For a lot of people in the world, it would be cheaper for the governmet to buy their rural property, bulldoze it, and then buy them a house in a town with internet service – than it is to run a line to their property.

of course that would be cheaper if the government is paying for it…That would also be cheaper than just buying comcast for someone even in suburbs of the US…

I used it in my car on the daily until it was removed from the phone. Then i went, in quite frustrating fashion, through a series of cheap aux/jack bluetooth dongles to maintain handsfree and music in the car.

Finally the radio in my truck started going out. So i replaced it with a wireless carplay/android auto model. And it IS nice.

But there are still times i would prefer a wired set of headphones. I still use them on my laptop from time to time. But will use airpods as well. One of the issues i have with my airpods is that often 1 side will be signifigantly louder than the other.

Copy them to the box. Sign them. Copy the cert file off the box back to the requester.

I run easy-rsa on a linux box. Just manually generate CSR’s and sign them via SSH.

And simply trust the CA cert in windows, linux and whatever extra places (normally firefox cert store).

Post the crl.pem to /var/www/html/ and let NGINX use that.

For most things public like plex or whatever i just use letsencrypt. Easy-rsa is really just for internal stuff like my NAS, VPN etc.

These have already seen active combat. They were used in the Armenian/Azerbaijan war in the last couple years.

It’s not a good thing…at all.

The ARR tools are basically a search engine website you host. The interact with a few other tools you have to have access to/pay for. Namely an indexing service and a (for some) a download service. They can use torrents, so you dont HAVE to pay for downloading, but using something like newsgroups is really nice and add reliability and security.

THe “ARR’s” basically then are just a fancy UI and scheduler and just search the indexing service, download the files you want, re-assemble them and copy them to the location you want (often a file share that your media player like Plex or Jellyfin will use).

You can set them to continually look for something too. So for Sonarr, it will auto-download new episodes as soon as they appear in the index. Or if you see a commercial for something upcoming, you can add it and monitor it and as soon as it starts showing up in the indexes it will download.

All the aarrrs. Saturates my isp bandwidth, have no issues with finding stuff, no takedown or piracy warnings…

There definately is something. They have a ton of products. I’d have to look through my list as well. The CSS runs switchos lite, but honestly its fine. I can do CLI configs (brocade, cisco, cisco smb etc) but its whatever.

At my parents house i have been using a Mikrotik RB260GSP since about 2016 on their net. It also runs swos and im not doing anything crazy on it (in fact i never bothered with VLAN’s there though i probably should setup a guest vlan. But its been fine for years now.

if the firewall can be updated regularly then sure.

Mikrotik makes perfectly acceptable switches at a reasonable price with a variety of features, vlan compat is pretty common. A MikroTik CSS610-8P-2S+in will give you 2 10 Gb sfp , 8 x 1Gbe with PoE+ and vlans for under 300 bucks.

I have a mini-pc running a plex vm. And all the TVs are Rokus. So can watch anything, including live broadcast tv. And the roku is so simple kids can operate it, and do.

The only reason I keep Netflix is kids.

We don’t really watch it otherwise.

Even my in-laws are now pirates using hacked amazon fire sticks that are being hawked around their retirement community.

My mother in law is like “I get every streaming service and channel for 1 dollar a day, isn’t that great”.

I’m all “if it’s simple and works for you yeah, absolutely. “

I have 3.

1. Dakboard above the fridge shows calendar and shared photo album. It also runs bluetooth and serves as a relay for Homeassitant and a few kitchen devices (ie: igrill mini probe for meat).

2. pikvm for a desktop

3. pikvm+ kvm for lab rack esxi servers.

the latter two also run tailscale and allow me to SSH proxy if needed as a back VPN/remote access utility.

There is also a 4th. It runs NUT/UPS tools for their network gear and a mail relay for alerting and also tailscale so I can proxy if necessary.

Since its tailscale etc. Only key based auth is allowed on these boxes.

When i ordered mine, they didnt have a US version. So i ordered a German model, and a keyboard (the German Model was overstock and discounted). And just swapped the keyboard.

It took about 30 minutes and probably 100 screws but it was simple.

Yeah displaylink depends on the use case. For my day to day work, scripting, spreadsheets etc. it’s fine. I can understand why some may not like them. They are great for lower end MacBooks because they can bypass the silly monitor limitations on the “slower” chips

At home I use an eGPU to drive 2 monitors and tv but that’s more to play games.

I THINK a thinkpad dock has 3 outputs. 2 DP and HDMI and is only limited by the horizontal resolution your laptop can output. A lot of intel onboard graphics are limited and if you are trying to output to a 4K+ 2x 1080p monitors you are gonna have trouble.

Any random thinkpad dock is like 200. A dell d6000 is a displaylink dock (so needs a driver) but will work for 160 bucks.

You really only need TB to extend pcie speeds to a peripheral. For most wfh stuff like spreadsheets you can do it for a LOT cheaper.

Yeah. Their expenses to try and add streaming was a waste. Plex did much of the same.

I bought Roku for the set top box replacement. They should continue to focus on that, though there really isnt too much more to do there either. They gotta innovate somehow i suppose and that means taking risk.

I will say they keep adding that goddam roku streaming channel to my list. I have exact an even number of lines of apps. It keeps throwing it off and its annoying.

Ah. That makes sense.

Interestingly the game is downloading for me. I have had it in my library for some time now.

Is it saying its been pulled for new sales only?

I do similar. For laptops and docks, especially if they change setups it can be a pita (though you just need to copy files around).

Also the DE monitor config (ie that you use to login) is logically different to a users x config. So you gotta copy that over to make sure the primary monitor etc is right.

Some amazon returns require an explanation while others dont. My guess, they took the default or went through the drop down to one that didnt require any actual reasoning.

It is for this reason I have stopped buying some things like Hard Drives (almost always get sold as new but are refurbs or used), or computers. Even when labeled as used amazon allows certain things, like glittery dbrand skins to still quality as “pristine”. Also there is a new thing where they will come wiped, but had been registered in Azure/Intune/Apple MDM and thus will still be locked or reporting in.