“Host” fucked me up and is the reason I don’t watch horror movies anymore. I’m a huge baby though.

I’ve had a great experience with the TrueNAS Mini-X system I bought. ZFS has great raid options, and TrueNAS makes managing a system really easy. You can get a box built & configured by them, with 16 GB ECC RAM and five (empty) drive bays, for about $1150 at the most affordable end. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

One thing to be careful about: you can’t add drives to a ZFS vdev once it’s been created, but you can add new vdevs to an existing pool. So, you can start with two mirrored drives, then add another two mirrored drives to that pool later.

(A vdev is a sub-unit of a ZFS storage pool, and you have to choose your RAID topology for each vdev and then compose those into a storage pool)

The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:

• 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
• 2 different forms of media
• 1 off-site copy

Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.

Check out gamemode if you’re gaming, it should improve performance a little bit

Homebrew is so fun, and I love how you can make it as complex as you want. Like, you can just mix some honey and some water (in the right ratio) and let it sit, and you’ve got mead! Or you can add flavors. Or experiment with yeasts. Or brew beer and experiment with hops and grains. It’s a hobby that really meets you where you want it to.

I recently got into video game development, and I’ve had so much fun, and it’s given me some much-needed meaning. I’ve solved problems unique to my game using programming skills as well as game design skills, and it feels meaningful because i can send it to my friends and they can enjoy it without needing to appreciate any of the technical aspects. I get to be creative about how people I care about can have more fun. It could also involve your music composition hobby, since every good game needs some music and sound design! I’m a programmer for my day job so most things I do there are only meaningful to other programmers, and the problems I solve there are incredibly boring ones.

Edit: I saw your comment about being burnt out on programming, and I totally understand that. That happens to me frequently. I enjoy programming as a hobby when I’m not burnt out so we’re kinda in different boats there. There are lots of skills involved in making games and the variety has really refreshed me, though I’ve still gotten sick of sitting at a computer while working on it.

There are a bunch of message broker services out there, and having a consistent set of common keys along with a documented process for transforming events to/from different systems means that this kind of data can move through different systems without getting mangled. It does have a spec for JSON, so it can be considered just a standardized JSON blob with transformation rules. But it also has a protobuf spec, specs for MQTT, NATS, HTTP, Avro, etc. It’s a common language for all these systems.

I’m really into CloudEvents because I love event-driven systems, and since events can come from, or be consumed by, so many different services, having a robust spec is super duper useful.

Many tools that use GPG, especially package managers, will download keys so they can verify signatures. It’s nothing to worry about. That developer probably signed something you use.

I’m lucky enough that a couple of my friends are willing to use Matrix to message me, but most communities I’m a part of are on Discord.

It’s damn fine coffee, Jerry.

Tridactyl!

Then they put on the socks and become girls

Deadliest Warrior fuckin ruled. It was the source of a lot of memes between me and a friend.

There’s a really nice app called Daylio which lets you track this stuff, and generates reports for you pretty similar to this one. I’ve been using it for years.

If you’re interested in setting up another program, you can use Overseerr to feed requests to Sonarr. Other people who have access your plex library can also use it to request stuff from you, but even if you’re a solo user, it’s a nice interface to search and add content with.

Space Engineers but not a buggy mess with player scripting that isn’t in C# of all things.

ixSystems sells pre-built machines running TrueNAS. They’re a little pricier than building on from scratch of course, but they have ECC ram and have everything set up out of the box. Funds also support the development of TrueNAS. I got one earlier this year and I love it. Fussing around in the web UI requires some technical know-how, but if you get it set up for them, I expect it to run like a dream.

I was using Fedora for about a year and it was great. Nice and stable, almost everything worked out of the box. Then I goofed up an update and had to install something new, and I chose Arch. Arch is working mostly fine, of course I had to learn a thing or two about how some subsystems worked but the Arch wiki is a wonderful resource. We’ll see how long this install lasts, it’s been smooth sailing for about a month now.

Other posters have described what Radar and Sonarr do, I just want to say having all the apps set up along with Overseerr is a game-changer, even if your setup is only for your own consumption and you’re not sharing your plex library with anyone. Overseerr lets you log in with Plex and request content, and it’ll add the content to *arr, which will automatically search torrent sites (I use Prowlarr for that), download the content, then move them to your media library and update Plex.

If you do share your plex library with friends, and can put Overseerr somewhere they can access it, then your friends can request to add content to your library, and you just have to click “Approve” to start the search & download process.

It takes a little time to set up, but once it’s up and running, it’s lovely.