You can buy a used office computer from businesses that are upgrading (downgrading) to win11 for less than 50 bucks. They tend to be relatively low power, relatively quiet, lots of PCI slots and USB ports so there are many upgrade options, yet low entry price for a decent computer. If you plan on using as a jellyfin server: either mind the chip now for transcoding capabilities (there’s lists out there) or know that if you want that, you’ll have to put in a GPU at some point if the onboard can’t transcode well.

I have a mix of external and internal SSD’s. Some are running way not as fast as they theoretically could, but it all works well enough for me. You can start with what you have, storage is still expensive.

Public torrents suck for music these days. Little available and a lot that is there is FLAC only, no mp3-320

What’s the name of the app you tried?

the coordinates aren’t there i think, but there are github projects out there that “detect” the panels and suggest split based on that. For most of the panels of most of the comics, that would be more than enough to do a clean split. I just can’t find a real relatively easily deployable service that incorporates it.

https://maxhalford.github.io/blog/comic-book-panel-segmentation/

The main mess is genres. That is non existent in the folder structure (I do have it: artist > albums), and still very hard with Picard etc. But genres is very convenient for Autoplay, auto generate shuffle playlists

A good movie in 720p will always be a good movie. A crappy movie with shitty story and shitty acting will still suck in 4K or 8K or 4D or whatever will come. Like good vinyl LPs from 60s-70s never really went bad if they were well taken care of…

Best podcast app I’ve ever used.

I would only switch to another app if that could remove the ads from downloaded podcasts :')

There is a vast difference between communism the theory and communism the real world application as it occured in 20th century.

Fujitsu Esprimo here… 50 €, before the extra RAM, SSDs, … Relatively low power usage, lots of SATA, PCI slots, lots of USB ports… Works very well for all except transcoding. Could put a GPU but it would really make power consumption go up

Why not a second hand small “business” or office pc? There are so many on the market now because businesses are replacing because of windows 11, while the hardware runs perfectly fine with Linux for probably many years to come. Buying one of those is cheap and reduces e-waste.

You should absolutely avoid using the same folder for downloads and media library. If you want such a setup, you should use hardlinks.

It’s a niche where AI helps because there’s just decades of so many forums and videos full of how to do stuff in excel and with AI you get the right answer quicker with less noise around it. I use ai assistance for excel formulas all the time, works pretty good for that.

SSD’s as far as I know mainly degrade from writing, not so much from reading or idling. If you fill an SSD, delete all files, write again, delete, etc, that is when they can wear out fast. If you’re just stacking on top slowly filling it and occassionally reading from it, it should theoretically last for many years. I don’t buy brands i’ve never heard about before and I read many customer reviews. Slightly higher price for way better reviews wins. Reviews like “it’s too slow” are not very relevant to me. Reviews like “I used it twice, got very hot and smelled like fire, broke, lost all my data”: those are the important ones. I never buy latest generation tech, I buy older generations. They’re cheaper, but more importantly they have more review information available about what you can expect from it slightly longer term.

I avoid buying anything from aliexpress, amazon, … out of principle, don’t want to support those foreign (Europe) giants. Any other webshop might get my order if they seem okay to me.

Teams is fine for video calling and screensharing. The mess begins when organisations, as MS encourages them to do, try to embed everything there is into teams. Then it can very fast become a black hole where no one finds anything anymore

That ease of outside LAN access poses a big risk tho. Plex can and eventually probably will share, be forced to share, get hacked etc Those cloud accounts imply the possibility of very detailed reports about who’s streaming what, when, where, from which source…

It’s quite easy without docker to get lots of it running with a dietpi install. Runs on rpi and alike, but also on any “normal” old low end pc. Just select jellyfin, arrs, … It handles it all for you, no need to learn Docker (I know people will argue about the advantages of docker, which are valid points, but ease of installation is more important to many people). The only difficulty remains the streaming outside your own LAN (because it’s risky). VPN, tailscale, … there’s options but it always keeps on feeling risky to open up outside LAN. Local setup for jellyfin can be really really easy tho, if it’s just for yourself and you mostly watch at home anyway… And in some jellyfin compatible app like Finamp and Streamyfin you can just download a few music albums, episodes or movies to your phone before you travel…

Purchase in your region so you can have a look at it and back out if hardware looks damaged, very dirty or not well handled by previous owner. 2nd hand is usually fine for most hardware, people sell because they upgrade or because win11 not supported, not because it’s broken.

For sale where? I don’t find it. Only announcements.

2nd hand Logitech s220

Fair enough.