In the old days, university IT put essentially no access controls on their networks, so students’ dorm computers were completely exposed to the internet. Any service you started was immediately, globally accessible. Some big sites, including slashdot and facebook, got their start in some kid’s dorm room. I feel like access controls really got going in the early 00’s - first for residential, then for broader campus.

Check with your IT people - they may have policy or conditions under which they will expose ports on your personal computer to the internet. Otherwise, your best bet is probably free-tier AWS or Oracle.

Not free, but there are some ‘KVM VPS’ providers out there that will rent you a small, internet exposed computer pretty cheap. They can be a good platform for experimenting with self-hosting services, without exposing your personal equipment or home network. eg: 1CPU/1GB RAM/24GB SSD $12/year https://my.racknerd.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=903

So, these scientists were asked to evaluate a political question, “Is there a link between immigration and welfare support?” using a large survey dataset. Not like they were asked whether temperature data supported anthropogenic climate change. The 158 scientists were in 71 teams and did, collectively, of 1200 statistical tests.

An overwhelming majority of all analyses found no link between immigration policies and support for welfare programs, regardless of investigator ideology. A handful of outlier models, where an effect could be found, show effects that correlated with the team’s politics, but it’s hard for me to look at the mountain of “no effect” conclusions and agree with the statement “politics predicted the results.” “Politics predicted the outliers,” OK.

Actual study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz7173

Are you suggesting that Obama is one of the Nobel Laureates negotiating to gift his medal to Trump? What do you think a former President wants from the current President?

FIFA are trend setters. Surely, there’s a line forming of other Nobel Laureates excited to turn over their medals for a favor from POTUS.

I realize you’re looking for new toys, but ‘anywhere in the flat’ includes ‘under a pile of pillows.’ Otherwise, for personal photo-sized storage, just put a couple 2.5mm format SSDs in the QNAP.

Who needs soft power when you can just kidnap world leaders and declare yourself the caretaker regime?

Trump has never solved a problem in his life. His entire experience is to tell a lackey what he wants, then either fire or reward that lackey. He thinks he’s “solved” Venezuela just by telling Pete Hegseth to take care of it.

Depending on the board in your mini-server, you may have enough SATA ports to plug in directly. I have a system similar to what you’re describing (N100 with 4x 2TB HDDs with 1.5TB data): 2 of those drives are set up in RAID1 (mirror), and once a month, I plug in one of the spares, rsync the array to it, and unplug it. Every 3 months or so, I swap the offline drive with an offsite drive. I used to use a USB dock for the offline drive, but I got a 3-bay hot-swap enclosure to make the whole process faster and easier.

The server shares the array via NFS and SMB, and it is absolutely a NAS for all my other systems.

If you expect to exceed 2TB data within 2 years, then you’ll need to replace all 4 of those 2TB drives in 2 years. You might, today, get a pair of 4 TB drives and one 2TB, use the 4TB as your main storage, the 2TBs as rotating backups, and wait until you actually outgrow 2TB to upgrade the backups.

It may be time for the rest of the world to stop waiting patiently for Americans to mobilize. When non-US states commit atrocities, the civilized world does sanctions to erode public support for the regime. It’s time for sanctions on the US. Russia can’t be the only nation that condemns us.

I see you’re getting lots of advice just to use c/selfhosted as a free consultant. That’s good advice if you’re self-motivated and focused.

If you want someone to be a coach through the process, to keep you focused and moving, that’s a) a slightly different skillset and b) worth putting in the description. I mention this only because I have a bunch of aspirational projects on my to–do list that have just sat there for literally years because of perfectionism, anxiety, and maybe some undiagnosed ADHD. I’ll also counter by noting that a lot of people, this time of year, buy a gym membership on the theory that spending the money will somehow force them actually to go to the gym, only to find that spent money is not actually a motivator.

Steam can do massive numbers spikes because they have essentially infinite inventory. The whole reason scalping video cards works is that Nvidia can not make as many as people want, even at full retail price. The existence of scalpers implies that Nvidia could raise prices, sell slightly fewer units at higher margin and get greater total return.

Great project. I like the 1-star reviews complaining about the lack of advertising and tracking.

If you want it to be an actual community service, then you want it to be something that outlives your residence, your tenure as event coordinator, and your interest in being the neighborhood IT guy. It’ll be much easier to transfer control of a VPS to your successor than to give them hardware that also hosts a bunch of your personal services.

You can start with a very small, nearly free VPS while you recruit users & scale up as (if) anyone bites. Probably even get the HOA to pay for it.

Georgia still has among the lowest per-kWh tariffs in the country, at $0.086/kWh (0.0806 in winter). Plus $14/month service charge and 20% taxes & fees. Compare California at $0.40/kWh.

I got my Pi4 to be a media player - LibreElec or Kodi - for my old, not-smart TV. It plays my library of CDs&DVDs, frontend for OTA TV, and a variety of streaming services. Fanless, so it doesn’t distract from audio, low power, so I don’t mind leaving it on 24/7. You can configure it to listen to a USB IR receiver, but I control mine from phone via web. The actual media library/NAS and tvheaded run on an old desktop in another room.

My favorite thing is all the sensors you can hook up. Adafruit & Sparkfun have a wide array of sensors with breakout boards for simplicity and well documented python libraries. I started just logging temperature, humidity, then air quality, CO2 to my own database and web page, but eventually expanded to full HomeAssisstant system.

Pihole.

SATA is really convenient for larger storage, though. I keep my OS on nvmes, but I’ve got a couple of SATA drive and a hot swap bay for games, media, etc.

Tandoor: I ended up there because it has an API that I can access and cross-reference to my grocer (Kroger.com also has API) to get current pricing, calculate recipe costs, nutrient costs, or find what’s on special this week. It’s theoreticcally possible, but I haven’t sorted out how to integrate that directly into tandoor & its shopping lists.

A lot depends on how many users you expect and how much media you expect. For one or two users with that stack, transcoding media is really the only CPU load. If most of your media is already in your desired format, then that’s not a big deal.

My stack is pretty similar (no *arr, plus tvheadend, homeassistant and a kodi frontend) for two users and it sits near idle all day long. It runs on an N100 NAS system off Aliexpress with 16GB and will transcode 1080p to x264 at just about playback speed… System runs from a 100 GB nvme, with a couple half-full 4 TB WD Reds for data. 35-ish Watts, maybe an extra 5 when actively transcoding. Used to be ~150 USD,

If you want a lot of 4k content, then I’d definitely go with the GTX 1660.

Same. Eventually upgraded to a Pi 4, which doesn’t have any trouble with 1080p content. Pi 3’s onboard wifi was also problematic, and I had to run it over wired networking. Kept that for the Pi 4, so I don’t know if its wifi is any better.

The landscapers and cleaning staff are probably fine people.