I’ve been running PiHole for awhile, in short it’s your own DNS server that’s configured to block DNS requests to known advertising domains. So when you load a website and it sends a DNS request to PopularAdvertisingCompany.com to load an ad, PiHole blocks the request so the ad can’t be loaded. It’s useful for devices that you can’t put an ad blocker on, like iPhones and smart TVs and such, but can’t block stuff like YouTube ads cause they come from the same domain as the videos themselves.

It also has bonus features like DNS caching which can speed up web browsing.

Any router from a mainstream brand is likely fine, just don’t enable any of their “cloud” BS and don’t use their smartphone app. I’ve had good luck with Asus, they have an app but you don’t have to use it at all.

For security, try to enable WPA3 on your Wi-Fi networks, otherwise WPA2 is probably fine unless you’re being targeted by a government-sponsored hacking operation. Choose a long password for your network.

Once you get it up and running, then worry about DNS and PiHole and VPNs and all that. Don’t get in over your head.

I think Google Voice still gives out a free phone number as long as you tie it to your actual phone number. I used it for Craigslist all the time years ago to avoid giving out my actual number

How long did you wait for it to forward? Dread has been under DDOS siege for years straight, so they have to implement just about the most restrictive mitigation measures possible. These unfortunately mean long wait times.

That’s what I thought too, but this system doesn’t actually use salt water. It uses a membrane that’s filled with lithium bromide (a “salt” in the chemical sense of the word), which absorbs moisture from the air while the computer is off and then is able to slowly “sweat” the moisture away while the computer is running. They say it can run for about 6.5 hours before needing to be recharged.

This is pretty cool for data centers which use massive amounts of power to keep everything cool, because it’s passive and doesn’t use any extra energy for fans or water pumps or anything. It really isn’t all that great for consumer PCs though, because it’s a lot easier to deal with waste heat.

How do you think they can provide their service free of charge? It’s because you are the product, and they likely track your own spending habits. However, I still use them occasionally if I ever want to sign up for a free trial or something similar, because you can put an all-time limit on each card. If my bank offered that feature though, I would just use it instead because my bank (a local credit union) would never track my data.

Hmm, I would only purchase them as a third (or more) layer of redundancy, or maybe for storing things like ripped media that could just be re-ripped (or re-torrented) should the drives fail. I would not trust them for anything important since you have no idea what kind of environment they were in for all those years.

Personally, I haven’t run into a situation where I could only configure something via UI. There’s always been an option to toggle between a UI editor, and just a text editor for the appropriate YAML. There could be exceptions that I haven’t encountered, but they’re definitely few and far between.

To be fair, I’m guessing the majority of Pi’s are used headless anyway. Plus even the older Optiplexes have DVI, which is just HDMI without the audio or fancy stuff like ARC. Won’t be getting 4K or anything, but still a very good video output and IMO adequate for almost all use cases.

That’s only if you want to watch it outside your home network, and either way I would recommend not just opening a port to the world like that. I’d say to use Tailscale (which is trivially easy to install) for remote viewing.

This is literally just a type of NFC. The same type of thing that’s used whenever you scan your credit card or use an Amiibo. It is interesting that it doesn’t use RFID standards, but conceptually it’s the same idea of an ultra-low-power chip with an antenna with the only purpose being to transmit a few bytes of data when scanned.

Personally, I used TrueNAS Core (known as simply FreeNAS at the time) for my very first NAS setup knowing nothing about BSD-based systems, and it’s been pretty much fine. It has ZFS which is absolutely desirable for a NAS that you store important things on, and It has some quirks but Ive been able to accomplish everything I’ve wanted to with it just by looking up the miriad of guides available. Not saying it’s better than the alternatives, just sharing my personal experience.

However, if you’ve already got OMV setup and it’s working for you so far, I would stick with it. I believe you could always import your drives into another NAS system if you decide to move later, so why fix what isn’t broken?

If you’re actually ripping bluerays, I would highly recommend using MakeMKV. It’s technically paid software but while it’s in beta you can can a free license key from their forums. BluRays can be formatted oddly and include a bunch of crap you probably don’t want (preroll ads, etc), so when I tried to rip one with jusy ffmpeg it was a pain, but MakeMKV deals with most of that for you and gets a 1-to-1 copy of the movie files + anything like captions and alternate audip tracks.

You aren’t beholden to any other countries laws, but such domains are the property of their respective countries and their usaging can be conditional and revoked at any time (see what happened recently with .ml domains). Personally I use a .xyz domain because it’s also very cheap, although I’ve heard that it can make you appear more “suspicious” to antivirus companies and such.

Not to be a downer but… how did people not anticipate this happening? Google is likely going to do everything they can to shut down non-official clients like Piped, since they’re sidestepping all of YouTube’s revenue streams. Hopefully they don’t take the nuclear option and somehow lock down the API and make it much harder to download videos via tools like yt-dlp.