Bitwarden has a account custodian feature that will give my wife all the info she needs to access essential accounts and hardware, however, realistically the homelab will only continue to work until things start dropping - there is likely no easy recovery of crashes.

I haven’t talked to my wife about it directly, you’ve reminded me this would be a good conversation to have, but the first thing she should do when the insurance money comes in is (after paying off the assassin) buy a bunch of dumb light bulbs and pay to print any photos she cares about in case our digital backups die.

I uhh… I don’t think that’s right… But I also dont know enough about the idiom to prove you wrong…

I have a 4 bay Synology NAS and it draws ~50W when running. Not astronomical, but if always going is potentially ~$100/yr. If the disks don’t need to be spinning, it idles at a pretty minimal wattage, so realistically maybe I’m paying half that, but if we’re being frugal it’s a lot of headache for something that’s not much less than just picking 1 streaming service/month and rotating (before you factor in the cost of hardware).

In terms of drives, a 4k movie is ~50-100 GB, so 24 TB saves you enough space for ~240-480 4k movies. It’s up to you to decide if that’s enough. Last I checked, the optimal $/TB was ~12TB drives, so worth considering starting with fewer larger drives if it works for you.

In terms of processing capabilities necessary, that kinda comes down to how you consume your content. Encoding audio is trivial. Encoding video is difficult. If you’ll always be playing on devices that can handle the raw HEVC output of bluray disks, then your server CPU doesn’t matter.

If you want to play on devices that may not be able to handle the full uncompressed content, or stream outside your home network without gobbling up all of your bandwidth, you will need to transcode the video. This can either be done on the fly as content is requested (in which case you probably need a capable CPU), or you can take the time and do it in advance on a PC, and just upload it to the Jellyfin server and request the compatible version when needed.

Getting in the habit of encoding your own files to your preferred spec or automating it with something like tdarr is time consuming but worth it in that it let’s your Jellyfin server be leaner (but takes more space on your NAS).

For me, I only stream Jellyfin content to one client (my ShieldTV), which is always on my network and capable of playing all video/audio formats I need. For that reason, I have a raspberry pi as my Jellyfin server because it doesn’t need to do anything more than download cover art and serve files.

I can’t speak to the sound levels of the specific NAS you’re looking at, but if you’ve ever owned a computer with 3.5"HDDs (I’m guessing you have), you’re familiar with the brr brr brr seeking hum & low grumble they do when moving files around. That’s the main source of noise and it’s primarily when you’re using them (aka watching a movie) so it’ll probably blend into the background. But I wouldn’t put one next to my bed.

annoying trying to find 1 game out of 1000 if it doesn start with “A”

I don’t have one, but if I did I would probably just find a “top 100 games” list for a given console and just load those + the 2 or 3 games I really care about in as a start.

A lot of people get into emulation with the attitude of “I can play every game, and they’re tiny files, so I want every game!” But realistically the overwhelming majority of people are gonna play fewer than a dozen or so games on a retro consoles, and good odds most of those would find their way onto a top 100 list.

Not a bad idea for small businesses - having a central place to purchase direct from retailers is a nice idea, I think where it may struggle is:

Verifying seller authenticity / avoiding scam products

• In a fully open marketplace its hard to enforce accountability. Amazon has teams of people removing fraud items (and they still have rampant fraud).
• Amazon functions as an insurer on sales - if you receive a fraudulent item, amazon eats the cost (and tries to cover it from the seller)

Part of Amazon’s market dominance and convenience is owning the logistics

• Amazon operates massive warehouses and has tons of money invested in logistics, so orders can be consolidated
• All of the savings of not paying the “Amazon tax” will just become the FedEx/UPS tax

This is not to say it can’t be done but Amazon has billions of dollars of infrastructure that’s hard to replace with volunteer programming

Yet another reason to use and support open fonts.

Idk how many fonts are typically in a game but at $20k a pop, I suspect you could hire your own designer or collaborate with a few other small studios to design a few open game fonts.

I’m gonna go with Kaepora Gaebora, the owl from OOT.

Would you like me to repeat that? Yes…

I’m gonna go with Kaepora Gaebora, the owl from OOT.

Would you like me to repeat that? Yes…

I’m gonna go with Kaepora Gaebora, the owl from OOT.

Would you like me to repeat that? Yes… No.