Aw man, every midrange phone that would be interesting comes with MediaTek SOCs. I should check if the custom rom scene is still dead for phones with MT chips… Do they still withold the sources needed for rom developement?

I know this is a late reply, but I didn’t notice the notification. Sorry about that. What I do is, I open a free virtual card for each service. I have one for netflix, one for spotify and so on. I set the monthly spending limit just above of what they cost.

This way if I ever unsub, I can delete the card and they can’t charge me, or if they have a data leak, they only stole my deleted cards.

Revolut was mentioned before, but let me elaborate on it.

They are essentially a bank but you can open an account through their app with the needed IDs.

You load money onto your account via a card payment from a conventional bank account, so no transfer fees apply in that sense.

They have one time use virtual cards and free persistent virtual cards. You can order physical ones if you want. You can set limits and recurring transactions per card. It even recognizes subscripition services and lets you know in advance if you need to top up the account before a payment is due.

Caveat: ads for their own services to buy crypto, gold, stocks and crap. I personally wouldn’t keep huge sums on my account, but know people who use it extensively. Even after years of usage, they werent burnt yet.

I have no experience with customer service, as I only use it for what you are looking for. According to the internet, their CS can be abysmal.

Very interesting! It’s tempting, but I can already see the “Major Change ticket” coming in for “Divorce” if I asked for tickets at home :D

Yes, well shopping lists worked similarly for us as well. Wife would send me a list on discord, and go by that. That might not need to change. I guess we’ll have to see for ourselves how things go what sticks.

I’m afraid of falling into the trap of having too many new toys to play with, so I’ll keep simplicity and tasks.org in mind! For taking notes for myself, I have Obsidian set up the way I like it. I must say, I under utilize that one as well. Joplin, I used in university some years ago. I should maybe revisit it to see if I find any use for it.

So far this is the sanest setup for my usecase. I was only looking at the AIO docker because I thought it would be easier to scale back, rather than up from the regular. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for the tip! I wouldn’t have stumbled upon it by myself. Looking through their demo, it’s rather complex, maybe too much for what I need. The price seems fair tho. With the source being available I’ll consider trying it.

An interesting take, and not very popular among the other comments, but I suppose you have your experiences and reasons to say this.

As I mentioned RAID is on the table, no problem with that. It is kind of the point to have a safer, more centralized storage for important stuff, and space for keeping media.

Speed wouldn’t be a concern. Noise is, since my apartment is very small. And reliability over time would be. Especially power cycles, or spin down - spin up events. I figured if I used SSDs, I could leave the whole rig powered on 24/7 But with HDDs I think I would probably need to turn the system off for the night.

Correct me if I am wrong about enterprise grade SSDs, but if I have the power on time and the TBW values for the drives along with the manufacturing date, ones with reasonable combination of those could be bought for a reasonable price. After some testing they could also be trusted. At what point would you expect an SSD like this to last some years in a home server environment? I am not an expert but with some pointers this should be easy to figure out, which is why I am asking.

I don’t plan to neglect backups. Currently I use Syncthing as well, but only between non-redundant storage locations, so I have duplicates. Like phone pushes photos to pc or laptop, those sync them between each other. Important docs that I can’t lose are also on all 3 devices.

And I plan to keep the local storage of mission critical data around on some clients at least. I just want to have a central, more robust, redundant system where one or 2 disks can fail without my data being gone or corrupted.

Thanks for the insights on the case and drives!

I have an old Silverstone case with about 6 of the old style 3,5" drive mounts and 3x5,25" bay. Originally I had a Samsung 1TB drive in it (which is still kicking around somehow pulling torrent drive duty) I remember it being louder in that case then in my new one. So I’ll have to test it out. If i can get my hands on some rubber bearings and if they help any at all.

I am not planning to go that big on storage for now tho. It sounds like serious work. I am doing this so I can be more comfortable. Aside from updates, I want to dial it in once and forget it unless I need to touch it.

The noise is only an issue because of how small my appartment is. I can’t really isolate noise in here. I would think it also depends on which drives I get. I read that some are louder than others.

redmi note 9 pro user here. Now on LOS. The default OS is full of telemetry. Even the calculator wants you to agree to personal data being used. Would avoid unless you only want the hardware and the model you want has active community rom support.

Also the Bootloader unlocking process is a PITA. You need a xiaomi account logged in to the phone for it for 2 weeks, then they may allow unlocking the BL but only through their unlocker app that frankly sucks. You may have to sit through the wait period twice if something goes wrong. Ask me how I know.