I started with the Black Widow fallout 3 perk figuring there world be more male characters than female when fighting.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Widow_(Fallout_3)

EFFECTS
+10% damage against male opponents
Additional dialogue options with certain male characters

It stuck after that.

I don’t care how big or small it is, as long as it remains real.

I believe I’ve seen more organic conversation in the fediverse than I have on any other platform.

It’s either bots, ads or ad bots everywhere else.

Being tiny makes it less appealing to the megacorp cunts that would want to ruin it.

I’ve posted it repeatedly but I’d like to add the (paid extension) Vinegar extension as a recommendation for iOS Safari.
Enable extension, add YT to home screen and stop seeing ads.
Combined with Banish for Safari - stopping the “open in app” popups on websites, my online experience is golden.

I used to own both a Series X, PS5 and have my gaming PC (all in the same room - desktop currently has an i5 13500, RTX 3090 24GB, 4TB of NVME storage & 128GB ram)

Got myself a 5m hdmi lead capable of driving my 4k/120 TV and just ended up using my pc for everything now.

I just switch sources between my monitor and tv when I want to game on the couch. Any mouse/keyboard input needed, I do it on the Unified remote app on my phone and fire up Steam big picture on the tv.

Sold the PS5 and XBOX and ditched two more subscriptions hitting me every month.

No regrets so far.

Are classic side scrollers ok to suggest?

• Golden Axe (Arcade)
• Altered Beast (Arcade)
• Double Dragon (Arcade)
• Streets of Rage (Arcade)
• Bad dudes vs DragonNinja (Arcade)
• Die Hard Arcade (Model 2 Arcade)
• The Simpsons (Arcade)
• Bruce Lee (ZX Spectrum)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES)
• Fighting Force (PSX)

Fighting as the car (hornet) from Daytona USA on Fighters Megamix is the one for me.

Working really great for me. I originally just bought it to run Pihole on a dedicated machine and have a secondary pihole instance on my Unraid server in case either of them went down but leaving it sitting there with just PiVPN and Pihole duties seemed wasteful.

I’m getting even more out of it running some of the lighter containers on it with plenty of spare room to do more.

I’ve logged/uploaded my upgrade process here just so you can get some ideas on what I did.
https://imgur.com/a/ExcLdtt

It is bulkier than a raspberry pi, being around the size of a router but the low cost and being able to utilise hardware that I had sitting doing nothing made me go this route rather than just getting a pi.

If you want something small and cheap, it might be worth getting a used thin client PC.

I got a cheap £20 Igel thin client from eBay as raspberry pi’s were still far too expensive, plus I already had a spare 4GB ddr3 sodimm to drop into it and a 120gb wd green ssd that I’d stripped from its case and fitted internally into the thin client.

After upgrading it one ended up with a 1.2ghz AMD GX-412 cpu, 4gb DDR3, 120gb sata ssd and an external usb 3 1tb hard drive i also had laying around.

As a component of my homelab, it’s running Debian 12, docker with a few containers (pigallery 2, Libreddit, portainer, searXNG), it’s my backup Emby server and my main Pihole and PiVPN client.

Completely silent, sips power and still has capacity spare to run more containers and other projects that catch my interest.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Igel/ud/ud3/M340C/

I use it to access any websites that I want to that Virgin Media block due to court orders issued by the UK high court.

Just set this up on my Unraid server and it’s amazing. Great suggestion and thank you.

I hate where the internet is right now.

Anyone trying to get information written by a human or decent benchmarks of CPUs is in for a real crap time.

Just tested i5 12400 vs i3 12100f and was met with results in this order:

1. Userbenchmark
2. Userbenchmark
3. CPU-Monkey
4. 3 shitty YouTube videos of obviously fake gameplay benchmarks (that’s a whole other thing on YouTube)
5. Technical city
6. cpubenchmark.net - the first kind of decent result as it’s from the people at passmark.
7. versus (dot com)
8. gadget versus
9. pc Praha (dot cz)
10. cpu-compare
11. cpu-panda

The crap just goes on. SEO optimised lists of (at best) affiliate link laden spec sheets with no real information form an actual human.

I’ve got 2 pihole instances in my home, one on my Unraid server in a Debian VM as a backup in case the main one goes down.

The main one is running from a cheap Igel M340c thin client I bought off eBay for around £20 ($25) running Ubuntu Server.

Cheaper than a Raspberry Pi at the moment and perfect for running a Pihole on.

If you want something cheap, consider a used thin client machine.

When I got into my gaming rut I took some time off and got into Homelabbing. Used to scroll through my extensive steam library and nothing caught my interest so I needed something new.

Learned about different NAS Os’s, Docker, Linux and seeing what I could get out of some low-powered hardware and what I loved most was learning new things.

Started with a Raspberry Pi when they weren’t stupid expensive and moved onto a cheap Intel Nuc to my home made, small form factor NAS running Unraid and a 2nd cheap Thin Client running Ubuntu Server.

I focussed on doing more with my computer hardware and for a long while, didn’t feel the necessity to game much, then one day I fired up Forza Horizon 4 and had a good, enjoyable 5 hour session on it.

Now I’m back into re-playing Horizon Zero Dawn, I plan to move onto Forbidden West after and tearing around the UK and Mexico in Forza Horizon 4/5.

See if you can find another hobby or something that can enhance your knowledge on something you’ve never tried before for a while, one day you ,ignite just fire up a game after having a rest and get that spark back.

Just claimed that and Neverwinter Nights, I always forget to check each week!
Thanks.