gemma. Gemini (2.0 Flash for Image) generated perfectly fine

This has to be fake…

The trick of retrofitting any battery powered device into a wired one is to remove the battery. No matter what, Li-ion batteries cannot sustain permanent power. Expensive adapters and new Androids can regulate power well, as can automations, but the best worry-free option is battery removal.

Edit: I’ve just remembered Fairphone, they’re bossing the mobile repair ability front and have removable batteries like pre-2012. Could get one of those

1 - I don’t believe you can use Minecraft without Microsoft any more - Mojang accounts were discontinued in favour of Microsoft accounts, and unmigrated accounts were deleted in 2023.

2 - Many updates have happened, but the launcher still lets you download and play every single version released, from major (x.), minor (.xx), to snapshots and one day specials, to the very first working version. Note: the first version is also available to play online for free. The last non-Microsoft update was 1.7.2 I believe

Thanks for saving us a click!

That’s China’s regulation at this point, it’s how their governing body rules the country. Nothing we can do. Meta is harmful to society but this is above board.

I got one recently by B&H Photo Video, may have got lucky but the drive was brand new and untampered, and was in plastic cushioning, in a fitted box, inside 6" of airbags, inside another box. Delivered by DHL Express.

Sometimes DuckDNS goes down partially, their servers breaking for about a week is why I purchased a domain and now host via Cloudflare.

Edit: One of my DuckDNS domains works internally, so at least it’s not a systemwide issue. Perhaps one of their relays…

Amazing scavenge! I’ve got a server for my partner and I, vanilla+. One mod we have pauses the entire server if nobody is online, it works fantastically and only RAM is held, minimal CPU usage. Vanilla server runs perfectly fine for my case.

Apple’s datacenters have been untrustworthy for a long time, at this point any breaches or data sales of user data is as much the user’s fault. But yeah, from what I’ve seen, corporations never make moves to primarily benefit the consumer, society, state law or otherwise. Only self profit. Sometimes aligning with demand improves profit.

I use Matrix and this is possible via several encryption keys. They just probably cba. How Matrix E2EE works