Hi, sorry I just saw this. “SFF” is short for “small form factor.” It’s just industry jargon for “a small PC.” They tend to be designed to use less power which makes them a good fit for home servers. Pretty much any line of PC sold to businesses, like Dell Optiplex or HP EliteDesk, will have small form factor variants.

Shout out for ODROID, their product revision cycles take too long (lmao why are they still selling a 32-bit chip that was an iffy investment back in 2013), but when they drop new stuff, it tends to be great.

Bonus: there is a literally endless supply of used x86 SFF hardware from large institutions, so unlike SBC’s, there’s no special, weird supply chain managed by an English educational nonprofit that could just suddenly decide to not sell to the public for years at a time.

I’m not saying you should care too much about the TOS, I just found it an interesting question.

They never actually stopped making offline MP3 players, they just went out of style.

Not that you should buy off Amazon, just to give you an idea – https://www.amazon.com/touchscreen-mp3-player/s?k=touchscreen+mp3+player

Tons of name-brand options from days of yore, too, that weren’t just iPods. RockBox supports a pretty good selection if you need some model numbers to look up: https://www.rockbox.org/

I recall people liked their Archos players a lot, I had a few Sansas and Creatives over the years, they were pretty alright.

Well it’s an interesting question. From Hulu’s TOS:

a. License. Within the United States and subject to the terms and conditions in this Agreement, we grant you a limited, personal use, non-transferable, non-assignable, revocable, non-exclusive and non-sublicensable right to do the following:

Install and make non-commercial, personal use of the Services; and stream or temporarily download copyrighted materials, including but not limited to movies, television shows, other entertainment or informational programming, trailers, bonus materials, images, and artwork (collectively, the “Content”) that are available to you from the Services.

This is a license agreement and not an agreement for sale or assignment of any rights in the Content or the Services. The purchase of a license to stream or temporarily download any Content does not create an ownership interest in such Content.

While I’m not a lawyer, I’m gonna guess the lines about a revocable license are intended to cover this. Sites like Hulu rotate their content out, which I’m gonna guess means your license to view their content only extends to what’s in their library at that time. Under fair use, you might be able to argue that you can create a backup copy for your own viewing – it does say “temporarily download,” but doesn’t say you have to download it from them – but legally you’d probably be obligated to delete your copy once Hulu gets rid of it regardless.

Also, the TOS does specify that circumventing their copy protection is a TOS violation. While the DMCA grants certain exceptions to the copy-protection rule for fair use, I don’t think it requires Hulu to continue to serve you content or not revoke your license if you break their TOS. Kinda reminds me of Red Hat’s use of TOS to enforce terms that go above and beyond the GPL. They can’t exactly stop you 100%, but they can refuse to do business with you, which makes it a lot harder.

In five years, they’ll be telling us it’s stealing not to go see the latest marvel movie.

Encrypting your disk only provides at-rest protection, meaning there are entire swathes of physical attacks it provides zero protection against. Tons of stuff a malicious actor can do during runtime with physical access that you’d never notice. it quite literally only protects against thugs smashing your door in and physically walking away with the disk.

So if you’ve painted yourself into a corner with a baby’s first config, what you can do to step up your level of data protection (until you can redo your setup properly) is creating an encrypted filesystem or filesystem image (use fallocate to create a large empty file, then connect it to a loopback device, encrypt with LUKS, and use it as a virtual filesystem), rsync your data directory to it, and then unlock/mount it at boot under the directory where Nextcloud is configured to store your data. It’s god-awful, but this should be more or less transparent to Nextcloud if you do it right, and then at least your data directory gets at-rest encryption, and tbqh if someone is smash and grabbing your hard drive they are probably more interested in your data than they are your OS config.

I wouldn’t say this is an acceptable or preferable alternative to FDE, but it sounds like you’re still figuring out the best ways to set these things up, and this will get you more protection than none. But, realistically, you should probably not worry about it too much and should think about the security of your setup as a learning exercise/study in best practices.

The most useful philosophy I’ve come across is “make the OS instance disposable.” That means an almost backups-first approach. Everything of importance to me is thoroughly backed up so once main box goes kaput, I just have to pull the most recent copy of the dataset and provision it on a new OS, maybe new hardware if needed. These days, it’s not that difficult. Docker makes scripting backups easy as pie. You write your docker-compose so all config and program state lives in a single directory. Back up the directory, and all you need to get up and running again with your services is access to Docker Hub to fetch the application code.

Some downsides with this approach (Docker’s security model sorta assumes you can secure/segment your home network better than most people are actually able to), but honestly, for throwing up a small local service quickly it’s kind of fantastic. Also, if you decide to move away from Docker the experience will give you insight into what amounts to program state for the applications you use which will make doing the same thing without Docker that much easier.

Watching videos is like an order of magnitude easier than reading for large swathes of the population. Fully 18% of the US adult population is functionally illiterate – they can pass a reading test, but their reading level is so low it hardly matters. These folks can still watch YouTube/Dystopian Vine (sorry, TikTok).

Also, this much is just my own speculation, but A/V media is a lot easier to push people’s emotional buttons with because it’s much, much faster and easier to consume content via video and we’re likely hardwired to pay more attention to audio/visual stimuli than abstract imagery in our heads. A video+audio track of an explosion is always going to hit people harder than a careful description of the same explosion, and if people expect it to be easier and to provide a larger emotional impact, they’re more likely to go for the thing that makes them feel something more easily.

We are all governed by dopamine more than we like to admit.

It’s like… could they go do some reading, figure out a good strategy, implement it, then make a video about how to do it properly? Well no, that would only be one video per topic, wouldn’t it?

What mistakes are you going to make “building” a Synology? Getting ATA drives?

Those aren’t pirated copies, those are… lawfully encoded… 4k bluray rips… I made myself… to back up the uh, lawful copies I purchased at MSRP! That’s right!

Hey, it can be the current directory!

Come back after you rm -rf / or remove glibc, you whipper-snapper! shakes cane

Your intended playback device impacts which format you’ll want. Or maybe I’m just fussy, I dunno.

if you use yt-dlp or youtube-dl’s -F flag you can get back a list of available formats. There are typically separately encoded audio tracks for most content on youtube, meaning you can just give it the stream id and get an m4a or webm file with no extra work.