I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

– Titus Andromedon

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • The original intent of this was a travel router that VPN’d back to home as well as providing PiHole ad blocking, but it ballooned when I just wanted to see how much could run on this little board. I didn’t have anything in mind when I made it other than if I could, so I had to invent reasons after the fact lol

    SHTF Server

    If shit ever hits the fan (evacuation order, natural disaster, house burns down, etc), this is something that’s easy to grab, takes up almost no space, can be powered for days with a power bank, and has all my important docs on an encrypted volume. If I’m stuck in a temporary shelter or whatever, I can keep myself entertained as well as a handful of other people who can connect to it.

    I’ve also got cron jobs to sync important files from my main servers to this one, so it stays up to date.

    Power Outages

    We don’t maintain any permanent streaming subscriptions (only when there’s something good on like a new season of Star Trek drops lol). So if the power goes out, and I can’t run the main servers, this can (and has!) run from a power bank for about 36 hours. Everyone in the house can stream something different to their phone if they want.

    Camping, Traveling, Etc.

    Kinda covered under offline access, but can keep the kids entertained without cell service or racking up data overages.

    I also made a couple of Snapcast receiver speakers with some old Pi Zero W’s so we can have wireless speakers around the campsite. I was able to add an RTL-SDR dongle to it and pipe the FM audio to Snapcast, so if there’s a game on, we can listen to that. I haven’t used that in practice, but it worked on the bench.

    Internet access isn’t a given

    I’ve had to travel places that have no or poor internet access and poor cell reception. Depends on where and why I have to travel and is always a crapshoot. This gives me a bare minimum environment that’s always on hand.

    Black Start

    If my homelab ever goes totally down or has a major malfunction, I’ve got copies of documentation, console passwords (that are normally kept in Vaultwarden hosted on the stack that’s unavailable in this scenario), and other resources to bring things back up. I host pretty much everything we use (including email) so when the lab is down (rare but does happen) it’s nice to have a backup stack.




  • Yeah, I was surprised as well by how many things can run concurrently and why this project ballooned like it did. It was originally just going to be a travel router and PiHole but I decided to see how much I could cram in there. There’s still room for more but I had to move on to other projects once winter was over. If/when I have time, I’d like to add a map tile server to the mix.

    The only limit I’ve run into is when I’m running the NextJS dev server and Jellyfin at the same time. That’s just a bit too much demand on the memory so one or the other crashes. So I can’t watch JF while I work, but considering what’s hosting these, I can forgive it.






  • +1 for hybrids lol

    I used to drive a lot of 4-bangers and remember having to do that with pretty much every one of them either to overtake another vehicle or even sometimes driving up a steep hill lol. The air conditioning just sucked so much power from those little engines.

    Been driving a hybrid for 6 or 7 years now, which also has a little 4-cylinder engine, but the electric motor more than makes up for that. It’s got a dash display showing the electric motor/ICE power split, and when you punch the gas, you can see the electric motor doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Love it.







  • I watched the whole series and did enjoy most of it, so keep that in mind because this is going to sound really, really critical.

    Liked the premise but I feel like it just jumped the shark multiple times, kept going, and jumped the shark again every following season.

    That said, yes, you’re right that it does explore some interesting topics, but the way they did and kept raising the stakes every season just kind of ruined it. So much of it was just completely implausible even by TV science standards. And they basically rebooted the show in the last few seasons except with Space criminals replacing the grounders as the antagonists.

    Conceptually, my favorite season was the first because of the survival theme, though the teenage drama kind of annoyed me (granted, it was a YA show and I wasn’t exactly the target demographic). In practice, my favorite season was the one with ALLIE. It explored ethics in AI while being a bit of a mix of The Matrix and Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a touch of zombie movie. For better or worse, it also provided the backstory of much of the series.

    Best character arc? Probably the authority guy from the beginning. Forget his name, but he looked like a young, store-brand Dustin Hoffman. (Edit: Kane?) Started out as the bureaucratic jerk, went through hell and stuck to his principles when refusing to take the ALLIE chip (and they even crucified him), and became one of the few level headed characters toward the end of the show.

    Worst character arc? Probably a toss up between Clark and Octavia. It’s like their worst attributes got turned up to 11.

    Favorite character overall? Raven. She was basically a live-action Gadget from “Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers”.