I have several Ecoflow batteries. Delta, River Pro, and River 3.

No complaints. I’ve used them in power outages. The delta is large enough to power an oil filled heater, and any of them can keep my fridge and network appliances running.

I’ve since gotten solar, but I still keep the portable ones around. The River 3 acts as a UPS and emergency power for my CPAP machine, and the others are still an extra 2kW for whatever I might need.

Asan aside, they also work great for monitoring device power use in lieu of something like a kill-a-watt. I’ve used them intermittently to confirm power draws on devices in my house in order to optimize my power consumption for my solar setup and find inefficiencies in my home.

Props for the Hiromi recommendation, though I’d personally choose Seeker from the Alive album.

Actually, I’m gonna add another really simple option: Lyrion (Formerly Logitech Media Server). My wife swears by this one, supports local library, integrates with LastFM, and if you use Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, or Spotify, you can integrate your streaming service with your local library for radio mixes.

Can install it right on a laptop or PC and connect to wherever your music is (local on the machine, on a NAS, etc.). After you install it, you can access it directly via a web browser or webapp, which will make it accessible from desktop or phone.

Not necessarily overkill, you can run Plex on almost anything. I used to run it on an old NUC6 I had laying around, then upgraded to a NUC8, and more recently I setup it up as a VM on Proxmox on a Ryzen 5700u mini-PC and just reimported the DB.

Virtualizing it has been good for my purposes since now it’s running alongside AssetUPnP, AudioBookshelf, and a dockerized squeezelite setup, and I’ve another VM on the host running Home Assistant with still plenty of resources to spare. Crazy we can do that now with a “server” that literally fits in my palm.

But virtualizing it makes hardware acceleration for video transcode be I more complicated, just a heads up. I play everything native so don’t use it, but YMMV.

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Edit - Plexamp is an awesome radio/DJ player, though I generally send to a Wiim Mini, as AirPlay quality with Plexamp can be kind of ass compared to direct DLNA.

There are lots of solutions, but as others have noted, Plex with Plexamp is great.

I’d recommend getting a NAS for storage and running mirrored disks. This way you’ve got some redundancy in the event of a disk failure.

I had to check the community and link, because I could believe he would say something like this.

Been married for 18 years and my wife and I adore each other.

Were there shitty times and issues? Hell yes, plenty. But there’s also been plenty of good times. She’s my mate and companion for life and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Seeing her smile completes the universe.

I wanna wake up to her everyday until we’re a couple of wrinkled old prunes.

No prob. Extra tip, the router has support for guest networks. If you want to be hardcore about it, put it on a guest network where it literally can’t see any of your other devices (bear in mind, this will make the automation stuff I mentioned not viable, but I’m sure most people don’t care about that).

Can confirm, I no longer get network or ad pop ups on my LG C1.

If you have a modern router you can block WAN connections while allowing LAN connections. This is what I do and it doesn’t give me crap (and bonus, I can interface with it still with home assistant for automations).

My router is an ASUS AX5700, if it matters.

I just have my LG C1 locked down to LAN only connection, in my router settings put it on house arrest. 😂

That way it doesn’t whine about no connection and wardrive for open connections. No ads, no crap, and just works without being able to phone home.

Next “TV” Will definitely be a short throw projector or commercial display (which is the codeword for “dumb”) TV today.

Not a specific song, but a band: Hail the Sun

You can use ntfsfix on the drive to do a check and remove dirty bit. This isn’t a full check though, and could mask or hide actual issues with the drive if it’s failing.

There’s also chkntfs which is more robust but I’m not sure if that’s open source and I’m not familiar with it.

Using ntfsfix is a good quick fix in my experience, but at the end of the day, NTFS is a Microsoft exclusive format and shared disks should be mounted in a format that both OSes can use, like exFAT, or Btrfs with the WinBtrfs driver (the latter I’m not familiar with, I’ve always used exFAT for shared disks, but I don’t use Windows anymore).

The other person said to never connect to wifi, but I’d say either put it on an isolated wifi (guest network) and lock it down to LAN-only access in your router, if at all possible.

The reason being that these devices are aggressive about getting a wifi signal, and even if they can’t connect to yours, they’ll apparently search for unprotected wifi networks and connect to those to send data and phone home. Locking it down to LAN only prevents this, and isolating to a guest network means no information about other devices on your network.

It’s utterly insane we have to do this stuff. If you’re willing to spend more, there are commercial signage displays you can buy that are essentially dumb TVs, and that is pretty much the only way to get a dumb TV today (and obviously, don’t expect smart features from it).

I’ve ditched all of them except the Disney/Hulu bundle, and that’s only because Amex gives me back $7 a month of the cost.

Amazon Prime used to be okay as a Prime customer, but now you can’t watch a 24 minute show without seeing like five ads. I tried to watch an episode of Invincible and there were two ads before the show even started, two in the middle of the show, and one at the end. It’s freaking insane.

I barely even watch video these days, I get way more mileage out of a good music service like Qobuz or Tidal.

And it’s not a dementia thing, it’s an adhd+generalized anxiety thing. Piece of mind is pretty valuable to me and mine.

That’s a fair take. I dunno, the potential security vulnerabilities outweigh any possible gains for me with most IOT devices, and I feel smart appliances are just more complicated to fix and more easily break down. Plus, the last thing I need is my washer to brick or my fridge to stop working from a botched firmware update.

With a wifi fridge for example I can know if it stops working and the temp starts rising before I have a fridge full of spoiled food.

You don’t need a wifi fridge for this. My wife and I manage this via Home Assistant and cheap Switchbot sensors. Fully self contained on my network, nothing to phone home anywhere.

The rest of the things you listed are kind of silly. If you left the oven on, that sucks, but you’re already gone. Also, who sets the oven on before leaving the house? That’s just an odd… like, really odd thing to do. Like, senility/dementia level odd, at which point what difference is a notification? And the dryer thing… well, that’s nothing a 15 minute wrinkle cycle doesn’t already solve on a dumb dryer.

It depends. I’m not saying I never pirate books. I’m not going to just support a publisher milking a book that should belong to the commons.

Also, some publishers have taken to raising ebook prices to as high or higher than hardback costs. For those I might buy one book by an author and pirate another. I won’t justify it other than to say I only ever bought paperbacks anyway and still remember those being like $3.99 to $6.99, so I’m not paying $18+ for an ebook novel because of publisher greed.

But if it’s an author I like, I buy their books, and support them in other ways (like with Sanderson’s Kickstarter for example).

Nah, no need to be a shitheel. I’m cool with paying for books, authors gotta eat. I wouldn’t refund a book I’ve read.