The monochrome and newer color Brother printers usually work fine without installing any drivers. If it supports IPP Everywhere, it will definitely work fine. It’s the older color printers that usually need the proprietary driver for full support.

It’s not really worth the trouble to try to host your own e-mail. There are lots of e-mail hosts that you can use with your own domain. A few of them are free and there are plenty of low cost ones. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch hosts whenever you want and keep your addresses.

The data is burned into a piece of glass with a laser. It doesn’t use a dye to store data like a CD-R. I doubt bit rot would be much of an issue. With that much capacity, you could use lots of forward error correction though.

Syncthing and Nextcloud are both FOSS. You don’t need to sign up for anything.

That probably just means a larger bribe will be required.

A large FPGA could work as a hardware video decoder that is software updatable. Unfortunately they are way to expensive for consumer hardware.

It would be nice if someone would make low cost hardware video decoders on an m.2 module. Then it could be easily upgraded even on a laptop.

Software decoding should work fine on modern PCs if the bitrate isn’t really high. You will want hardware support for anything battery powered though.

That motherboard has a very limited number of PCIe lanes. Using the second m.2 slot will slow down the second GPU. All of the other slots are coming from the chipset and are only PCIe 2.0.

I would get rid of the second GPU, then there would be enough lanes to run 3 SSDs at PCIe 3.0 x4.

It would probably make a good terminal if it had an RS-232 serial port. The CM5 would be overkill for that. A Pi Zero would be sufficient and a lot less power hungry.

There’s no way I’m going to be doing much typing on that tiny keyboard though.

I rarely go over 1TB per month at home. It’s usually closer to 500GB. My seedbox goes through several TB per month with all of those Linux ISOs though.

You can convert 3 of the 5.25" external drive bays to 5 3.5" drive bays. That’s what I did with my NAS.

Have you tried using a different DNS server? The one you’re using could be blocking it. Try using DNS over HTTPS.

I certainly won’t be upgrading until DDR6 memory is available. My PC still runs everything I need just fine. I just want a more energy efficient CPU. Mine uses 80 watts sitting idle.

You leave your fingerprints on everything you touch. Fingerprints should never be used as the only authentication factor for anything important.

Any IoT type devices should be on their own network where internet access is by whitelist only. They should only have access to what they need to function and nothing more. Ideally, they should all be used with self hosted services so internet access is not needed.

I use global addresses for everything. ULA is the equivalent of the private networks like 10.0.0.0/8 on IPv4. It doesn’t need a static IP. ULA will work without any internet connection. If you run an IPv6 only network, it would be a good idea to set up ULA so you can access your local devices if the internet goes down.

I only use SLAAC on my network because DHCPv6 is not well supported. My router does use DHCPv6 to get a prefix from the ISP though.

On Android, enable private DNS and set it to dns.adguard-dns.com.

I probably used a couple of those on some of my old sites.

Mobile games usually aren’t controllable with a keyboard and mouse. Being able to run them doesn’t do much good if you can’t control them. Most of the games aren’t even worth playing. They are infested with micro transactions, which are much worse than ads.

Bluray drives have been working great in Linux for a long time. You can use xorriso or growisofs to burn disks from the CLI.

Just keep in mind that burned disks are not reliable for long term storage. Cheap disks burned at high speed can degrade within a few years.