It is not recommended to run the arr stack through a VPN because cloudflare will cause problems. Only the torrent client should go through the VPN.

Inleed.xyz has free email hosting with IMAP and POP3 access. You can have as many accounts as you want, but there’s a limit of 1GB shared between all of them.

They’ve had it for years. It can be difficult to sign up for though.

You get a lot of resources for free, but don’t use them for anything important. They can nuke your account for any reason.

You can also use exFAT if you want cross platform support. It’s had a Linux kernel driver for quite a while now.

Yes, they do require you to use their nameservers unless you have a business account.

Maybe we shouldn’t make most of the internet reliant on one company.

Some people modify phones to run without an internal battery. That’s a bit of a pain since the screen will have to be detached and there will be wires hanging out though.

Laptops are easier. Most of them will still boot with the battery disconnected. They will usually show a warning during boot and some of them will require you to press a key to continue booting. Running without a battery may limit the performance, especially if you’re not using the highest wattage charger the laptop supports.

I used to use dynv6, but I started having issues about 2 years ago. DNS records would just stop resolving until I deleted and recreated them. Their forum has been broken for years, so there’s no way to get support.

If you only need 5 records or less, give FreeDNS a try.

That means apps tend to stop working if the developers don’t keep updating them. Mobile operating systems much, much worse backwards compatibility than windows. If the device hosts its own website instead of using an app, it will most likely work fine decades from now without any updates.

Mobile apps bit rot pretty quickly when they stop updating them. A web UI would be better. A server or internet connection is not needed, a web UI can be hosted directly on the device.

That hardware still has plenty of power for basic use. It should be good for another 10 years running Linux.

Keep the firewall on dedicated hardware. You don’t want your whole network going down because you have to do some work on the server.

I had an upgrade fail and completely break the install a long time ago. I haven’t tried a distribution upgrade since then. I just format and install a new distro every couple of years. It cleans out all the crap I end up with from 3rd party repositories and stuff I’ve compiled from source. I’m sure upgrades probably work a lot better now though.

I did have Arch running on one of my laptops for quite a while, but I quit using it after it started falling apart.

I’ve got a 16MB MMC card that I use as an offline backup for my password manager database. It’s old enough that it uses SLC flash, so I don’t have to worry about data retention time.

I use it as a modifier key for all of the shortcuts I create since nothing uses it by default.

Just use a mini PC and pirate everything. The amazon fire interface sucks anyways. Every streaming service is in a different app and you have to remember which app to use for each show.

There is Tiny Core Linux if you want something small like the original DSL.

You can use the 3040 to build an AllStar node.

I would use point to point wireless links between the buildings. Then connect an access point to the link to provide WiFi to the building. Something like the Omada EAP211 should work well for the link.