Hand it over to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

There are way less productive and interesting hobbies and interests.

My honest opinion: literally any hobby or interest that makes you happy and makes your life better is productive and valid and should be encouraged, but i do have an acquaintance who once in a while forgets I am a nerd with a nerd son and a nerd’s ability to google productively and extensively. I do not need to play to know how much it costs for serious gameplay when you’re into Magic the Gathering so you really want to talk about my forays onto Newark, Mouser, and Adafruit? He does not.

(Honestly, I’d bankrupt myself if i was into Magic the Gathering; I am not a gamer and stick with stuff like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley and Final Fantasy because I only have two modes; casual and competitive murder if it hits me right. Even thinking about getting into DnD makes me a little nervous; in theory it seems like I’d be okay but that transformation into Seperis-Hyde is really distressing.)

I bought Home Assistant Blue from Ameridroid, which was Home Assistant’s first (and happily still continuing) jump into making Home Assistant more accessible and easy if you weren’t a hobbyist or tinkerer: Odroid N2+ preloaded with Home Assistant OS, a super adorable blue case, and power supply. That was my first experience with that board and with eMMC; 128 GB of it, talk about turning my head (also 4 GB RAM). Honestly, the only reason I didn’t get another is I didn’t have a project that required it; the reason I even found out the Beagles existed was the Open Source Border Router project I wanted to do had it as an option for the walk-through and gave me a reason to test drive.

But I have to agree: I’ve been running it straight for three years now and the Odroid does its job with zero issues. Home Assistant and its parts have given me problems, but Blue (yes, it’s name is Blue, it was just there) never does.

No, and even with the Pis, that woud be only the Pi Zero/Zero 2 range. I bought Andromeda Pi (Pi4 8GB) right before COVID and the board alone generally ran $64 for that model (less for 1, 2, 4 GB) but that was before mandatory accessorise; Andromeda’s kit was $115 therabouts.

The only equivalentish board with low overhead is the BeagleBone Black (~$65 for the board, ~$10 for the case, ~$7 for the power, ~$8 for the sd card = ~$90). It has eMMC but only 4GB (you can actually run from that but only Single Project use cases) or you use sd card. I will say, either sd cards have improved tremendously since I first ran my Pi’s off them or Beagle and Pi Zero 2 are witches, because other than during initial install/updates (which yeah, is slow as hell) or running some heavy work, response time is fine. On my Black, boot is roughly equal to my Pis who all run on the fastest usb drives I could find or a dedicated NVME. My Play is the fastest going off eMMC (it has 16 GB so I can run from it), but that’s ‘holy shit’ territory so I don’t use it as a baseline for anyone else.

In case anyone ever needs this: Silicon Power 3D NAND is almost shockingly fast. I got the rec off a tech website, invested $8, and was indeed shocked. Boot time is great. I haven’t gone above 64 GB cards, though.

I’m testing the SAMSUNG PRO Plus, which also seems to be performing amazingly, but the size (128 GB) is still giving me pause.

Completely subjective experience: above 64 GB, sd cards seem to slow down faster regardless of how much data you actually have on them. I could be imagining it, but that feeling goes back to before Pi’s were bootable from USB.

I consider SBCs drastically overhyped these days. RaspberryPi was nice enough when it was released a decade ago, but these days you can just get a Beelink or similar miniPC, which is much more capable and often even cheaper. It doesn’t have the GPIO, but even if you need that, you are generally better served with a cheap MCU connected to USB.

I would put it another way; they’re ideal for You Have One Vital Job Only projects; Home Assistant and Pihole are my two specific, but robotics, a router, even a dedicated NAS would be a use case. I could run a lot of things on a mini PC with a hypervisor–soon, I shall start be experimenting with that–but One Vital Job Only projects are ones that do their thing without me ideally ever noticing them other than maintenance, if that makes sense. And even more important, things I should not tinker with because they’re just fine, which is why I ended up building a second, dedicated Media Server/media ripping/encoding/NAS machine; once I did that, I finally had a stable media library I could access for more than a month at a time before I got An Idea That Would Be Fun and Oops Time To Reinstall (seriously; before I built that machine, I had to run my media and plex from a Pi (aka One Vital Job) because if I put it on my main machine, I’d tinker it to death; hence, separate everything. I am basically hiding the cookies from a three year old and I am the three year old).

Tentatively–and this applies to a much smaller population–they’re perfect for deconstructing the Linux kernel and operating systems in general because you get to work at a reduced scale. I have the repository for the Pi kernel in my bookmarks and go to just read through it and get familiar when I have some time or if I remember something I want to look for (my usb wifi dongle testing project was invaluable for how much kernel homework I had to do, it’s hilarious). I know and can write in basic C++, I know how to compile, but I still don’t pretend to understand the kernel; with the Pi’s scale, though, I can grasp it, if that makes sense. I can recognize the structure and begin to get how things fit together. I can even–tentatively–find specific parts, identify drivers, especially when it comes to specific removable hardware where it’s fairly obvious and easy to follow (following actual driver files…that’s in progress). My goal before I die is to be able to read and follow the entire kernel end to end; I think I’m going to need to look into the benefits of reincarnation or cryogenics admittedly, but hope springs eternal.

(BeagleBones–if nothing else–has seriously upped my game on Figure It Out For Yourself. Which yes is a very me-specific use case, requires more homework to get context than literally every class I’m taking combined including TCP/IP class, and I literally don’t have time to do in more than sprints, but did lead to me literally being able to making my first Universal New Install Checklist (covers every Linux operating system I’ve ever used including all my personal configurations and scripts, in order, with all exceptions) and my first foray into creating an auto-install-and-configure script I can run on a new machine. Yes, those Beagles had me doing a clean install that many times. No idea what I’m doing there and I really wish there was a universal template for that.)

Having said that, I haven’t jumped into MiniPC/hypervisor culture so I am up for changing my mind the minute I make the leap. And seriously, this thread has moved it actively up my priority list, which I did not see coming, so thank you for that.

My favourite toy at the moment is actually my StarFive VisionFive 2 RISCV board, its been fun trying it out and getting applications to compile on it which don’t officially support RISC-V.

You are living the dream. And I need to google that more.

Oh, this is a nice collection!! If you want to experiment, either RPi will support Open Thread Board Router if you’re into that, or a NAS; I ran one off Pi 4 with OpenMediaVault and it did not even dent its resources.

I am now wondering if I should start looking into my own firewalls.

ADHD here: I live for finding people who know how to enjoy their hobby correctly: like you’re invading a country and taking no prisoners.

I’m using a Netgear r7800 with ddwrt, with hopes to eventually move dhcp handling over to the Zima Board.

I am seriously feeling the Zima, but I just went over to Orbi Pro 6–yes, I gave in for Wifi 6 and no regrets, the coverage with just one satellite and the router is unreal. I’m trying to decide if I’ll have time, but I really desperately want to learn OpenWRT; my first try was–well, there hasn’t been a second one. But there will be. I picked up some (read; too many) USB Wifi dongles via rmorrow’s list of linux compatible ones, so I could try and test drive a diy wifi router with it. God, that sounds fun.

The transcoding problem is one that keeps popping up. Depending on your price point, the NVIDIA SHIELD Pro (latest) can handle anything–and it is a genuinely amazing streamer and really spoils you for most of the rest–but that means it would only work when watching using that over Plex or whatever media server software you can put on it. And I think the X-Box? When I was researching during COVID, the only other all-in-one option was a full dedicated server with either Threadripper or something in that family; I think when I did the math, just for the processor, my minimum investment for 4K and Atmos/7.1 was roughly $600-$800 if I was lucky, and that’s before the board and like, a sound system that does Atmos.

I know there were some other possible options with hardware, but it’s been a while. If I think of anything, I’ll bookmark this page to post here. Hopefully you’ll find something you like and will work for you. I know exactly how frustrating it is finding a solution.

My dude, that is beautiful I now need to google C.H.I.P to see what’s going on. And yeah, my Black is seriously solid.

I love how my post about SBCs is slowly but surely pushing me to test out a mini-PC sooner than later. Added to hardware wish list for future mulling after the move; I really do want to start learning the ins and outs of how to use a hypervisor and it’s really convenient to have recommended options to pick from for what to run it on.

Friend, this reply is beautiful. And reading the Zima site, I may be sold. What do you use to run the network? OpenWRT, DDWRT, Tomato?

And forget about trying to transcode Blu-ray rips, which most of my devices can’t stream natively, so transcode is the only option.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am unqualified to advise on anything; thanks to COVID, I got deathly into making a media server and ran into the transcoding problem followed by making a spreadsheet and experimenting and documenting my results.

My results (other can disagree): all my transcoding problems came down to audio streams and subtitles. None of this may apply to you, but just in case.

I approached it from three points: a.) I got the NVIDIA Pro to run Plex as NVIDIA can handle anything; b.) I made a server just for my media processing and storage (it also runs Plex as a secondary instance when my Shield is in use). I use MakeMKV for the raw rip into an mkv container with all audio streams. The rip I process through Handbrake so I can get as close to a clone as I can (4K to 4K, 1080p to 1080p, etc) with full original audio then make a copy of each and every audio stream into the equivalent container that was compatible with the sound limitations of whatever I was planning to stream it on. Example: my Sonos speakers wanted Dolby: DTS 7.1 to TrueHD. I also did a third copy of each stream into the equivalent AAC containers: TrueHD to AAC 7.1 to future proof. I also added a fourth copy that’s a basic AAC 2.0 that rolls with anything; and c.) Subtitles: turn them off and use open subtitles files so no one has to deal with bitmaps. I tested through Plex to make sure, and watched for the switch from direct play to transcode, then reverified on my Windows machine, etc.

Yes, it will eat hard drive space like whoa–uncompressed audio streams do that–but with surprisingly few exceptions, I can get direct play for 4K on pretty much anything now, not just Plex. I also create multiple resolutions using either original rip 4K or original rip 1080p as source but with the same audio mapping (that’s a me-thing and also, Covid). I know this sounds like a ridic amount of work, but once I set all the profiles, it’s basically a batch job. My total movie library sits at 400 movies with about 1200 files; last year I re-audited my Handbrake profiles, deleted everything but my source rips (and actually did a mass re-rip on the older ones that I did before I started compiling the latest ffmpeg to use when compiling MakeMKV), and re-encoded everything using those profiles. Total time was about two weeks end to end; I did them in batches of fifty and checked in every six hours to move completed files back into my media drives and also restart.

The only ones now that need me to personally go in and make corrections are the remastered releases like Apocalypse Now and Scarface (my files were twice the size of the original, it was unreal). Every one of them rips huge and needs slightly different profile tweaks, so those I oversee personally.

I don’t know if any of this is relevant to your setup, but I reverified running Plex on one of my Pis and it could direct play at least 90% of the 4K and anything lower, and the 4K problems seem to all be with those remasters.

My dude, you made me google, but fine; RockPro on Ameridroid is on my short list. I’ve been meaning to follow up on that one, so bookmarked the homepage.

What do you use it for?

I want to see it.

I really honestly wish more Linux users would throw open their personal libraries of scripts that made their lives easier. Yes, probably 99% of them are super idiosyncratic to do This One Thing the user needed done or are the same ten or fifteen everyone has discovered for themselves but I bet most of them have a piece of code in them that’s does this thing I didn’t know I could automate or could be a template for this other thing I want to do and didn’t even know where to start or I just want to look at and go ‘wow, you really went all out with that, this is art I want to frame this, holy shit’ even though all it does is like move a file.

For aesthetics: Budgie, with Cinnamon a close second For simplicity and speed: XFCE