I think SD card failure rates are way overblown if you’re buying from reputable manufacturers (Sandisk, Samsung). I’m sure they do occasionally fail, but I’ve never experienced one.
You’re right, for really intensive tasks the costs can climb, but I see people asking for ideas for what to do with a junk laptop and the top suggestion is always something like pi-hole or a bookmark manager that could run on a potato.
Like with most things in life, it depends.
Laptop performance when closed is quite variable, but depending on where you live, each 10W of idle consumption 24/7/365 could cost you somewhere around $20/yr (assumes @$0.20/kWh, YMMV). This isn’t overwhelming on it’s own, but it is “cost difference between a junked laptop and a Raspberry Pi” kinda money.
Just built a new PC literally this weekend. WiFi mouse and Bluetooth drivers did not work out of the box. I had to spend hours searching through what little info exists out there tangentially related to my problem to find:
WiFi drivers were fixed in kernel 6.10, which fortunately Mint let’s you upgrade to 6.11 at this time with relative ease.
Bluetooth drivers do not appear to have been fixed, but I might have a shot if I switch over to a rolling release distro and relearn everything I’m used to from using Debian-based distros for years. Dongle is on order, but I don’t love having to have 2 bluetooth devices.
It’s unclear if mouse drivers have been fixed in the kernel, but I was able to find a nice set of drivers/controller on github which fixed some mouse problems but only if i used their experimental branch and it did not work with my wireless adapter. Very fortunately I had an old wireless adapter from a mouse from the same brand that was able to close the loop, but that was just dumb luck.
By EOD today I should have everything I want working, but it wasn’t “30s” of searching - to your point, 60-70% of problems may be solvable that way, but having 1/3 of your problems require technical expertise is not going to bring Linux out of the hobbyist domain.
Note: this is not a complaint against Linux, just a statement of fact. These things have gotten a lot better over the years, and things get easier to find as the community grows and these struggles get discussed more openly, but there’s still lots of challenges out there that take more than a 30s search.
The VPN speeds will be throttled pretty substantially, and low ram will result in some instability seeding, but it should run. Good thing about torrents is they’re built for unreliable.
I’ve run a torrent box like described on pretty much every pi generation, and the pi4 was the first one where VPN speed was no longer the bottleneck.
Unfortunately there’s not much discussion of open trackers in this community, but on that other site there’s an “OpenSignups” sub you could keep an eye on. Watch for general trackers to make a post, then you can built a reputation/ratio on those trackers and continue your way up the ladder
Either that or just watch the sign up page for the site you want to see when it’s open.
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Use it as an opportunity to find new music and fill those playlists out with a little more variety
Tools like https://ipleak.net/ provide torrent leak checkers. You need a browser to view the results, but they provide a magnet link you use in your torrent client to assess what information it is giving out.
In theory if everything is set up right it should show exclusively IP/location information associated with your VPN
As part of a websites DNS info they have to provide a TTL (time to live). This value can be just about anything but is often in the 30s to 5m range, and serves as an instruction on how long a client should cache the IP address locally before checking for updates.
This is because IP addresses can change, and you don’t want to experience hours of downtime for all clients every time your IP changes.
Every time your client queries your tracker for server updates (every few minutes, give or take, based on tracker preferences) it should follow your system DNS settings, which should involve checking your local cache, then going to the upstream server indicated in your system DNS settings.
If your system is set to a DNS server outside of your local network (e.g., 8.8.8.8) that request should go through your VPN
If your system is set to use a local DNS server (e.g., 192.168.X.X…), typically either done through something like a pi-hole, or if your router sets itself as the DNS server then forwards all requests, this MIGHT create a DNS leak around your VPN.
A good VPN like Mullvad should have an option to force their own DNS settings when enabled to prevent this leak.
Honestly there’s so much wonderful art out there not created by Nazis, I don’t know that it’s worth the energy to pirate Nazi music.
I totally understand the moral pirate argument, I just don’t have time to enjoy all of the games, movies, and music from artists I support. To waste what time I have engaging with content from people I find morally repugnant is just not where I’m investing
Even setting seed to infinite, if there’s just one other capable seeder, good odds no individual sends any other individual a full file.
You’re just sending jibberish chunks everywhere, not your fault if someone assembles it all from multiple sources, right?
Yes, it absolutely can, it’s super easy! Just swap your Minecraft .jar with Paper and it’ll do the rest. It’s a tiny bit harder to go back, but only marginally.
Out of the box, aside from huge performance benefits, Paper is virtually indistinguishable from vanilla, but it also opens the door to a whole world of easy-to-use server-side plugins.
Edit: (you should still make a backup before swapping, just in case)
CPU intensive servers like Minecraft are where you start to run into problems with older hardware. If it’s just you on there, a 10 year old CPU is fine, but if you’ve got a few friends, the server may start to struggle to keep up.
Not sure how recently you ran this, or what all your were running, but in the past couple of years Paper has hit some pretty major milestones in unlocking threaded processing. Barring some sort of spammy 0-tick redstone nonsense or over the top plugins, I’d wager a Raspberry Pi 4 could handle up to about 5 or 6 friends without seeing any TPS dips. Its really remarkable how far they’ve pushed performance recently.
Could I get a larg HDD and ad it in an enclosure to the Mini PC to handle the media volume?
Like an external USB drive? Absolutely.
I mean, this is c/piracy, you can pretty easily go download a non-HDR version of everything. If you do want HDR just not DV, most decent DV encodes also have a HDR10 fallback which should kick in if your device doesn’t support DV.
Alternatively, I’m pretty sure there are plenty of tools out there like DoVi Tool that can help you convert the HDR metadata to HDR10/10+ if that’s what you want.
It’s much lower risk, someone dedicated could prove you accessed a seedbox, but it would be a lot harder to prove you violated a copyright
if its possible to have Jellyfin read the name via a sub folder such as Movies/LinusISO/
It’s possible. Just make a LinuxISO (Year) folder in your movies directory and it’ll pick up the movie file within, regardless of name.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/
Naming only matters within folders if you have multiple versions.
I meant visually web vs disc. To me, a 4k 15 Mbps web-DL is visually 99% as good as a 60+Mbps UHD BR remux.
Web-DL may not be how I want to watch something like Interstellar (shot on 70mm film) but is probably fine for something like 7 Fast 9 Furious Tokyo Zoom Zoom (shot on Vin Diesel’s iPhone, probably)
Yes and no. Depending on your client I believe you can tweak the settings to avoid slow seeders if others are available (especially if you have a set max connections per torrent)