Honestly, as acts of appeasement go, a fancy dress party seems about the least humiliating thing a country can agree to. Play king for a day, like Make-A-Wish for senile fascists. If that settles the tariff negotiations, then well done.
I’ve used a retired desktop for my home server since 1999. It doesn’t have the fancy web-UI management of commercial NAS, but I’m comfortable with command line and config files.
At some point, I realized I could use its wifi card and hostapd to replace my WAP. That was a bit of an adventure initially finding a card that really supports AP mode and setting up hostapd, but has now allowed me to migrate from 802.11g to n to ac much cheaper than buying whole new devices,
Recently converted to an N100 with 4x ethernet ports, which let me unplug my little 5-port switch.
Managing this doesn’t feel like a second job: it’s stable and just works. Automatic updates, with kernel blacklisted; periodically log in, update kernel & reboot. It does give me the opportunity, when I get inspired, for a weekend project, like adding hostapd or a new service, either via docker or bare metal. I like that I have one device doing “NAS,” WAP, and router jobs.
That drive averages 900 hours between power cycles? In Windows?
This is one of my pet peeves with containerized services, like why would I want to run three or four instances of mariadb? I get it, from the perspective of the packagers, who want a ‘just works’ solution to distribute, but if I’m trying to run simple services on a 4 GB RPi or a 2 GB VPS, then replicating dbs makes a difference. It took a while, but I did, eventually, get those dockers configured to use a single db backend, but I feel like that completely negated the ‘easy to set up and maintain’ rationale for containers.
I suspect that tech management & executive culture has learned & become accustomed to exploit the mental health of their employees. Software and tech are stereotypically jobs well suited to neurodiversity and ADHD, and those people are prone to hyperfocus & long hours and may benefit from tight timelines. If management just gets used to recruiting for autism/adhd, then develops management strategies that work well with that population, it’s going to be difficult as the field matures and attracts more neurotypical people.
I used to tell my mentees that no one was going to explicitly tell them that 10, 12, 14 hour days were mandatory. That long hours were not a metric for success. It was that they would be competing for jobs with people who really did want their life to be their job and would happily spend that much time working, because that’s all they want to do. It’s only when the pool of available jobs grows beyond the number of those obsessive workaholics that they have to start hiring people who have any interest in work-life balance or collective bargaining.
People will accept either intelligence or stupidity. They will pay for a flattering sycophant.
The services you’ve mentioned are all pretty low compute impact, just bandwidth, so I’d expect your MBP to be fine. Transcoding for jellyfin is the only real wildcard, and that depends on your media and client setups. I run pihole, homeassistant, immich, and kodi on a raspberry pi 4 with plenty of overhead for more services. NAS is nice if your library outgrows a single disk and your storage bandwidth gets choked by USB multiplexing.
My suggestion is to consider a cheap VPS and vanity domain for external access. Domains cheap as $5/year; fair VPSs cheap as $30/year. Use SSH to forward localhost ports on the VPS to container ports on the MBP, then nginx on thee VPS to reverse-proxy to those forwarded ports. You get unique names for every service, LetsEncrypt certificates, and an offsite location for critical backups. Make sure you are the one paying for VPS & DNS so they don’t get surprise-cancelled.
It was worth $80 to a few pre-orderers, but not enough for the market analysts to project a profitable launch.
In monopoly capitalism, the prices are all made up numbers, especially for digital goods, with very little to do with what they cost. If they don’t get enough preorders at $70, they’ll either drop it to $60 or cancel it altogether to maintain “$70 market conditions.”
Second not using local.com If OP doesn’t want a real domain, use an unresolvable TLD, like “private” (so, pihole.private, audiobookshelf.private), but a real domain will just work better, will let them use real TLS certs, and prevent problems from apps bypassing system DNS. Even if it’s not as pretty or memorable as the hijacked domain name.
If you earn $50-200k, they you’re in the 22-24% federal tax bracket, but probably pay 15-20% Federal income tax. Plus 7.65% payroll tax (also federal). Plus 5-10% state tax. Some cities have an income tax. But yeah: 25-35% total tax burden is pretty common for middle income people.
My Pi spends all of its time around 55°C in a 20-25°C room. Main server idles at 47°C. Those aren’t worrying temps.
I’ve watched enough Lock Picking Lawyer never to want a consumer ‘smart lock.’ Half of them can be opened with a magnet. Maybe commercial grade is better, but I’ve been locked out of my job after every power failure for the last 10 years, until someone comes along with a physical key.
Re homeassistant on a Pi: homeassistant does a lot of database transactions, so you may want to have db storage on something other than an SD card.
You don’t even need to learn HTML to do it. Any word processor will ‘save as HTML,’ but the markup should be straightforward enough for anyone considering selfhosting. CSS can be a real rabbit hole, but browser default styles aren’t awful.