But will it continue to be your last post in the future? Or is it simply your last post at this moment?

I know a bunch of places do it with plasma. Not sure with whole blood though.

Claims moral superiority for never buying the game and instead buying Factorio

Never played that game, what is the context?

It always pisses me off when someone defending their life, or the lives of others, in a show is somehow a monster for stopping the threat. (Or it is somehow ‘honorable’ to not kill someone actively murdering others.)

Fuck no. Stop the murderer, rapist, or terrorist using as much force as is necessary. Little Timmy will be so much better off with parents who are still alive, Susan will be happy her husband wasn’t murdered, etc etc.

God that is great mascot. It sears itself into your brain.

sudo edit this file!

My suggestion: Raspberry Pi (or any other computer) connected via an HDMI port. Use any photo program of your choosing. Many, many available for linux.

Fucking around with TV OSes is a PITA and is best to just be avoided.

For the money angle, something like a Digital Ocean droplet would be appropriate here. They are $4/mo and you don’t even need to run the thing all the time, just when you need an app version approved.

You don’t need to give them a premier experience, you aren’t trying to sell them on the features of your app. It just needs to function.

Load in those 20 royalty free songs and let the algorithm suck at picking the next of the 20.

Yes, iOS app approval is a pain in the ass (this is one of the reasons there is so much fuss about app store policies and anti-competitive practices). They do test the app and if it has to connect to a server, they will ask you to provide such for them to test against.

Setup a virtual host that you only turn on when they need to approve a new version. Give it some royalty free music to serve.

For DIY, just about any setup would work fine as long as you put it in a case with lots of bays. Throw 2 or 3 of these in there* and you now have however many ports are on the motherboard (probably 2 or 4) plus 8-12 more ports available via the cards.

*I’m not recommending that specific card, just something that gives you SATA ports on a PCI-E card. Just pay attention to bandwidth bottlenecks on the cards. Here is a table of PCI-E speeds.

Since you are looking to build up to 12 bays, what you can do is buy that 4x 12TB drive set now, transfer everything over to the new system, then add the old 12TB drives into the array one-by-one expanding it to an 8x 12TB array. This ensures no data loss, nor wasted drives.

Edit: Also with 8 drives, consider using RAID 6 instead of RAID 5. It’s almost the same thing, it just has two redundancy drives instead of one. Depending on how full your current RAID is, you may or may not need to start the new array with 5x 12TB drives instead of 4 due to the lower capacity when using RAID 6.

It’s also fairly cheap to buy 32+ GB of RAM, lots of choices for under $80. Meanwhile, I’m not even sure how you find a video card with 32GB of VRAM (not that you really need this much, 12GB and 16GB are pretty solid for a video card nowadays).

It’s a very old 1080p Sharp TV. I know it does have WiFi which I have not setup, but that certainly doesn’t mean the WiFi is off.

I’ll have to see if there is some way to disable the WiFi completely and re-measure it.

The UPS should have a USB plug in the back. Plug that into your computer and it will read the battery status as if it was a laptop. Then in your OS, set the standard shutdown options when low on battery.

A note on the fans specifically, you can buy quiet fans. In general, the larger the fan, the lower the speed you can run it and the quieter it is. You can also setup fan curves so they are only doing anything of note when the computer is pumping out heat (given your statements, that would be basically never).

The electricity usage is a pretty notable thing. Though, if you take the graphics card out of a desktop (use integrated graphics, a dedicated graphics card in a server is just wasted electricity) and set the OS to power saver (this mostly means it won’t boost the CPU to higher clocks), it really won’t use much power. Compared to buying dedicated NAS hardware, you may never recoup the energy costs between the hardware you have and the lower-power hardware you need to buy.

If you don’t already own one, a Kill-A-Watt is a great tool to have. Tells you how much energy a device is using. Biggest thing I found was my TV had a vampire draw of 15W. Literally draws 15W while off. This got the TV put on a power strip I turn off when I’m not using it.

Now, with all that said, sometimes you just want what you want. And there is nothing wrong with that. My goal here is to make sure you don’t feel you have to pick one option over the other.

If you have a desktop, throw a hard drive or two in it and you have a NAS. Software (like you mentioned Plex or Jellyfin) does the rest. Even if you only have a laptop, a hard drive in a standard USB enclosure will perform this role just fine.

What are you intending to run on this server?

• If it is just PiHole, you can basically get the weakest computer you can find.

• If you want lots of storage space, you will need to make sure you have a case and motherboard that will accommodate the drives.

• If you are running encryption on those drives as well, you will need a CPU more powerful than what comes in a Pi, but nothing crazy.

• If you are running lots and lots of VMs, you will want lots of RAM. A linux VM will use maybe a few GB each depending on what software each is running internally, a windows vm will use a bit more.

• If you are doing AI workloads, you will need a graphics card.

Well you see, space isn’t flat in this very localized area!