Are mini stick PCs practical to set up as a media player, eg with jellyfin? Some advantages are the small form factor that plugs straight into the HDMI port, and flexibility/privacy vs using a dongle from a shitty company like amazon/google/roku.

Are there any things to watch out for to ensure it has enough compute power and hardware decoding? I just want it to play HD video with a jellyfin app/browser page.

I'm assuming it's no big deal to install Linux on (x86 hardware?), do you need to watch out for specific device support? Thanks

Now that the Iran conflict is heating up again, one thing I'm surprised doesn't get talked about is where the oil reserves are at and where they are heading. Flow through the straits has been restricted for a long time, and once reserves get low enough it's going to make a big mess of the economy, but somehow markets are ignoring it and no one is talking about it?

Consider a power station set up in the middle of a town with cold winters. In the first example it burns has, drives a turbine and cycles water back after some form of basic cooling loop.

In the second example the waste heat (after driving the turbine) is connected to a distributed heating system throughtout the town that heats buildings and pavements and so on. In this case the return loop is much lower temperature, say just above freezing.

In order to do work you need a temperature gradient, although I'm not sure if that is relevant here. On the one had there will be a bigger gradient between the boiled and cooled water, but on the other hand you need to use more energy to lift the temperature from the cooling loop to boiling.

How does the efficiency for purely energy generation compare in these cases?

Let's say you have access to a remote machine and use it to copy backups occasionally, eg with rsync. Your local machine has credentials stored that allow write access on the remote machine, however if the local account was compromised that could also allow access to the remote machine and the data stored there.

How can you grant access to an account to write remotely, but also protect the data from this account? One possibility could be to change the permissions on the data after it is copied to prevent deletion/interference, although I'm just making this up. Is there a standard practise for this?

I wanted to improve the security of a TV connecting to a server on a different LAN, and one approach I thought of is to use a RPi on the network to look after the secure connection.

So the pi could connect to the remove server through SSH, and forward the port locally. I thought this port could then be opened, and the TV can then be pointed at the pi on the local network.

Port forwarding to the pi works but I can't connect to it from another device, even after setting firewall settings.

Basically the firewall rule is ufw allow from 192.168.1.0/24 port 1234

Does this idea work, or is there a better approach? Am I missing something in the setup?

I'm using a pixel 6 and want to disconnect from all the big providers as much as possible, and GrapheneOS looks like a good option. I'm tempted to jump in the deep end which means wiping the phone and starting again.

Backing up photos should be done, I sync with Immich so that should be ok. Most apps don't really matter about being wiped, reinstalled (if possible) and logging in again. I need to make sure the KeePass file is backed up, and need to check how to preserve the settings from my 2FA app, this is currently using Okta Verify, but hopefully can add the same settings/keys in a FOSS app? Is this easy or should I make sure to roll over the 2FA keys first while I have access?

Bank apps may or may not work but can cross that bridge later, using web only is also possible.

The other tricky thing is the Microsoft apps, currently I'm using some company portal apps for basic work stuff (teams, outlook) and they are very useful and hard to substitute. Has anyone tried these in GOS? I suspect this may not be possible.

Anything else to watch out for?

Thanks

I've tried replacing the fans but the problem is still there, it sounds like a fan rubbing and it gets worse if the laptop gets flexed in some way.

I took it apart to look for the issue, but I can't see anything, when it is open and upside down it runs quiet, unless you press certain places to make it flex around the fan, which is not unexpected. But I can't see anything out of place or see what can be fixed.

The laptop is a Dell XPS 15

I've set up a self hosted photo system with immich, and it works doing automatic backups of photos from the filesystem, eg using termux/cron, although it is a bit flakey. Immich also works for backup, but it's less ideal.

iPhone seems to be a lot harder, backup in immich doesn't work, it seems that iPhones have a complicated was of handling background tasks which make background backups very difficult.

Does anyone know a way of doing any kind of backup automatically, without plugging in a cable and without using iCloud?