One thing I do is instead of having an open SSH port, I have an OpenVPN server that I’ll connect to, then SSH to the host from within the network. Then, if someone hacks into the network, they still won’t have SSH access.

Yep. My dad said it’s working great for him.

Yeah. I had to go into the settings and change some setting to get it to work with keyboard input.

I had the same experience with my parents. They have a Samsung TV and the Jellyfin experience was awful.

I ended up getting them a little N100 mini pc and installed Bazzite and the Jellyfin app from Flathub. You can configure it so it knows it’s on a TV, and responds to keyboard controls. I got them a remote from a company called Pepper Jobs that gives keyboard input and now they have a great experience with it. Even my mom, who’s a big technophobe, loves it.

My dad also has an LG TV in his workshop that doesn’t have a working Jellyfin app (cause it’s ten years old), and he uses the Jellyfin app for his Xbox on that one.

And that’s why open source is best.

I’d imagine not very much. I don’t know how to measure just the GPU. It doesn’t have any desktop installed, so it’s only ever rendering a console. It can transcode tons of 1080p streams at once, so even a transcode probably doesn’t draw much power. The CPU is the hungriest part, and that’s mostly idling too.

That’s awesome! Yeah, I’ll definitely check it out. Thank you!

Sorry, but I don’t know. I use an A380 in my system. I got it before the A310 was available.

That’s really cool! I just run the vanilla server, but maybe I should check out Paper. Can it import worlds from vanilla?

Absolutely yes. It’s better to use an old PC for a home server, because upgrades are cheaper, parts are easier to find, troubleshooting is generally easier, they’re usually more energy efficient than an older dedicated server, and you’re saving an old pc from becoming e-waste.

That being said, what you want to run on it determines how old/cheap of a PC could work for you.

Jellyfin works best when you can do hardware encoding, and these days that means throwing an ARC A310 in there and calling it a day. If you have a new enough processor, you don’t even need the graphics card.

Mastodon is pretty disk heavy, but if you’ve got a nice hard disk to put the Minio server on and an SSD for the db, you’re golden. That’s how I run https://port87.social/. It’s running on an old 6th gen Intel i7. The PC I built in 2015 (with a few upgrades).

CPU intensive servers like Minecraft are where you start to run into problems with older hardware. If it’s just you on there, a 10 year old CPU is fine, but if you’ve got a few friends, the server may start to struggle to keep up. I had to move my server off that same system I talked about above, because Minecraft was pegging the CPU a lot. But a 5 year old CPU would be fine for that. (Assuming that the 10 year old and 5 year old CPUs were both top tier CPUs when they were new. Like i7, i9, Ryzen 7, Ryzen 9. A five year old i3 would still struggle.)

Basically unless you’re trying to run AI models on it, cheap hardware is fantastic for personal servers.

Cause that’s not simple or easy at all. It takes a fair bit of knowledge to set up all of these things.

Super easy. Spin up an OpenVPN server, forwarding the right ports to your server. Now spin up an Apache server with the folder your file’s in as server root. Send the client config for your VPN to your friend, along with the local address of your HTTP server. Now they can install the OpenVPN client on their PC and download the file from your HTTP server. Once you’re done, tear down all your servers, and don’t forget to unforward the ports. Couldn’t be easier.

/s

I write all my code on paper and use OCR to convert it. It almost works sometimes.

If you’re passing a string, and you don’t know what currency it is, you have the exact same problem as passing an int and not knowing what currency it is. USD’s smallest denomination is 1/10 cent (gas stations usually charge in tenths of a cent, and half pennies are still legal tender, even though they’re not minted anymore), so the string representation in your examples would be exactly the same for USD and Dinar.

I agree that the best way to represent it between server and client is as a string, but that doesn’t work when you need to perform calculations, so in that case, the best way to do the calculations is to use the smallest denomination, then use banker’s rounding on the result, then use the int for storage and turn it back into a string representing the default denomination for transit. Or, just use ints representing the smallest denomination everywhere except displaying to the user. Even JavaScript can handle integer arithmetic.

Source: I’ve also done fintech for loan and retail companies. Yes, there are definitely a lot of gotchas, so using integers is best when you need to do calculations.

Every currency has a smallest denomination.

Or, use the smallest denomination. In the US, that’s typically tenths of a penny. So, $1 = 1000. Then everything uses integer arithmetic.

Of course, JS doesn’t actually have integers, so yeah, strings are probably best.

You look amazing! I took a look at your older progress pics, and wow, your progress is incredible!

I don’t know. I just read the XML. It’s pretty easy to read. I’m sure there’s a tool out there though.

Yep. Definitely worth the ten bucks a year. Also it lets you get your own DMARC reports, which can be useful sometimes.

Good point. I’ll add that.

I’m working on custom domain support right now. And pricing is pretty straightforward, since I only have extra storage and sending options. You get 500MB for free, and the ability to receive email. Sending is $1/month. I put that behind a paywall to prevent spammers from using Port87. As a small email service, if you send spam, the big players can blocklist you and kill your service. So, keeping my SMTP servers’ IP address reputation high is really important.

You can join the Discord to follow along with new features and updates:

https://discord.gg/yVkApV9c8Z