1/2 to 3/4 of my drives are from server parts deals, only had one of them give me issues and I think the issue was the SATA cable I had. I have several servers.

They are used drives, but I only paid about $100-125 each. Keep watching their site and things go in and out of stock all the time. I wait until they have a good price.

I just wonder if plex will ever sell the list of movies and IP address of everyone. Many people have the ARRs to auto download, even stuff still in theaters. What good is a VPN when plex knows your email and IP.

This is what I am going with now, I canceled my domain when moving and now I get a letter that I have money at patreon but can not log in without 2fa from the email on that domain, but it’s expensive now. I am loosing money when I need it most.

I also have the xreal glasses, they are great (as long as you keep your head still). I really enjoy them for playing games. Lots of people use them for movies and tons of other uses. It’s like having a huge OLED tv on the wall.

I just moved across states.

I took everything apart, packed the equipment in boxes using tons of padding. Any extra space in the boxes was filled with extra cables and more padding. Rack mounts that I have come completely apart.

My main servers have hard drives, so I used a lot of foam all around the server and added trackers (air tags) to the servers and my camera stuff.

I’m now off grid so not really in a hurry to setup all this stuff, but happy it seems to have made it here in great condition. Eventually I will setup the rack mounts just to hold the equipment and maybe I will power on things here and there as I feel like playing with them again.

I think I learned about knoppix from the TV show “the screen savers” in the early 2000s. Played with it a few times on old laptops, scanning for open Wi-Fi lol

Before I moved I used to use my web server.

My Domain . Com / files . Zip And I would set a password on the zip. After they download it, they tell me and I remove the file.

The appeal for me to use immich is the AI search.

I have over 100,000 photos I have taken. I can do a search of “blue sky with pink clouds and a moon” and it will show me the photo I want.

The way I did it before would take me 2-3 days of looking at every photo one by one to find that photo.

The other benefit of the server is I can access all these apps from my laptop, phone, desktop, or using my VPN from anywhere in the world.

The one that was way more useful then expected is immich. I have over 100,000 photos I took during my life and it usually takes me DAYS to find a specific picture I need.

I installed immich and let it AI scan everything for a week or something. Now I can search for something specific like “it’s a black square in the middle of the photo and has a little knob on it” and it finds me the photo I need.

It’s also cool to see photos of people, organized by the individual by searching their name or clicking on their face.

I use J for skip back, k for pause, and L for skip ahead.

What annoys me about Amazon search is it doesn’t listen to my search, and it doesn’t allow qualifiers such as minus sign. Most other searches listen to minus sign as excluding that word from search.

Example: metal cup -plastic -mug -jug

I search for a metal cup, but I do not want plastic, and not a mug or jug.

On Apple we have Firefox focus, it’s a single tab browser with Adblock. Works for YouTube and other websites.

I usually check the proton DB website, to read the comments and see what people do to fix games and software.

Just recently I used it to get old CAD software to run, had to lower the proton version to 6 or something and it worked.

I did do custom firmware for the internal drive for 4k ripping, but didn’t find the right firmware for the external ones (years ago). Maybe I can find it again once we unpack our storage. We are moving to another state now. Thanks for the info!

That’s awesome you have a server for ripping. I made a dedicated machine using my old desktop.

Ryzen 1700, 16gb ram, 12 dvd / Blu-ray drives (one drive does 4k Blu-ray’s) and 2 more usb Blu-ray drives on top.

I ripped so many thousands of DVDs that my neighbor gave me after he passed away.

I’m in the middle of moving so everything is packed up. But this was the rack before we moved.

Networking, 3D printer, black and white laser printer and a color laser printer, several servers.

I had home assistant, Plex, Minecraft server, 7 days to die server, and many other services.

Servers are Ryzen 5950x and the other is a threadripper 24 core.

The other side of the rack was HDMI switchers and some game consoles.

Going to miss the 1gbps fiber internet, we now have Starlink.

I used a spreadsheet and labeled each box AA, AB, AC… BA, BB, BC… FA, FB, etc. it’s 2 digit codes for each box.

I then took pictures of every box as I’m filling them, and make a list of all contents in the spreadsheet.

In the end we have way too many boxes! Yikes. lol Maybe I should have gotten rid of more stuff.

I use several of the suggestions above, but also for IOS (iPhone) I use “Firefox Focus” and it clears everything when I close it and I can watch ad free.

Back when I was on windows I would rename .webp to .jpg (or was it .png, it’s been a long time) and it would open. Now I’m on Linux and it just works.

I have been able to play most games fine on Linux mint.

If he plays Minecraft bedrock he can use “Minecraft bedrock launcher” which loads the android version (if you own it on the play store). Minecraft Java works find on Linux, but I prefer bedrock to use a controller.

Some PC games I play in “bottles” which lets you run windows programs.

I also have “heroic games launcher” that lets me play epic games, gog games and Amazon games.