Alright alright alright

Caprice (or Taurus?) police car and fingerless glove really date this photo.

Probably because it was an affluent school. In a school with more poor kids, stuff like this is their little chance at feeling higher status than their peers even though it’s all imaginary based on marketing.

Check serverpartdeals.com for HDDs. They’re used enterprise drives so they’re much cheaper, but there’s always the possibility of getting a bad drive so they should be tested first. If you’re just storing pirated stuff the risk isn’t super great since you can just find the files again. The next best option is shucking external drives like WD Elements/Easystore/MyBook as they’re typically half the price of the bare WD Red drives and are virtually the same thing with a different label. I have bought about 15 drives using both these methods and haven’t had any issues. The shucked drives have been in use since as far back as 2018.

A better value is just getting 6th gen or newer Intel CPU and using its built-in GPU to do the transcoding. If you want a discrete GPU, any low powered card that supports HEVC should work. Alternatively, you can get something like a Roku device to connect to your TV as they have pretty good compatibility and you’ll avoid transcoding all together.

What are you using for storage?

You may be conflating this with adding lanes to the freeway which doesn’t reduce freeway congestion since it’s all rush hour based traffic, but I fail to see how adding more lanes in a city wouldn’t reduce congestion for people who live there. If you have 1000 cars they’ll fit more densely in 3 lanes than they would in a single lane since they can drive in parallel to the other vehicles.

This seems more like a server with a built-in NAS, but i agree it’s probably way overkill for most, though it seems like an awesome product at first glance. It’s like they took every component and cranked it up to 11. I wish we saw more of this in the consumer electronics segment and less “let’s strip or nerf everything we possibly can before sales tank. Our margins are so great this quarter!”

This is one change (which isn’t the cause of OP’s problem) that they announced months ago. I’ve been using it for well over a decade and while I have had major issues with it in the past going so far as to setup Emby and buying a lifetime license for that, I would hardly say that they’re “constantly changing allowed abilities.”

Most people’s issue with them is that they focus too much on adding new stuff that nobody asked for while ignoring longtime bugs. I can’t recall a time they’ve ever locked anything behind a paywall that wasn’t a brand new feature prior to this.

OP has a misconfigured server and isn’t connecting to their server over LAN.

Why not 3D print something for it? I printed this to make a digital photo frame with a Pi 4 and the official 7" Pi touch display. https://www.printables.com/model/44218-7-touchscreen-case-for-raspberry-pi-4-internal-fan

Printing it with something strong should help keep it safe in an accident though you’ll need to create a mounting solution.

I went through the exact same situation with my 20 year old music collection and MusicBrainz Picard and unfortunately this is just the state of music piracy even now as things are rarely tagged correctly or come from compilation albums, sample albums, or are just obscure and don’t have the proper tags available on the service. This is why I don’t mind paying for music streaming even though I selfhost most other media formats because you can put in days of work tagging songs and still have a jumbled mess at the end (Picard’s tagging template is also a huge PITA to use with some obscure legacy language).

Probably not much of a difference. These mini PCs can run at single digit wattage too and you won’t be buying new SD cards every 6 months.

I bet you could instead use an ESP32 for GPIO and just connect it remotely to whatever Pi alternative you use (if needed at all). Turning some switches on and off while monitoring input values doesn’t sound very computationally intensive.

I think this really depends on the model they’re eyeballing because the Pi5 is frankly ridiculous for the price and has absurd power requirements (5V5A USB?). I wouldn’t recommend one of these unless you have a specific need like a certain hat or the GPIO pins. You can get a Dell micro Optiplex for less money and have a full fledged i5 or i7 processor with similar power usage.

Plus the RPi Foundation exposed themselves as the greedy bastards they are during COVID which is yet another reason to turn your back on them.

For something like a Pi Zero, maybe go for it, but there are similar devices out there from other companies too.

Unless your Blu-ray player can’t phone home to verify the license on your disc in which case it stops working.

With the few stations near me that have them, the mute button is the 2nd down from the top on the right side of the screen.

I think the Define 5 is a good option as well. I bought the 6 in 2018 because it was new, was white, and only like $99 at the time and it’s served me well. Every couple of years I’d buy some more drive trays as my pool filled up and I needed more space.

I just rebuilt my whole system a couple of months ago but kept the case because it works so well and there isn’t much on the market like it without getting into fullsize cases. It’s nearly silent even with 5 fans and 9 HDDs inside. It sits about 2 feet from me on my desk and I only hear a tiny hum from the fans.

PC Part Picker has filters that will let you set all your requirements and show you what’s available. Since you want ECC and low cost, you might be better off finding options on PCPartPicker and then looking for those items used on ebay.

If you don’t have a case already, you might check out Fractal Design. They have several cases for lots of 3.5" drives. I have a Define 6 and it holds like 12 3.5" and 4 2.5" in a midtower format and it’s constructed really well. You will need to buy additional drive trays though as they only come with 4 I think.

Just get a bigger combination air fryer/toaster oven. They’re a total game changer and way more efficient than using your kitchen oven. I haven’t found a frozen pizza yet that won’t fit inside ours, there’s almost zero preheating time, and the air fryer portion works great for fries, tots, nuggets, etc.