TedZanzibar

Hey all,

I used to build my own gaming PCs way back in the 90s/early 2000s but I fell out of the habit when I realised I'd rather kick back on the sofa with something that "just works" than constantly chasing framerates etc, and I switched to exclusively console based gaming. Now that I own a Steam Deck, and with Xbox going down the shitter, and my kids becoming of the age where having a static family PC makes a lot of sense, I've decided to move back into PC gaming.

I started looking at self builds again but everything's moved on so much since I last dipped my toes into that space that I struggle to know where to start. Then I saw an Alienware A51 in the refurb store with a decent early Black Friday discount code and very-nearly top-end specs so I pulled the trigger yesterday:

£2525

• Core Ultra 9 285K
• Geforce RTX 5080
• 64GB RAM
• 2TB Gen5 SSD
• 1500W platinum PSU

Retail, this spec is currently going for £3600 so it's a sizeable saving, but now I'm getting cold feet on the basis of the Intel chip not being the best choice for gaming (and will possibly never see the BIOS fix that Intel rolled out to address this), the odd PSU that'll likely need swapping out at some point in the future, and the sheer size and weight of the thing.

On the plus side, the reviews I've seen say that it's very cool and quiet, which is pretty important to me, and I do like the case design itself - it's very understated compared to most of the off-the-shelf options out there. On the downside what looks like a huge discount on the surface is mostly just wiping out the Dell premium, and similarly specced AMD options are available elsewhere for similar prices - albeit with the aforementioned off-the-shelf cases and a big question mark over noise levels.

All of which is to say: Help this former DIY builder feel a bit better about dropping this much money on a Dell of all things! Odd CPU choice aside, this is still a decent system at a decent price, right?

Oh no

We have a bunch of shutters in our living room that don't have any kind of remote control, nor a rod to operate them - you just move any of the individual slats and the rest follow suit.

Is there anything out there that could make these smart? I'm really struggling to find the right terms to search for.

Update: Turns out they are plantation blinds which has helped me to find the sort of thing I'm after. Cheers, Emperor!

Quick overview of my setup: Synology NAS running a whole bunch of Docker containers and a couple of full blown VMs, and an N100 based mini PC running Ubuntu Server for those containers that benefit from hardware acceleration.

On the NAS I have a Linux Mint VM that I use for various desktoppy things, but performance via RDP or NoMachine and so on is just bad. I think it's ultimately due to the lack of acceleration, so I'd like to try running it from the mini PC instead but I'm struggling to find hypervisor options.

VirtualBox can be done headless, apparently, but the package installed via Apt wants to install X/Wayland and the entire desktop experience. LXC looks like it might be a viable option with its web frontend but it appears to be conflicting with Docker atm and won't run the setup.

Another option is to redo the machine with UnRaid or TrueNAS Scale but as they're designed to be full fledged NAS OSes I don't love that idea.

So what would you do? Does anyone have a similar setup with advice?

Thanks all!

Edit: Thanks for everyone's comments. I still can't get LXC to work, which is a shame because it has a nice web frontend, so I'll give KVM a go as my next option. Failing that I might well backup my Docker volumes, blat the whole thing and see what Proxmox can do.

Edit 2: Webtop looks to be exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again for everyone's help and suggestions.

Specifically from the standpoint of protecting against common and not-so-common exploits.

I understand the concept of a reverse proxy and how works on the surface level, but do any of the common recommendations (npm, caddy, traefik) actually do anything worthwhile to protect against exploit probes and/or active attacks?

Npm has a "block common exploits" option but I can't find anything about what that actually does, caddy has a module to add crowdsec support which looks like it could be promising but I haven't wrapped my head around it yet, and traefik looks like a massive pain to get going in the first place!

Meanwhile Bunkerweb actually looks like it's been built with robust protections out of the box, but seems like it's just as complicated as traefik to setup, and DNS based Let's Encrypt requires a pro subscription so that's a no-go for me anyway.

Would love to hear people's thoughts on the matter and what you're doing to adequately secure your setup.

Edit: Thanks for all of your informative replies, everyone. I read them all and replied to as many as I could! In the end I've managed to get npm working with crowdsec, and once I get cloudflare to include the source IP with the requests I think I'll be happy enough with that solution.

Some sort of goals against streak, no more than 2 or possibly 3?Also unclear as to whether that's a franchise or NHL record?

... Due to past performance post mid-season, but look at those standings! Even if Boston or New York catch up in points we'll still be on top.

Anyway, just sending some hockey love from a UK Jets fan.

I work in tech and am constantly finding solutions to problems, often on other people's tech blogs, that I think "I should write that down somewhere" and, well, I want to actually start doing that, but I don't want to pay someone else to host it.

I have a Synology NAS, a sweet domain name, and familiarity with both Docker and Cloudflare tunnels. Would I be opening myself up to a world of hurt if I hosted a publicly available website on my NAS using [insert simple blogging platform], in a Docker container and behind some sort of Cloudflare protection?

In theory that's enough levels of protection and isolation but I don't know enough about it to not be paranoid about everything getting popped and providing access to the wider NAS as a whole.

Update: Thanks for the replies, everyone, they've been really helpful and somewhat reassuring. I think I'm going to have a look at Github and Cloudflare's pages as my first port of call for my needs.

Hey there, my local instance has had two admin posts pinned for the last 6 months-ish and they show right at the top of my Subscribed, Local, and All views. I can't imagine they're going to get un-pinned any time soon, so it would be great to get a feature where we can hide them.

Thanks for the consideration!