I second the idea of a VPN instead of directly exposing devices or software to the internet. Requires more work and learning but it’s more secure. I would argue that well-known VPNs are more scrutinized and pentested than any camera software ever.

I’m rebooting my router every week via a crontab because some dynamic dns update process fails from time to time and I find it hanging. No time to debug the actual problem.

Paint a wall in a certain pattern, using multiple colors. It needs time for planning, time for buying tools, and time for execution.

Fix something. Replace dying batteries for electronics, take a look around the house, anything you can find parts on ifixit for. It requires focus and skill, gives you a sense of pride and accomplishment, and you benefit from your items longer. Also cheaper in the long run.

Tinker around the house. There’s always something broken or in a bad condition. Repaint stuff, reapply stuff.

Build something with your hands. Try woodworking.

Gardening unfortunately is usually done outside and during the day, but you could try indoors hydroponics or vertical gardening. Try to automatize it.

Learn programming. Learn hobby electronics. Arduino is easy to learn and requires both. Could help with the automatization above. You can find cheap clones and parts. You mainly work with DC under 12V, so it’s relatively safe.

Be curious. Watch Youtube videos about any subject you might find interesting, learn how stuff works, no matter how familiar or not they are. A lot of times I don’t have the patience to watch a show, but I find myself getting into a Youtube / Wikipedia rabbit hole about cryptography, programming, how games are made, how mechanical pinball machines work, lockpicking, painting, large buildings fails, quantum physics, astrophysics, photography.

Watch Cosmos, presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

My friend doesn’t get it

It was a default for so long that people just got used to the feel of it and its “ecosystem” if you can call it that.

I use Win at home and at work as my main desktop, because of familiarity, the apps I got used to and because I just don’t feel comfortable with any Linux UI. I get annoyed when the Win UI gets even slightly changed between OS versions, so imagine how it would be for me just switching to Linux. I have a dual boot, but the Linux partitions always gather dust no matter the distro.

But I wouldn’t touch a Windows server. I’m apt with the Linux on work servers, my home server, RaspberryPi and routers. It feeels like having swiss army knives and I feel at home in a command line.

This doesn’t make me a fanboy, but I do get raised eyebrows from co-workers.

Turris Omnia. Powerful hardware, auto updates, config backup / restore (with anti-bricking feature), SIM slot, etc

As someone reading this thread, I’m stuck in an endless loop.

Holy shit, I stand corrected, those graphs speak for themselves. Bookmarked for future stats.

LE: Well, there’s also the section about average age of failure in their newest report: 2 years and 7 months for HDDs, 14 months for SSDs.

True, but it depends from person to person and it counts if you have a small or big drive, how often you watch and rotate your media, how large the media is. If you only have a 1TB SSD, and often download and watch blue-ray quality, 20 movies will fill it. It won’t be long until the same blocks get erased, no matter how much the SSDs firmware tries to spread the usage and avoid reusing the same blocks.

Anyway, my point is, aside from noise and lower power consumption advantages, I wouldn’t use SSDs for a NAS, I regard them as consumables. Speed isn’t really an issue in HDDs.

I use Hard Disk Sentinel, it’s not free, but it also monitors drives in Windows so you have an early warning at the first sign of issues. Also logs historic data (writes, temperature, etc) and displays them as graphs.

Failure rates for sdd are better than hdd

I’m curious on where did you find this. Maybe they have lower DOA rates and decreased chances to fail in the first year, but SSDs have a limited usage lifetime / limited writes, so even if they don’t fail quickly, they wear out over time and at first they have degraded performance, but finally succumb in 5 years or less, even when lightly used (as in as OS drives).

To avoid DOA / first year issues with HDDs, just have the patience to fully scan them before using with a good disk testing app.

From my experience, SSDs are more prone to failure and have limited writes. They are ment for running the OS, databases for fast access, and games / apps. They are not ment for long time storage and frequent overwrites, like movies, which usually means download, delete and repeat which wears the memory quickly. One uses electric current to short memory cells and switch them from 0 to 1 and viceversa, the other uses a magnetic layer which supports a lot more overwrites on the same bit.

If keeping important data on them, I would use them only in a redundant RAID configuration and/or with frequent backups so I wouldn’t cry if one of them fails. And when they fail, there are no recovery options as with HDDs (even if very expensive, at least you have a chance).

I also wouldn’t touch used server SSDs, their lifetime is already shortened from the start. I had 3 Intel, enterprise-grade SSD changes in our company servers, each after about 3 years - they just wear out. For consumer / home SSDs the typical lifetime is 5 years, but that takes into account minor / “normal” usage, ie. if used as OS disks. And maybe power users could extend that with moving the swap/pagefile and temporary files (ie browser cache, logs, etc) on a spinning disk, but it defeats the purpose of having an SSD for speed in the first place.

If you have media (like movies) in mind, you’ll find sooner than later that you’ll need more space, and with HDDs the price per GB is lower than SSDs.

If you have no issue with 1. noise, 2. speed (any HDD is fast enough for movie playback and are decent for download), 3. concurrent access, or 4. physical shocks from transport, go with HDDs, even used ones.

My two, personal opinion cents.