brickfrog

My Sony Trinitron served me well back in the day - But no, I don't miss the CRT era. Just too huge and heavy. And honestly I don't remember the generic non-Trinitron CRTs being anything special, they were kind of shitty.

Anyways I thought the CRT thing is just collectors/old school gamers looking to display older media on a proper CRT? Obviously people with a lot of space, garages, basements, etc.. people in tiny rooms and apartments need not apply LOL.

This whole article seems a bit off.

If I create a new torrent, does CGNAT (carrier-grade network address translation) prevent me from being an initial seeder of that torrent?

It's not ideal, you won't be able to seed/upload to any other firewalled (non port forwarded) peers.

But technically any connectable (port forwarded) peers connecting to you will still be able to download from you, so you'd still be able to seed in that sense. That does mean you're only initial seeding to peers that have their own ports open/forwarded.

I can download and upload in my torrent client just fine, so I know my ISP isn’t (intentionally) blocking and firewalling torrents.

Yup that would work fine, you can participate in torrent swarms that contain other connectable peers and that's usually how most torrent swarms are. You'll probably have trouble with the random low seed torrents e.g. a torrent with one lone seed who also has no ports open, that seed won't be able to send you any torrent data.

Depends on what you're building. If you're looking for an overpowered SFF type of platform then yeah those AI Max+ builds may be what you want. Just keep in mind a lot of those are integrated motherboards (non-upgradable parts) and usually have minimal storage options and slots for add-in cards.

The other reason those AI Max+ PCs get a lot of press is that there's still not a whole ton of CPUs with capable NPU built-in aka Windows Copilot+ compatible. AI Max+ happens to be one of those. (whether NPU is actually useful right now beyond Copilot+ is a whole other discussion)

So if you actually want a more extensible build out and don't care about this Copilot+ stuff then traditional builds / non SFF builds are probably still more in line with what you want.

Yikes! Yeah if the SSD storage isn't easily accessible then it's not worth the disassembly headache.

If that is the case then OP's only option is to try writing the bootable ISO onto a second partition on the current drive while in Windows and boot off that partition.. assuming getting the USB port repaired is a no-go.

Does the Surface Go have a SSD in it? And/or can you install a SSD into it? The specs do imply that it supports SSD so you should at least have a port in there for that. If so, as long as you have a spare machine you can install the Surface's SSD into another system, then install Linux Mint normally there, then re-install the SSD back into the Surface Go.

I've never done that but it's been mentioned a few times in the Linux Mint forums so apparently that is a roundabout way of installing on a machine without working USB ports. e.g.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=388243

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=361542

Not sure how well Mint works specifically on Surface Go but it's worth a try, most likely you'd use the same steps to install other distros on there.

EDIT: Without a spare system you might be able to download then write the Mint ISO onto a second partition inside Windows and boot from the Mint installer partition afterwards. Not sure how well that would work but someone else in the forums mentioned it https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=369154

Thanks for the share! It's not something I'd need to use but I'm all for people sharing their scripts with the community for this stuff :)

One suggestion, you may want to look at re-writing your script to move away from the VBScript (.vbs) dependency since Microsoft is moving towards disabling and eventually removing it from Windows 11 and onward. It'll likely be disabled by default in 2027 so you have plenty of time.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/vbscript-deprecation-timelines-and-next-steps/4148301

OP's example use case in the post was with the internet still being up. Building off of that yes, I'd log into the power switch remotely via the internet where I can then power cycle anything plugged into it - for me it was just to restart unresponsive desktops or whatever was plugged into it.

But you wouldn't need internet to power cycle the internet router itself by using scheduled tasks. e.g. the power switch can check that the internet router is responding to pings every x seconds/minutes and power cycle it if stops responding. (it has other checks/conditions it can use besides simple pings)

That said my own equipment rarely/never needs a reboot so in the case my network loses internet access it usually means the internet is actually down, nothing I can do about that aside from maintaining backup internet if I needed.

if the primary internet router goes offline but the internet isn’t out (ie a router reboot would fix the problem)

Maybe you just need to give it a simple power cycle remotely? There are devices that do that sort of thing, I have a Digital Loggers Web Power Switch Pro that I've used on-and-off over the years for this purpose.

https://www.digital-loggers.com/

At one point I had to relocate for half a year while needing to remote access a slightly unstable desktop that wouldn't always reboot cleanly and get stuck at the BIOS, it sometimes needed a couple of power cycles to come back online. The Power Switch was perfect for that, I'd log into it remotely and power cycle anything that was plugged into it.

It should work for routers too e.g. it can automatically power cycle something plugged into it based on different conditions like maybe it stops responding to pings or whatever. Or I guess if you had multiple IPs / multiple internet connections the switch itself can stay online and accessed remotely without needing to schedule anything automatic.

Pretty sure there are more pro-level (and more expensive) types of devices to do this sort of thing if you look around

Nouveau seems to work pretty well on Debian 13 for me, at least for standard web browser / streaming / video playback with 2160p HDR tonemapping. Back when I was using Debian 12 Nouveau would lag badly during 2160p playback so I was force to use the Nvidia driver binary at the time. But so far it's been alright, granted I've not tested any gaming and perhaps that's where Nouveau won't do as well.

Sorry... are you talking about piracy or privacy? They're different things, you start off referring to piracy but most of your post is about privacy :P

Anyways I've never considered Lemmy as a "privacy" platform so it's not really how or why I ended up here. Most Lemmy instances don't even allow Tor usage, some block VPN usage too, and most require an email to sign up and register. On top of that each Lemmy instance is going to be as private as the instance admin is willing to make it.

I have a bit of a dilemma with my DIY NAS rig.

Does your setup have any way to do noise insulation? I suspect the answer is no but figured I'd throw it out there, surprisingly noise insulation helps more than you'd think. I have a bunch of drives inside a desktop case with insulation panels built in and the drives themselves are in there with rubber anti vibration screws/mounts. Barely ever hear anything from the drives (granted my WD Reds are probably quieter than your current Seagates).

Just something to think on whether it's an option for your current NAS rig or a future configuration.

It's been a thing, not specifically just Canada

https://www.wired.com/story/phone-searches-at-the-us-border-hit-a-record-high/

That said I don't personally know any canadian citizens that have traveled in/out of the U.S recently. Not too sure if it relates to OP's question, OP never mentioned canadian citizens only that they has a GF that goes to school in Canada.