Many of our home customers’ feedback indicated a preference for the certainty provided by an annual plan. The annual plan offers assurance that you always have access to the latest version with innovations such as improvements we’ve made in compression speeds and algorithms. It also ensures you have access to critical updates and are protected against new threats and risks.

I think they made that up. I highly doubt their customers expressed any such preference.

$20 per month would be enough to discourage me. It’s another relatively costly computer-related subscription and I already feel like I’m losing a battle to keep those minimal. There would have to be some very clear benefits for that price.

They’re looking for something open-source. Draw.io’s readme says:

License

The source code authored by us in this repo is licensed under a modified Apache v2 license. This project is not an open source project as a result.

I haven’t been through the license to see what its restrictions are, but there must be a reason they give this warning.

Maybe they should, and also care about the many people still using these processors that are not very old.

I think this is why the “my code documents itself” attitude appeals, even though it’s almost never enough. Most developers just can’t write, nor do they want to.

Google takeout is there so they are technically compliant with rules that say you must be able to download your personal data, but they make it so inconvenient to use that practically it’s almost impossible to download it. Google photos isn’t a backup service so much as a way for Google to hold your photos hostage until you start paying for higher amounts of storage. And by the time you need that storage, Google takeout download has become impractical.

Is btrfs RAID stable yet? This article is three years old, so maybe things have improved, but it contains some pretty strong warnings about the dangers of btrfs RAID:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linuxs-perpetually-half-finished-filesystem/

To summarize, the article argues that btrfs is great for single-disk usage but its RAID implementations are idiosyncratic and unreliable.

(I use btrfs daily on several single-disk computers and it has been great, but I have never tried its RAID.)

Am I likely to be annoyed about where the fiber comes into the house?

That one depends on the company installing it. When I got it installed they asked me exactly where I wanted the fiber to terminate and ran it through the house to an outlet under my desk. So let them know and they might put it where you need it.

As for the router, I recommend buying a mini PC with at least 2 Ethernet ports and 4GB of RAM and running OPNsense. It’s great and will give you all the control you need. Or you can repurpose any old PC you have lying around and just add some Ethernet ports on a PCIE card.

Once the company goes out of business (or they focus on a different business) they tell you to get your tires or they will be discarded if you don’t. So you have to get them from them and you stop paying for the storage.

That’s where there’s no analogy for media purchased through streaming services. When streaming services withdraw content, the analogy would be the tire shop sending you an email saying “Just so you know, we’re burning your tires next week. No, you can’t come and get them.”

If the backup HDD was the only copy, it was an archive and not a backup, and you also need backups of the archive.

The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they’d put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.

OPNsense is excellent. You can run it on a cheap mini PC with multiple Ethernet ports and it makes a great router. I run several VLANs through it.

Edit: It’s based on FreeBSD, not Linux, in case that matters to you.

The N100 has a reputation for decent performance and good power efficiency at a cheap price. It’s a basic quad core CPU with only efficiency cores (no performance cores) and no hyperthreading, but it comes with modern codec capabilities. It will certainly give you more power than a Raspberry Pi for everyday tasks, but don’t expect to do anything too demanding with it. If your needs are basic an N100 mini PC seems like a good option.

I just found the general combination of security - mindedness and cheap Chinese hardware curious / amusing.

I think it can make sense, since there are so often vulnerabilities in consumer router firmware, and because those devices are so common the vulnerabilities are profitable to exploit. Running a BSD-based router on a cheap Chinese PC is likely to be better security for the router’s OS and software itself, even if you don’t know for sure about the firmware on the board (which you don’t with consumer routers either, really). Overall you could still have reduced your attack surface compared to a popular consumer router.

I use one with 6 LAN ports and a fanless 10th gen i5 running OPNsense, and it has worked well for years. It runs many services including Unbound DNS and Suricata with capacity to spare. It’s much better than any consumer router, though I run WiFi separately with an Asus AI Mesh set to AP mode.

The only concerns are that you don’t get BIOS updates, and you don’t know for sure that there’s nothing nasty in the firmware. But then you don’t really know that on consumer routers either.

I run a fanless mini PC with OPNsense and it’s by far the best router I’ve ever had at home. I can keep traffic separate in different VLANs, configure my own firewall rules, run a recursive DNS resolver and use Suricata for intrusion detection and blocking. It cost a bit more upfront but it has been worth it. Instead of attempting WiFi on the OPNsense box I added a consumer WiFi mesh router in access point mode, but any old router would do for this.

Or gravity-sync. I use two Pi-holes with gravity-sync and it’s very reliable and effortless.

I haven’t used PFSense, I’m afraid. There’s a fairly recent comparison here:

https://homenetworkguy.com/review/detailed-comparison-between-opnsense-and-pfsense/

I like Joplin too, and I use it when I can instead of Keep. It supports a pretty good range of synchronization mechanisms. But it doesn’t have the collaboration capability of Keep, so when I’m doing shared shopping lists or to do lists, I still end up using Keep.

I use OPNsense on a reasonably cheap mini-PC with 6 ethernet ports that I bought from AliExpress. You can do a lot with OPNsense. For wifi I could have added a wireless card, but to avoid any potential driver issues instead I just plug in a wireless router set to Access Point mode.

How much this kind of setup costs depends on what kind of hardware you buy. If you stick to the minimum spec for OPNsense and buy a cheap wifi card or a used wifi router from eBay, you won’t need to spend too much.