It’s been over a year since the last big Starlink outage. That’s a lot better than my old DSL provider.

802.11ac was a huge improvement over 802.11n. The later versions have only given a small performance increase unless you don’t have neighbors and can run wide channels.

The video playback should get choppy if the CPU is overloaded, the PC shouldn’t shut down from that. It sounds like your CPU may be overheating. I would suggest monitoring the CPU temperature while playing the video.

Piracy never got anywhere close to dying. TV and movie piracy dropped a bit when there were decent streaming services though.

Lots of people got used to watching what they want, when they want it. Now that the streaming services have all enshittified, loads of people are turning to piracy because it provides better service.

Any computer that meets the minimum requirements for Fedora will support booting from USB. The only reason left to boot from a DVD is if you need read only media for security purposes.

You don’t need a static IP address, but you do need a public IP address. You can use dynamic DNS to avoid having to keep track of your IP address. FreeDNS will work fine for a basic setup.

Wireguard is one of the easiest VPN servers to use. If you’re not using your ISP’s router, it may even have Wireguard built in.

Don’t give the tech companies any ideas.

Ads used to be static text in the sidebar that the site owner manually put there. They didn’t have any tracking and didn’t slow down the loading time. Once they started adding images, I started using an ad blocker. I was stuck on dial-up until 2008 and a single, small image could add 10 or more seconds to the page loading time.

You can find used Thinkcenters pretty cheap with AMD CPUs. I recently got an M75s Gen2 with a Ryzen 3 4350G for around $100.

Normal DVDs are not good for archival. Cheap ones can degrade in less than 10 years. You want to get the M-disc ones for long term storage.

LTO tape is good for 30 years when properly stored. You should be transferring the data to a newer format much sooner than that anyways. LTO drives are only backwards compatible for 1 or 2 versions, so you probably won’t be able to find a working drive that can read your tape 30 years later.

Is it x264 or AV1? They are two completely different codecs. If it’s AV1, you may not have hardware acceleration since it’s fairly new. It takes a lot of power to software decode AV1 and you will get dropped frames if the CPU can’t keep up.

I’ve never had to defragment the ext4 drives in my server. Ext4 is fairly resistant to fragmentation.

Solar panels are already quite cheap. What we need is much cheaper grid forming inverters so we can stop destabilizing the grid with solar.

You basically need a supercomputer for windows 11 to not run like complete shit. Linux will run well on 15 year old hardware, although I wouldn’t suggest anything that old if you care about power consumption.

I haven’t had any issues with my RX 6700 XT. It works great for games and CAD. I’ve never gotten the video encoding working though. I think it needs the proprietary drivers.

My newest PC only supports PCIe 3.0. My SSDs are still plenty fast, at least until they start thermal throttling.

I used packet writing for a while when I got my first DVD-RW drive. A few years later, multi gigabyte flash drives became affordable and there was no need to mess with DVD-RWs anymore.

It’s an important thing to have in an emergency. The remaining cell towers will probably be overloaded, but you will likely still be able to hear an FM broadcast station to find out if you need to evacuate and where to go.

I don’t think a mobile version would be practical, they don’t have enough processing power. Blender needs a high end PC.