iMeddles

AV1 isn't needed yet, because its only really being used for live streaming like youtube gaming at the moment (Plex itself only started supporting AV1 in December). That might change in the next few years, depending on if the scene picks it up as a technology, its just a case of whether you want to future proof yourself. Of course, given how cheap these mini pcs are, you might be as well sticking with the N5105 now, and then picking up an N100 (or even whatever it's successor is) in a few years time. If you do end up running proxmox, you can always cluster them together, so you can keep using the old one alongside the new one. (Because they're so cheap, I actually have three of them in a little cluster, so I can patch and reboot each proxmox server without downtime to my plex server)

Getting proxmox to pass the GPU through to containers is a little fiddly, but it got a lot easier since they moved to the 6.x kernel, and there's plenty of guides around. It could well be worth a look if you want to run multiple servers on one device

As for the GPU, they're unlikely to make a huge difference either way, but note that the n5105 has no hardware support for the AV1 codec, so any media you have or end up with in that format will need decoding on the CPU. The n100 igpu has hardware decode instead, so if you think you might end up with any av1 content, then that's the way to go.

I run Plex on essentially one of these (different case, but n5105/8gb ram, bought from AliExpress) and they're great little machines for it. Most of my library is 1080p, but I have run 2 simultaneous 4k transcodes before and it just keeps chugging along happily. I'm actually running proxmox on it, with Plex being just one container out of several, so it also has the grunt to do several simultainious streams and keep my mastodon server, torrent box, pihole, and a few other things running at the same time. In my experience, you'll run out of ram before ever chocking the CPU on a standard setup, so it might be worth upping to the n100 to get 16gs instead.

It wouldn't be any cheaper for them to ship without windows, because the windows os youre getting from aliexpress sellers selling budget pcs is almost always counterfeit :p but installing Linux on them is a breeze, they've got a full standard uefi BIOS, so just plug a USB stick with Ubuntu on it in, and install as usual.

We offered him a deal, he accepted, then we withdrew it before it was signed. Frankly, clownshow behaviour from united for the guy who's saved our seasons over and over again, even if his time here was coming to an end.

Even better, I found a company that pays me in money while having a free beer fridge in the office :D (at least, up until before I basically started wfh full time during the pandemic)

Went to university to study Bioinformatics. There I discovered I don't really like biology, but I did really like getting paid beer to fix other student's computers. Especially when they were desperate around submission deadlines cos they hadn't backed up their work for weeks/months before their computer went kaput.

I've been a sysadmin now for 13 years since graduating.

Its interesting that everyone focuses on the privacy and the EEE risk of this, but my reasons for leaving Facebook were that Facebook is actively-allowing-the-promotion-of-genocide-because-not-moderating-is-better-for-their-bottom-line Evil. I left facebook because I'm not willing to provide the (even infinitesimal) boost to their network effects that my account had. For the same reason, Threads is an instant defederate on launch.

Holy shit... for years archive.org only had fairyland and I'd given up on this one ever appearing. Thanks so so much for spotting this. MY QUEST IS OVER. Time to see just how crap it is :D

Fun School 6: Futureland. Its a shitty edutainment game from the 90s that I played non-stop for like a year, that I want to get my hands on for nostalgia purposes. As far as I can tell its not available (online or physical media) anywhere. I finally found a copy for sale a few years ago, but it turned out to be a mislabelled copy of fun school 6: fairyland.

I will keep searching, eventually a copy will show up somewhere!

I've had a lot of luck with these (I'm using the previous gen, but this one should be even better), they're so cheap I bought 3 of them and set up a little proxmox cluster. The iGPU. In them is strong enough to run multiple 4k Plex transcoded, and I have 20 or so containters and vms tunning across then without hitting any limits. https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005005575993915.html?spm=a2g0n.productlist.0.0.4ea83dd0P2OEuA&browser_id=e010fa4472c54b7ab7a7431394ec6e9b&aff_platform=msite&m_page_id=gxinhmngbwccavuh1891a9984c2ea436a5e1596831&gclid=&pdp_npi=3%40dis%21GBP%21244.73%21134.6%21%21%21%21%21%40214527c616883684159437702d0723%2112000033613841000%21sea%21UK%210&algo_pvid=42d27fb3-693a-4b11-97f8-7e83f1dddc74