I've been running this thing for a few months now as my NAS and home server (and no, it doesn't dispense HRT). It's been pretty nice except for one thing: the fan noise. That was just horrible and made it impossible to run this thing in any living space, even though it sits in a closet.

Some friendly chap suggested swapping out the fan and a few days ago I finally got round to it. Luckily this device is pretty easy to work with. The black fan is the old one. It was not temperature controlled, which is likely the cause of the problem. The new one is and the difference is striking. Almost total silence. So, success.

Maybe this is useful to others with the same machine. The fan cost about €10 so this didn't blow up the budget. They could have put a decent one in to start with, though. Bonus pic of the PC after I put it back together:

Yes. With human drivers. Truly groundbreaking.

Suddenly the normal sleep tracking became something completely unusable. Is this enshittification or did I do something wrong?

After my last post got quite a lot of interest, I thought I'd do a follow-up. And, what can I say, it's been a journey:

Hardware

Installing the hardware was pretty easy. I'm just always a bit apprehensive about these things because I don't do this very often. But it went fine.

First boot

Nothing. No reaction at all. Well shit. After trying to reboot about 10 times, I removed all the drives one by one, but no change. I tried reseating the RAM but that also didn't do it. Then I left the machine alone for a few minutes while I was doing something else and suddenly I was in the BIOS. I'm not sure if it was the reseating or if it just needed some time for RAM training or something. Anyway, finally some result. So I put it all togther again and proceded to the next level.

Openmedivault installation

Plugged in the USB stick, it booted straight into the OMV installer. Then I hit a snag as it was trying to connect to the network. It only sh

It's an Aoostar R1. A mini PC with an Intel N100 and two HDD drive bays. It's going to be my new NAS.

I just ordered an Aoostar R1N100 mini PC to replace my aging Synology NAS. Now I'm thinking about what to install on it. It's supposed to work as a NAS but I also want to host some services on it like papeless-ngx and Jellyfin, which I both run in Docker containers on a different machine right now. Plus anything that takes my fancy in the future. Current candidates are OpenMediaVault and TrueNAS. My priorities are ease of installation and administration, as well as reliability. Which one would you recommend or are there any alternatives I'm not aware of? I've also considered Unraid, but I'd prefer something FOSS.

While I think something like this makes sense, the pricing seems off. For $600 you can build a PC with a desktop GPU. If you want to make it easy to set up, you could just use an off the shelf mini-PC and preinstall everything so a non-technical user can get started without any hassle. I really hope we'll see more Steam machine like devices in the future.

I installed Pipewire a while ago to fix some audio problems. Now it's time for the 22 upgrade. Can I just run the upgrade or will the existing Pipewire installation cause problems? Has anyone done that already?

The hippy-dippy looney lefty guys from Lazard investment bank come to the conclusion that wind plus storage at its most expensive is still considerably cheaper than nuclear at its cheapest.

Source

The future is going to be great!

The brain drain continues. Who would have thought that people don't like to work for a delusional narcissistic asshole.

But of course we all know that the big manufacturers don't do this not because they can't but because they don't want to. Planned obsolescence is still very much the name of the game, despite all the bullshit they spout about sustainability.