Shurimal

How does one find out what chips are in what USB sticks? Manufacturers don’t make this information available. At best you just find read and write speeds, usually just the max possible read speed and nothing else.

Looks pretty and is stable, but two fatal flaws:

1. Browsing by genres displays individual pieces/songs, not albums. Browsing albums or artists doesn’t allow any filtering by genres, years or any other metadata. Haven’t found a way to change that behaviour and as someone who listens to albums, not songs, and has thousands of albums this is a complete dealbreaker for me.

2. No support for UPnP/DLNA to stream from my phone to my stereo (or, for that matter, any modern AV receiver/streamer/network stereo receiver all which support UPnP/DLNA).

Set up Tailscale as exit node to your local network.

Make sure that your network is not standard 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x IP address range, but something like 192.168.101.x so you don’t have IP conflicts when accessing from a friend’s house or workplace wifi.

Set up Nginx to redirect your home server IP (eg. 192.168.101.5) to the correct port for your dashboard like Heimdall or Dashy.

That’s it. Works like a charm for me if set up this way.

Addendum: if you have trouble on Android, disable MagicDNS.

I agree, a 6,6" screen isn’t that big, but it sure is and feels bigger than the 5" screen of my old phone. As I said, just big enough to not feel like trying to use apps through a keyhole.

With a 6,6" phone I don’t need a tablet for everyday carry because the screen is just big enough. Back in the day of 5" screens I always had a need for a tablet. Nevertheless, tablets are great for certain professional tasks.

Like taking inventories, putting together orders and other warehouse tasks where I need to work with spreadsheets on the go but a laptop is just too unwieldy.

Tablets are also absolutely great for live mixing with digital boards—you can walk around in the audience and adjust the sound on the spot. Same for adjusting the system settings while doing installations. And for small gigs, the mixing board can be tucked away in a stage corner and not clutter the floor.

Pilots use tablets as digital kneeboards for checklists and other necessities.

Tablets also make great POS devices and there are many specialised models for just that task.

Tablets are simply fantastic for wallmounted or desktop control panels for smarthomes. You can even use the front camera for motion detection so the screen comes automagically on when you approach it. I use WallPanel, but Fully Kiosk Browser is also very popular.

Honestly, the title confused me slightly—wasn’t sure if it was about a workstation PC, GPU, ARM based microserver, gaming laptop or what. 24 GB of RAM and 240 W charging seem completely ridiculous for a phone.

I’ve had good luck of finding very good concert recordings—many are recordings from the mixing desk tape outs as 24/94 .FLAC-s with excellent sound quality—from Internet Archive. The search system is tedious, though, and you probably won’t find “big acts” there. But if your tastes include modern jazz, folk and indie rock, it can be a treasure trove.

Having faced the same situation, here’s my 2 cents:

• OMV is the best solution for reusing/upcycling old consumer grade PC hardware. Your storage pool is easily expandable using MergerFS, you don’t need 16+ GB of RAM, and you certainly don’t need server-grade hardware. But you won’t have the bells and whistles the ZFS offers (yes, there is ZFS plugin, but at this point, why not just use TrueNAS?).
• TrueNAS if you intend to build a “serious” storage server with many GB-s of ECC RAM, multi-Gbit networking and all that jazz. And if you have the budget to buy 5 or 6 large HDD-s at once to start out your storage pool with a single vdev using RAIDz1 or RAIDz2 (or buy 2 HDDs for a single mirrored vdev with a whopping 50% of all your current and future storage going to redundancy). As I understand it, ZFS expandability is in the works, but not production-ready yet—which makes ZFS less suitable for ad hoc grow-it-as-you-go storage solution.

In the end, OMV won it out for me, the 10TB motley crew of various HDD-s has served me well and I can expand cheaply when my needs grow.

Maybe if it’s just a jolly roger with “*ARRR” under it. Those in the know will understand, for others it’s just a silly pop culture reference. And has plausible deniability (“What? I just really like Pirates of the Caribbean and Sea of Thieves!”).

Those small AMD boxes are great. I set up 3 MSI ones as Kodi/LibreELEC media boxes and they work very well, stay cool and quiet while having plenty of horsepower for 4k.

I haven’t really used smart playlists, so I cannot comment on that

And another vote for Navidrome. I use it vith DSub frontend (the only one I’ve found that supports DLNA, for playing back on any DLNA renderer device) and Tailscale for remote access.

IP-ratings might suffer, but I’d wager that a global reduction in e-waste is more important.

Nokia made water resistant phones that had replaceable batteries 20 years ago. I owned two, both survived several water immersions.

Yes, Tailscale starts up with Windows and doesn’t require any interaction.

One caveat, DLNA/casting/KDE Connect don’t work when Tailscale is active. Seems to be a limitation with multicasting not playing well with VPN-s in general.

Capitalists are behind the most prelavent economic school (neoliberalism) today—just look at the history of the “Chicago school”. I doubt the capitalists themselves believe that BS, but it’s profitable for them to make the rest of the world to believe it.

I highly recommend evonomics.com, some rally good essays on there about the cult-like economic beliefs of today. Written by economists who’ve seen through the BS.

In a capitalist POV, redundancy is just unneeded cost for things that are “not needed”.

In an engineering POV redundancy is insurance to make sure things work as needed even when part of the system fails.

For example, Apollo flight computers were triple redundant, and the outputs from all three were compared before being fed into engines. If two outputs would be 0.98, but one was 0.12, it’s most likely that the third one is wrong and should be discarded. This makes it very likely that correct control intput is given to the engines all times and the whole thing would not crash and burn because of a random bit flip.

LG OLED TV-s are where it’s at. Superb picture quality and prices have come down considerably.

As for sound, Denon 3600/3700/3800 AVR–everything else is either overpriced or crap (or both). The 3000 series has good power amp section and Audyssey MultEQ XT32 which actually does something below 100 Hz where room correction is most needed (see https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/difference-between-audyssey-multeq-vs-multeq-xt-vs-multeq-xt32.14786/#post-460377). For speakers I quite like ELAC Debut Reference speakers and SUB3030 subwoofer–price-performance ratio is really good.

That’s for the normal consumer level stuff. Of course, if you have the time and will, you can do what I have done and go down the rabbit hole of DIY speakers and subs to end up with something that blows the socks off of actual THX cinemas–highly recommended ;)

Just to add a thought: big film studios screw over the VFX artists all the time. There are stories of a movie winning “Best Visual Effects” award and the VFX house that actually did all the hard work going bankrupt because they didn’t get paid enough by the big studio to make ends meet. IIRC, Life of Pi was one such occasion. Isn’t that piracy, too: owner class stealing labor from working class.

One could possibly argue that piracy is the inevitable product—nay, an honoured practice—of capitalism because it all boils down to exploiting someone’s labor for your own benefit without fair compensation for the laborer. Big corporations exploit 3rd world countries to get their resources for as cheap as possible; pirates exploit movie, film and game studios to get their entertainment for as cheap as possible. Circle of life; business as usual🙃

Navidrome is a self-hosted music streaming service and Tailscale is an easy to use VPN to remotely access your home (or work) network and services on them without exposing anything on the public internet.

Never really stopped, what with being a low income resident in eastern parts of EU.

But a big reason in addition to cost and many services or content simply not being available in my country is all the technical loops you have to jump through to get the best experience—I remember the time when to get full HD streaming you had to either use a specific set-top box or certain Intel CPU-s integrated graphics in a specific browser. If you didn’t, you’d be limited to 480p. The same still goes for 4k and Atmos today.

Speaking of Atmos, ironically being a DIY audio enthusiast has pretty much locked me out of that. No way to decode Atmos on a PC, you have to use an AVR. But my speakers use (along with other uncommon components) digital crossovers that take digital inputs and multichannel digital outputs are verboten on AVR-s because MPAA and licensing terms (I believe only the 30000€+ Trinnov and Storm Audio pre-pros have them). Not to mention that even 3000€+ AVR-s have DAC performance no better than my 50€ Asus sound card. In the end, it’s just not worth the cost and hassle of setup.

For me, convenience of streaming is also a non-argument; with Jellyfin, Navidrome and Tailscale I can access my whole library from any point on Earth that has internet access. And streaming quality is only limited by the internet connection quality, not by my hardware not having some obscure DRM feature.