Many DNS providers offer privacy options. They’ll put their own information in the WHOIS database and forward relevant stuff to you.

Just put it on a USB stick. No install, no commitment. Baby steps.

Yeah I saw that. Not ideal, but there aren’t a ton of games I play that really need that throttle.

That looks super cool, but unfortunately I can’t spare CAD$483 for it :(

8bitdo controllers are great, I have the SN30 Pro. But the 2C Ultimate doesn’t have that right joystick in the position I’m looking for.

Dang, this is definitely the winner. I’m a fan of Nintendo’s controllers, but never had a WiiU so didn’t realize they were in that configuration. Thanks!

Weirdly, it seems like the only non-modular part are the buttons on the right side. You can swap out the right stick for other things (like additional buttons), but you can’t put a stick up top. A bit above my price range, but a super cool idea.

Nope, thumbs on the joysticks and fingers on the triggers, with the thumbs leaving the joysticks if the buttons are needed. Same way I use any other controller, but I find the upper positioning of the joystick to be more comfortable and intuitive for FPS games.

Oh dang, I’m actually totally into that. Thanks!

I’ve had good experiences with 8bitdo. There’s this one that looks more reminiscent of a SNES controller, but has the layout you’re looking for.

I’ve got Jellyfin running on an odroid, and it’s pretty solid.

Not sure if you’re the type to need access to your home network while away, but I also use a pi zero as my “login gateway”–I forward just port 22 to it from the WAN, and I have ssh set up to only allow logins with a key. I can set up dynamic port forwarding and tunnel through to my home network, and that pi zero has no other function (so even if I screw something else up on another server, I can still access my network).

Typically a web browser or dedicated app, but it’s open source so there are options. You might be able to stream directly with VLC, not sure.

Not sure if it supports all of that, but yt-dlp is my go-to.

At least 12, probably.

It depends on the way you like to learn.

If you like to play around with things and look things up as you need, go with a beginner-friendly distro (Mint, ElementaryOS, and Pop!OS are all good options). This gives a more immediate payoff (in that there are lots of fun things to experiment with right away), but you’ll learn things kinda piecemeal.

If you like to learn by reading first, then starting with the absolute minimum and gradually working your way up, something like Arch might be great for you. It’s a much slower process and has a much steeper learning curve, but if you have the discipline for it, you’ll come out with a really solid understanding of how things work.

Most people start with something simple, and venture into the more intimidating waters when they feel comfortable. If you’re not sure, try Mint and go from there. You can always wipe it and install Arch later (if you don’t have anything important on this laptop, you can try lots of different ones without worrying about migrating or losing anything).

The answer also depends on your level of experience and how much you want to learn doing this. You mentioned you haven’t done this before, but are you otherwise comfortable using computers and figuring things out? Are you familiar with Linux and/or the command line? In addition, are you hoping to tinker around and learn a lot from this, or are you more concerned with just setting it up so you can use it?

There are options for all levels of expertise and technical interest, but I recommend starting with any hardware you already have or can aquire for cheap/free (especially if you’re hoping to tinker and learn more). As another commenter suggested, finding an old desktop or laptop and putting a NAS operating system on it would be a great starting project. Then once you play around with it, you’ll know if/where you want to spend some cash on something better. If you don’t have old PCs laying around, check on whatever you use for local buy & sell listings, you can probably pick up something for pretty cheap.

If you’re mostly looking to play around and you don’t have any extra hardware, you can also try things out in a virtual machine (download VirtualBox), which will let you learn without any monetary investment.

I’m using my old desktop from 2010. There’s no such thing as a server that can “do it all”, but any computer from the last 10 years would probably be a fine place to start. The more you do, the more likely you’ll be to hit some sort of performance limit, and by that time you’ll know more about what you actually want.

In short, find old cheap/free hardware and start playing around.

“The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there’s not really a point in doing this. Maybe the original meaning of these assignments has been lost or is not being communicated to them well.”

The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. (In a recent survey, Deloitte found that just over half of college graduates believe their education was worth the tens of thousands of dollars it costs a year, compared with 76 percent of trade-school graduates.) In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?”

This is the root of the issue, and why it won’t get better until academia is turned upside down. Those handful of professors who still have a soul might value critical thinking skills, but the academic industry as a whole is perfectly fine with all of this. The cash flows, the customers enroll and graduate with their product, the machine works as designed.

But this is the part that keeps me up at night:

The problem may be much larger than generative AI. The so-called Flynn effect refers to the consistent rise in IQ scores from generation to generation going back to at least the 1930s. That rise started to slow, and in some cases reverse, around 2006. “The greatest worry in these times of generative AI is not that it may compromise human creativity or intelligence,” Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell University, told The Guardian, “but that it already has.”

If we’ve peaked intellectually as a society, we’re completely and thoroughly fucked.

I’ve been on both sides of the interview table, and yeah it’s not hard to figure out who lives up to their CV. But unfortunately, that giant pool of useless grads clogs up the already horrible HR pipeline. A lot of good people are turned away before an engineer gets to talk to them.