I have lunch meeting with a magat in a few hours, I’m going to try my hardest to memorize this!

Considering these people are in charge of the only systems capable of regulating them, yeah probably not. And if you won’t sell them they’ll force you into foreclosure and buy you up even cheaper like JD Vance’s Acretrader has been doing to farms.

Vulture capitalism. These VCs come in and take out a huge loan to buy these established companies, then the company becomes responsible for paying the loan, and the company also pays the VC “management fees” then when the company is a hollow husk of what it used to be they start selling off assets and closing stores. Kmart, Sears, Toys R’ Us, Circuit City, Party City, Payless, etc etc etc. This is how Thiel made his Billions and what Vance did before pretending to be a politician. Lately they’ve been going after the funeral home industry and veterinary clinics.

The Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theories were based on the Jade Helm 15 United States military training exercise, which took place in multiple U.S. states between July 15 and September 15, 2015. The exercise, which involved 1,200 personnel from four of the five branches of the U.S. military, was designed to train soldiers in skills needed to operate in overseas combat environments, including maneuvering through civilian populations. The announcements of these training exercises raised concerns and generated conspiracy theories, mostly from Alex Jones, that the exercise was a hostile military takeover.

Damn employees expecting to be fairly compensated for their labor. Don’t they know they’re literally stealing from the executive’s bonuses?

Are*

Please take it from me. I and many others have also carelessly bet on RAID as a backup and lost. I know storage is expensive but you’ve got to at least back up the important things.

He could give every member of the committee a billion dollars and be none the poorer for it.

Not that you’re wrong, but with a tyrant of his means, who’s essentially above the law, well…

I’d definitely rather boot windows, but to each his own.

Canonically he does it to honor his master.

The LCD model is not compatible with wifi 6 :(

Hell yeah, dude.

Only posers create open source projects as a promotion tool

So it’s a masters with practical experience.

A website could open your freaking CD tray.

Ah, memories.

Well like I said you can start running servers right now for free with your desktop. Then your best bet is in my opinion going to be buying a NUC, Elitedesk, or another smaller form factor PC, this will save you on energy costs and noise, and flashing truenas to it (Or you can run everything you need to in Windows or Linux or containers if that’s what you’re comfortable with) and using either external hard drives or getting a hard drive array and using that to store everything. This is going to cost more than a Synology and takes a little setting up but it’s infinitely expandable and will suit your needs whatever they become. And don’t forget the 3-2-1 rule of backups. These rules are written in blood. And RAID is not a backup, I learned that one the hard way, myself.

Totally fair. I’m actually in the process of building a dedicated Proxmox VM host / TrueNAS server to ease up on my little media server, but for a quiet and powerful yet economical little package these mini PCs are great for the task. After all this time the only modification I’ve had to make was adding a 2.5Gb compatible NIC.

You said it yourself.

Extra points if I could host my ebooks and music there and run a torrent client. Extra extra points if I could connect to it from outside my home network (and stream)

To start, if you’re using it to torrent your media then you’re going to want it running in the background because you need to seed your torrents. Aside from it being the right thing to do, keeping a good ratio is necessary to get into good private trackers. And torrents aren’t great for music, at least not in my experience, so you’ll probably want soulseek as well. That also requires sharing in the background. You could buy a seedbox and torrent through that, but if you were going to go that route you could just do everything you’re trying to do through a seedbox instead of getting a NAS, and it wouldn’t take long for the subscription costs to surpass the costs of self hosting.

So now you’ve got qbittorrent, soulseek, Plex, and Kavita or similar for ebooks. What else could you want over time? Do you want to host audiobooks, too? Comics/manga/magazines? Maybe you want to streamline and automate the downloading process. Maybe your mom can’t stream her favorite show anymore so you decide to share your library with her. Maybe you want to be able to search and download anything from any device anywhere, and maybe you want your mom to be able to as well.

Why stop there. Maybe you want to self host your own file and picture cloud storage as well. Maybe Mom’s, too. Maybe you want to start blocking ads on your network at a DNS level. Maybe you want your phone to use your home network even when you’re out and about. The possibilities increase exponentially once you start getting into self hosting.

I don’t want to hear the fans

That being said I have a good number of the above tasks running on an HP elitedesk mini g9 and it stays pretty quiet. The spinning disks make noise though lol

Edit: After reading through the rest of the replies I understand your situation a bit more. I see you don’t want to build something or run it on your current desktop. It’s hard to tell you which way to go without knowing at least your current budget and storage expectations. Because you can get a Synology and it will work out of the box for your needs right now, as someone said, but, you will be throwing money away that could better go towards more storage or compute, and in the end you’re limited to their walled garden. As someone else said, you’d be much better off with TrueNAS as your OS. It all depends how much time, energy and money you’re willing to throw at the problem. That is to say, are you looking for a hobby or are you looking for a solution? In any case, installing Plex on your desktop is the easiest and most common first step. You can set up a small library and test it out, see how loud it gets and how much power it draws if that’s your concern. You will be streaming media to your bed by bedtime. Learn how to use it, then when you figure out your next steps it is easy enough to migrate, or just start over with the wisdom you’ve gained along the way. And YouTube is a good enough resource for this. There’s a variety of steb-by-step NAS builds. And though there are definitely guys on there that don’t know what they’re talking about, if you watch enough NAS building videos you’ll catch on quick enough to the necessary components. Anyway hope that helps.

Setting up a pi-hole is as easy as some kind of baked desert. Flash your OS to the SD card, boot, install. Follow the prompts and you’ll be golden. The hardest part, depending on your router, may potentially be giving it a static IP and setting it as your DNS server, but those steps are also usually pretty easy.

Ah, no I appreciate the back and forth. I was looking into Overseerr once upon a time, but my Plex server is running in a Windows VM and I didn’t want to mess with Windows Docker. A python script and a few HTML files seemed much easier at the time and got the desired result. I am eventually planning to migrate the server to Linux, but haven’t had the time and energy and would have to literally schedule the downtime with my family. It still doesn’t look like Overseerr integrates with Soularr or Readarr but I’ve made a note to play around a bit with it in the future.