There’s a feature to allow charging from USB ports while a computer is off, Lenovo calls it “Always on USB.” That feature is constantly using power even when nothing is plugged in. To test if any ports have that feature power off the computer then try plugging in a simple 5v 500ma usb device to charge. If it starts charging then it has that feature and will drain power. If no options to disable in BIOS then as far as I know stuck :(

I’ve worked on a couple recent gen refurb laptops (dell and lenovo) with that feature but lacking any disable option in BIOS. I’ve tried to get into the habit of plugging in whenever not being used but still end up with things empty more often than I like. Very frustrating and I think only hope is future bios update to give that option.

My first zigbee device was Sylvania (73685) rgbw led strip. On it’s own it worked fine but once I started trying to add sengled zigbee bulbs I kept having problems with pairing the bulbs or keeping them connected. Zigbee uses 2.4ghz so I thought maybe interference so lowered power output on wifi AP 2.4ghz band & even turned it off for testing but didn’t help. I think I read somewhere that sylvanias caused that problem. I unplugged sylvania led strip, reset & rejoined everything else and had zero problems. Tried to add the sylvania back in and disconnect problems came back after awhile. It was past the return period so now I keep it unjoined and plugged into a zigbee smart outlet. I sometimes have to remove power from it to join new devices or when I restart zigbee controller. Currently have mix of sengled bulbs, thirdreality plugs, sonoff plugs & sensors, and single aqara tvoc all working together fairly reliably.

What are max print speed and volumetric set to?

For some filaments (silk PLA) I’ve had to slow things down (120mm/s max print speed and 10mm3/s max volumetric speed) or it comes out horrible. Only used 0.4 nozzles so far though.

Slicers for FDM are open source and lots of forks. The built-in printer profiles vary a lot but can be created from scratch. You can find lots online to use as examples too. I currently use Cura, Prusaslicer, and Orcaslicer.

I’m more interested in printing plastic than tuning/upgrading the printer itself so I recommend a printer with automatic z-offset and bed leveling. Basic maintenance tasks such as cleaning, oiling, and greasing will need to be done on occasion no matter the printer. Beyond that I’ve only done simple retraction tuning.

I started with Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro. Klipper firmware upgrade improved speeds a lot. It wasn’t bad for a budget printer but lack of automatic z-offset can be frustrating so I replaced & gave it away to friend. Replaced it with Creality K1 which was a lot easier to get started with thanks to automatic z-offset calibration. Output quality is good but to get better would require upgrades + tuning. Been saving up to replace with Bambu Lab P1S combo so I can also do multi-color printing.

I’d recommend using distro you know best and/or most prefer to work with. I use the flatpak install of Jellyfin Media Player but there are also deb files available.

I’m currently using minipc with Intel n5105 (or something similar) for 1080p HTPC. Debian 12 OS with auto-login & Jellyfin Media Player starting at login. I control it with pepper jobs RF remote but also have a logitech wireless keyboard+touchpad for it. Keyboard+touchpad come in handy when browsing media sites on firefox but some might restrict quality. Some of the newer minipc’s I tried required adding backports repo to install newer kernel for wifi to work. I had been playing with Debian a lot when I set up first one & been using clonezilla to image them so it’s stuck.

Ordered a gmtek n97 minipc to play with and should have it in about a week. Going to test it out with 4k but it’s not a deal breaker for me if it cannot handle that well enough.

Yep, asking for something I’m sure a lot of us would love to have, a ready to go TV remote control style usage, but rather than having discussions about why those options aren’t viable just downvoting.

Create a backup image from the working SD card. Write that backup image to a spare SD card and verify it works. Then try to do ‘apt update’ and see if anything breaks. If it breaks you got a spare SD card ready to go :)

I had issues with DNS checks and traced it to my pihole. I changed that container’s resolv.conf to use cloudflare DNS and it has been working fine since. It was with Caddy so needed to change over to use IPs.

Plex still wins on client compatibility, ease of server & client setup, and at least has the 3 commonly used oidc login providers available.

Jellyfin you may need to point external clients to your server manually as well as setup everything so they can actually connect. There are so many ways to do this that it can be paralyzing to actually decide which to try as a beginner. Local clients can usually use discovery if the firewall and container are setup correctly for the jellyfin server. Accounts have to be created manually unless you use something like jfa-go. For oidc, there’s only 3rd party plugin in alpha state and looks like people use it so guess it works well enough.

As others have said, you can have both running on the same system pointed at the same content. If you’re following the plex naming scheme should match pretty well in jellyfin, nfo files work really well for jellyfin metadata too. Lets you get an idea of it and whether it could meet your needs.

I mostly switched to Jellyfin over 3 years ago, shutdown my plex server 2 years ago after many tiny annoyances over the years. I had tried to get my family switched over but it is too much hassle for them and myself still. Been working on setting up some cheap htpc’s for that purpose but it’s not a priority for me.

I’ve had good luck with refurbished Dell laptops. My primary laptop is a refurbished Dell Latitude 11" 3120. Bought it for ~$250 at beginning of this year and currently have Fedora on it. It’s not very powerful. I use it primarily to browse the web, watch movies/tv, and vnc/ssh to my other systems. Can last about 5-6 hours streaming video from jellyfin at 50% brightness, other stuff barely uses any power and can stretch out to 9-10 hours if I set display brightness even lower.

I’ve always bought Windows laptops then put linux on them so I’m used to verifying that tools such as TLP are installed, configured, enabled, and working. There is too much variety with laptops for all of them to be handled automatically unfortunately so I always verify it. If a laptop came with Linux pre-installed then it might be good to go ootb but I’d still verify.

Quick way to check if a program is using hardware video acceleration is with a gpu top utility.

Intel - intel_gpu_top

Nvidia - nvidia-smi / nvtop

AMD - radeontop / nvtop / amdgpu_top (just did quick search, don’t have any AMD powered on to verify)

Self-host your own ACME server. Then you can use certbot pointed there.

These instructions are old so not sure if newer/better ways, https://blog.sean-wright.com/self-host-acme-server/

Is MariaDB on spinning disk or ssd?

I initially set up Nextcloud with MariaDB on spinning disk but it was slow even completely empty. I moved that container to ssd & performance was a lot better. The web UI may still have some slow loading parts but I can’t say for sure since rarely use it. Caldav+carddav+Nextcloud client are how I usually interact with it.

They still build recommendations even if you’re not logged in, you can see them in the sidebar after you load a video. Imo they only removed them from the homepage to try convincing people to log in or create account, it’s all about increasing user numbers, ad engagement, and data collection these days.

The container method used should be whatever you are more familiar with or prefer. They both have their own quirks, pros, & cons.

SELinux - If you don’t want to deal with SELinux then set it to permissive mode. If you want to keep in enforcing mode you need to create the appropriate policies, https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/using_selinux/configuring-selinux-for-applications-and-services-with-non-standard-configurations_using-selinux

Firewall - If you don’t want it’s protection then look up instructions to stop & disable it on your distro.

Port forwarding - From linux container side you either need to specify host networking or the ports you want to allow through, there is no avoiding that if it needs to be network accessible. If you want it internet accessible then you need to setup port forwarding on your router.

Have you looked into something like yunohost? It may be the kind of thing you’re looking for.

If router supports it, a static route via connected machine with IP forwarding enabled might work. OpenWrt has packages for things like tailscale and zerotier so could do it without an extra machine too.

For 3, if router supports it could also try doing static route via Tailscale joined machine that has IP forwarding enabled

If your router lets you try adding a static route for the tailscale IP/subnet to the laptop with IP forwarding enabled.

For the OS side a few ways.

• Clone & then rename+change drivers
• Ansible/chef
• NixOS

For home folder side of things a dotfile manager, cloud services, and file sync tool will take care of most things. I use chezmoi for dotfiles & nextcloud for file syncing. Firefox is only cloud synced service I still use for now. I have yet to find any decent sources of information on dotfiles so gonna be stuck going through those stupid things to figure out what you want to sync.

Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I’ll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.