thehatfox

PiVPN is a simple home VPN solution that’s worth exploring.

Is you are interested in smart home/home automation Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform and makes a great Pi project.

As a Pokemon fan I understand your pain. It’s not like it’s an obscure series, or from a small company. Why is it so hard to stream such a popular anime? I’m surprised The Pokemon Company hasn’t rolled out their own streaming platform yet.

Before diving in to Plex I would highly recommend looking at Jellyfin first also. It’s offers much the same features as Plex but is fully free and open source.

For my own media server I use an old HP Microserer G8 purchased second hand, and upgraded with a Xeon e3-1260L, also sourced cheaply used. It’s small, easy to service and happily runs my Linux disro of choice. I know other people using various SFF PCs, or even repurposed old desktops. For best performance look for a CPU (or GPU) with hardware video encoding support. Otherwise, the rule of thumb for Plex used to be a CPU with at least 2000 Passmark score on cpubenchmark.net per concurrent 1080p stream.

If you go back to Reddit you will probably end up spending hours reading about the protests anyway. Even if you stopped using all social media, chances are you’re going to end up reading and thinking about the latest Reddit drama anyway, because it’s making a new headline on at least one of the tech news sites each day.

Lemmy, kbin and the wider fediverse have attracted a lot of my own attention recently, but that’s because I find it interesting and genuinely exciting for a new community to form and develop. Because of that I don’t think it’s a bad use of my time, so long as I still keep life generally in balance. Perhaps you should ask yourself the same question.