I think I got three recommendations you might enjoy.

• Green: Yutaka Midori No1 - slightly cheaper alternative to Gyokuro; deep green and very aromatic cup, sweet, slightly astringent but no bitterness ( shaded for about a week before harvest)
• Oolong: Thai Ruby Red - more on the fermented side, very aromatic red cup with flowery notes reminiscent of Darjeeling, no smokiness like e.g a formosa
• Black: Benifuuki Black - a very intense and complex black tee with a nice sweetness ( usually made into a high grade green tea)

Edit: My personal daily drivers are: Darjeeling Ambootia Second flush (Strong, nutty, with some flowery notes) and a Korea Sencha from a local shop (sadly no info on the garden, quite green and surprisingly sweet) both organic and still quite affordable.

Tell that to my IBM 10GB 10.000 RPM U2W SCSI from back then. To this day I have never witnessed a noisier harddrive… But that PC was pretty epic, including the biggest mf of a mainboard I ever had (the SCSI controller was onboard).

Yeah, the tinkering is part of the fun. Right now I’m still perfecting my OMV NAS/Homelab but after that I might look into custom routers. I’m still hoping to get fibre in the foreseeable future, but right now it’s not looking too good in my area…

That’s the problem with my router… I can’t. I’ve seen it done with OpenWRT but I chose the wrong model for that…

I wanted to do that as well, but I can’t redirect outgoing traffic on my router, just block it entirely. Sadly it was the only device of that series not supporting OpenWRT (sigh)… Next one will either have to support that or be a DIY project… Have been starting to self host my stuff already and I’m not planning to stop there!

Doesn’t help if the device has a baked in DNS address and just ignores your settings tho. Amazon and Google devices seem prone to that. After blocking everything on the common DNS ports except the PiHole, some of my devices have been acting kinda sluggish.

Mine was a first generation one and as it was dying the first articles popped up about how bad they and the following generation were failing. Didn’t bother with warranty… wasn’t fond of gambling with the failure rates. Irony was that I named the drive Deathstar when I got it (I have the long standing tradition naming my drives after space ships).

Gonna remember that for the next drive failure. Isn’t condensation a problem with that trick?

You might want to look at snapraid. I’ve recently overhauled my own NAS and love it. It is snapshot based (so not perfect safety) but it is highly configurable and provides parity and scrubbing for corruption even with a JBOD array.

The only one that didn’t die because of my own fault (two externals and a laptop one sigh), was one of the infamous IBM/Hitachi Deathstars.

That’s not on Nvidia but the fault of Google tho (they use stock Android TV) you can just use another launcher and set it to auto start ( not like the Fire Stick where they barred that option with updates sigh).

I use Syncthing to automatically keep the database up to date and usable on all of my devices. Autotype on PC is such a nice feature I wouldn’t want to miss (and it increases security on top of that).

That might be a hot take.

And of course they won’t compete over which service provides the better app\features\catalogue but will try the same exclusivity game the video streaming platforms started… No thanks!

I couldn’t find it again, sorry. But it wasn’t any real brand that did this (yet), but cheap noname TV clones (similar to those Trojan horse android boxes). Not something you’d trust anyway, but didn’t expect them trying to bridge the gap to get telemetry.

I have been searching for the source, but can’t find it anymore between all the WiFi troubleshooting sites. It wasn’t really brand stuff they mentioned but cheapo TV clones they checked for security risks, similar to those Trojan horse Android TV boxes.

But wouldn’t be the first time that the industry takes inspiration from something like that and either implements it silently to get the juicy telemetry (yes, using that to enable smart features would be dumb) or sells it as a ‘feature’.

The question is how long that will help. Just recently read about the first TVs popping up that try to connect to any available open WiFi to phone home, regardless of your settings. Soon our TVs will need tinfoil hats 😱

With Firefox on mobile I can use my personal uBlock filter list to deshitify the search results. That alone makes it superior to Revanced for me (still use it from time to time, but every time I search for something I feel the urge to puke).

At the beginning the launcher-manager acted a bit weird (started FLauncher on every home button press) but a reboot with power off did solve that. Now the launcher starts with boot and stays. Ever since I’ve never had issues. I use an external USB DAC to feed my vintage HiFi tho.

You gain a clean interface a Unsplash wallpaper selector and a nice screensaver (galaxy generator rocks) :)

My guess would be Google. When the first banner carousel came and users complained Nvidia told us they used the stock launcher, we should complain to Google, they don’t care and we’re free to use another launcher (still do ever since and they never tried to block that).

And then everything comes in separate packages with different parcel services anyway… Amazon really has become shit.