Agreed. Set up tailscale (or wireguard + DDNS) and a pi.hole for ad blocking on your phone and laptop whenever you’re away from home.

That’ll let you shake out the issues with running a home server. Once it feels stable and you have a feel for running things reliably, you can try out a home music/media server with Jellyfin, an RSS reader like freshRSS, run your own private file server with NextCloud, sync private notes with Syncthing and Obsidian, watch TV shows and movies on Kodi, and so much more.

But don’t get carried away with a million services at first. Just getting a home server up and running takes some trial and error and luck!

Do you pay for a domain? They likely provide dynamic DNS (DNS). If you’re lucky, they have an API for it, instead of an app, and you can configure a cronjob on your home server to run every 1-5 minutes (or more often, if your IP is super unstable!).

And the 80s Dungeons and Dragons movie is… well, it has Tim Curry.

In all fairness, I’d be terrified to drive that Miata with that monster sitting in front of me. It makes you realize just how crazy the size difference is between these monstrosities and everything else on the road. If this Denali hits this Miata, it’ll decapitate anyone in the Miata. Full stop.

Crash testing needs to account for people outside the car, both in other size classes of vehicle (including bicycles and scooters) and pedestrians. This is policy failure. The Denali should not share road space with the other modes of transportation! Even if this person is an unrealistically perfect driver, their low beams are so high they’ll blind anyone in a shorter vehicle.

I can sort of understand huge semis and delivery vans since they literally need the storage space and they’re generally driven by people with CDLs. But even those should be smaller in urban environments (and suburban, and small towns).

Tragedy of the commons. How many people drive big SUVs because they’re blinded at night by tall vehicles otherwise, and they’re afraid of their children (or themselves) being killed in a crash in a small car? The only way to solve this is government, lawmaking, and enforcement.

I have very similar requirements, but I’m currently using a Pi with some external drives since that’s how I started out. Would you mind sharing what you ended up buying? My place is pretty small, so the ‘quiet’ requirement is one I care about a lot. Personally I’d love to get something passively cooled, but I haven’t seen much!

You might have to live on a busy street in NYC to understand. Ride share drivers in particular will just LAY on the horn for many tens of seconds, even minutes straight.

When you’re NYC and you haven’t figured out that we should get rid of a lot of public (free!) parking spots for delivery and loading zones, you wind up with a lot of double and triple parking.

Combine those two things, you’ll get noise complaints about honking. Seriously, you have no idea how bad it can be!

Hmmm. I wonder how they could improve the ‘character of the neighborhood’ and reduce their ‘traffic issues’?

Perhaps, if we just give them more lanes and parking spots in New York Fucking City they’ll solve it! Looks like a super pleasant place to hang out currently.

FFS. If you want a car-dependent nightmare dystopia, move literally anywhere else in the country! Sheepshead bay is in the damn subway network. Ride a bike. Go for a walk. Ride the damn subway. If it doesn’t go to enough places, we should expand it!

You can always funnel all your VPN traffic through a more typical port, like 80, and there’s very little anyone can do to distinguish between your traffic and typical web traffic.

If your ISP causes issues with inbound traffic to your home network, just add another link to the chain to include a cloud-hosted server, or host it all entirely in the cloud (if you find a trustworthy one with a reasonable cost).

152mm tall is larger than the Pixel 4a. Not. Compact.

Is there some kind of alternativeto astroturfing going on today? I see they just rolled out a website redesign, but I literally only know them as a spammy SEO-bait site I wind up clicking accidentally when I look for software recs. Everything on the site is generic and AI-generated as hell. Tons of ads, AI generated images, and dark patterns.

Mods, take note.

Honestly I wish Kagi would build their own full Firefox fork and maintain it independently. I already pay for search, I wouldn’t mind paying for my browser if it actually respected me!

Just a nitpick, while ‘brighter’ belongs in objective Pros (as long as the minimum brightness is as dark or even darker than the last gen), ‘bigger’ isn’t a Pro. People have different size preferences and we have spiralled so far beyond the smaller end of size preferences we’re actually getting into ‘too big for anyone’ screens if we go much larger.

FFS, reduce the bezel and keep the screen the same damn size. I know some people love big screens but it is hardly 100% of customers.

Recently switched from a 4a (literally what you just described – it even actually has an aux port) to an iPhone 13 Mini.

The Mini is a better size. Better build. Better standby battery life. Better performance from the A15. No fingerprint unlock is a loss, but FaceID is… fine.

I would kill for another Mini.

Car-dependent infrastructure is antithetical to wheelchair and blind accessibility anyway. They’re much better off in a safer environment free of multi-ton death machines driving 45mph.

Aha, thank you. Shouldn’t have riffed from memory on that one, I suppose!

But very much agreed: the Zero series has plenty of beef for a DNS server. Maybe when the 3 comes out I’ll add one as a backup for my 4 server.

Funny enough, the Pi Zero uses the CPU from the 3 and the Zero 2 uses the CPU from the 3+, so they’re both more powerful than a 2 anyway :)

Just be sure that the second server in the list is also a black hole. If you don’t, all black holed requests will fallback to the second DNS… which, if it doesn’t also black hole them, will wind up serving you ads and defeating the point!

Personally I find a single Pi is just fine for DNS. It only takes like 10 seconds to reboot. Less, if you use M.2 storage via a HAT or boot from USB! That’s pretty fine downtime. But if you’re afraid you’ll knock over the network and get yelled at by your family or housemates, best to use a backup :)

The real answer? Buy a phone older than the 15. You’ll never get on-device intelligence. My 13 Mini takes great pictures, performs perfectly, has great battery life as a non-gamer. And it should get at least 3 more years of iOS updates (maybe more? phone specs have really leveled off).

Anything newer, Apple and Google will start pushing intelligence on you simply because your phone can do it.

You could try GrapheneOS as well on a recent Pixel.

I use Jellyfin to host my music, and Finamp on my phone to browse and listen to it. Finamp supports downloads as well, so you can listen to your music offline and away from home. Pair that with a self-hosted VPN to access Jellyfin away from home and you’ve got most of your needs covered!

GrapheneOS kills support when Google kills security updates, I believe. Source: my Pixel 4a came out in 2020, and Graphene already strongly recommends against using it and dropped updates entirely a few months ago.

Lineage and Pixel Experience ROMs are better at long-term support. But any custom ROM on older non-officially-supported phones is vulnerable to firmware exploits, since those fixes are typically distributed as binaries by the hardware manufacturer (Qualcomm etc). So I understand why Graphene drops support so quick, since they want all Graphene users to benefit from strong security practices.