I live in a dry but mountainous area. I’d like to see them pump water uphill with any overpower so we can just use turbines to recapture that energy later. The average american keeps impressing me with their turnip-level intellect to the point where I don’t want them running a carwash, much less a nuclear reactor. There are a lot of IRL Homer Simpsons out there.

I would check out Recallbox. It’s quite polished feeling and looking. It can run on a raspberry pi, or something more powerful. You mention accessing the files and I liked the SMB access because I could just cut and paste my new ROMs over from the PC or phone. I imagine you could set up a script to do this automatically or just expose a read only SMB server for your friends to access. If your games are older, like Atari or Sega Genesis this would work great. If you have big ROMs like Gamecube or Xbox, then you’ll probably need a different solution since copying entire romsets to the device itself may not be practical.

I have seen a DIY Steam-ish software floating around, hopefully someone pitches in to get you that link as well.

I hope your project goes well!

Same, once I got PWM set up right on my fans, my desktop former gaming PC server has been 90% silent. Even when under load, it only kicks up a notch or two. I’m under the roof, so my summer temps will be the real test.

Thanks for the reply. At this point, I’ve decided I’ll need to try both. Fortunately my old router still works. I just need to make some hardware decisions now as I don’t have any hardware with multiple lan ports to try it out on. I don’t want to buy twice, so I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to need to overshoot my requirements a bit but not go crazy overboard and overspending for unused specs. My current router is the GliNet Flint 2 which has an open-WRT advance mode that I’ve messed with a little bit.

Sounds like you are pretty far along in your networking journey. I can appreciate the vLans and the 10G backbone, but a lot of the hardware you mention is over my head. :D I’d take the miniPC route, but like you, I’d like to attach my 4g router as a failover.

Glad to know I’m not alone! Sometimes it feels like everyone else has either figured it all out, or I’m charting new (and potentially silly) territory and nobody knows wtf I’m doing.

I’ve been doing Linux stuff for a long time, but I was still living under my parent’s roof back then so I never had to network anything, I just had the wifi password. After school, out in the world, I still didn’t have my own network for quite some time. Only in the last few years have I really started to grasp how it works well enough to actually do something useful with that knowledge. I’ll take a look at ipfire too. Luckily my current router is still functioning okay, so I have time to play around and see what software will work for me. Right now I have to make some sort of decision about hardware because I don’t have anything with dual ethernet on hand.

I have the fiber ONT straight from the wall. The tech support guys at my ISP gave me all the details I needed to configure my own current router (GLInet Flint 2). I’ve just been not trusting corporate solutions lately. I’m almost completely degoogled on my phone and the recent router banning drama is encouraging me to do this now instead of later when I had originally wanted to do it.

This is good info. I remember hearing a little bit of that and someone set me straight on DDWRT vs OpenWRT as well. I think I’ll take OPNsense for a spin.

Thanks for the reply.

I have devices I could use, but they’re earmarked for other projects. I’m looking at acquiring hardware specifically for this project. I could acquire it at a garage sale or a classified ads site. I don’t really want to spend more than $350 if I can help it and even then, I have to be able to justify that to myself somehow. (since that almost enough to add another 2TB of SSDs to my server). Having said that, if the features I want are only present in pricier hardware, I want to find that out now.

I have a 4g WiFi router I carry around when I travel that I call “the hocky puck”. It also has an ethernet port, so when I’m home, I take the battery out and attach it to my router as a backup in case the fiber fails. If I want to do the same thing on OPNsense, I would need to add an expansion card with more network ports, right? That would steer me from miniPCs to barebones router hardware or a small-form-factor PC build where I could add as many NICS as I have PCI slots.

Does wanting a 2nd WAN pretty much rule out mini-PCs for me?

Even in my God Tier build-dreams, I only have 2WANS a LAN and a management LAN. :D

.fart because decades of growing up haven’t quite cured my potty humor.

They stopped indexing years ago if I recall correctly. If they still had search results, they were probably white-labled. Doesn’t take much to beat modern google results though. 🙂

Yeah, I remember disliking it back in the day (Alta Vista gang!!!🅰️♈), but I wish they evolved and got better rather than shutting down and I am still sad to see it go.

Yeah, these ineffective fines need to stop. perhaps the following would work better:

1st offense: warning, public humiliation, reparations to the wronged. 2nd offense: meaningfully huge fine 3rd offense: even bigger fine and c-level prosecutions. 4th offense: stop work order and c-level prosecutions and personal liability. 5th offense: public tar and feathering.

I have an XPS 13 9370. It’s still chugging along great on Linux. No real slowdowns. Drives an external 4k monitor with no lag or issues. Like you, I’ve had to replace the battery… 2-4 times by now. A $30 battery every 2 years seems like a pretty reasonable price to keep this champ running. It looks like the framework may be my next laptop though. I’ve been watching them for a while now. That or system 76.

I’m new to mesh and have some radios on meshtastic, but none on meshcore, yet.

Help me understand the implications of this. Does this mean people will have to reflash existing infastructure to ensure they’re on whatever fork/branch ends up favored by the community? Will it split the community geographically?

Yeah, it was top notch, right up there with Nova for a year or two. Oh how the great have fallen!

I think we’ll also see more of a differentiation between things grounded in open source ideology, like the FSF, and more corporate open source. I can’t blame coders for any ideological impurity because I don’t imagine that “buy me a coffee” button exactly fills up their bank vault with gold coins. That said, I appreciate the free software heroes who visualize what the world should be and work towards that. Maybe in the coming decade, we’ll see FOSS hardware make some leaps and bounds. I choose to remain optimistic, but the software world is threatening to catastrophically implode at the moment and it’s a bit hard to think positive.

Software like Firefox is designed in a modular way for humans to be able to reason about its correctness. It is complex, but not arbitrarily complex.

So take out the free VPN and Pocket and it’ll be less complex! ¯\(ツ)/¯

Nova was so customizable. I used those same group, tab features a lot over the years. Categories like: Network, Games, PIM, Storage, Images, Comms, etc, can take a lot of clutter out of your main drawer, not to mention Nova let you customize the visuals to a extensive point.

I remember using one called Apex around the days of early Nova and the two of them would swap who was in the lead and who was the better launcher. I haven’t found an open source launcher that gives me what I want.

I’m going to support local anti-authoritarian punk and hip hop until they do away with this.