My first thought would be to try and fix it, then you have a nice laptop or get to be the family hero when you return it working to your brother.
Past that there are several services you might use that can take advantage of the video card: Immich image recognition, Paperless OCR, some of the local Whisper servers.
Or you have a nice set-top PC for big screen gaming and media playback.
It heavily depends on how close you are and their hover system and how much work has been spent to make them quiet. You probably heard about the Amazon ones, which are loud and hover low to the ground. There are other ones, such as the ones Zipline makes, which are quieter to begin with and hover very high, using a powered descend module on a cable. Those are basically silent from ground level.
Avoiding traffic and using an electric vehicle instead of a ICE one. In Bay Area traffic an electric drone can do a delivery in five minutes that would take a car thirty. And the Zipline style high hover + tethered descent drone is quieter than a car. I’m not sure if these are using that style or the low hover type like Amazon had been using, which are much louder.
You definitely don’t have to go full LLM for this. There are a wide variety of local spam filtering tools available, depending on what email application you use. If you really want to use modern ML, I’d go with something like Laya as it is tunable and runs locally.
Easily! My Pi runs PiHole and a print server and I’ll could probably run almost my entire stack in it if I wanted. Jellyfin would be the hardest due to transcoding CPU usage, but it’s probably ok for one stream at a time.
The other issue for me would be storage. Since I have a 32TB NAS I run everything that requires large storage on it, but a USB RAID attached to a Pi would probably work just fine.
The other issue is RAM. I rarely hit 8GB, but do use more than 4GB fairly regularly.
I have a git repo with all my docker files, config, notes, etc. I have a main overview file covering the overall system and then a directory for each machine. I edit things on my local machine, then scp and ssh to the various remotes. Once I’m happy with my changes, I commit and push to my Forgejo install on my NAS in case my main computer fails. Secrets, passwords, and keys are in my Vaultwarden.
I don’t use AI for it, but a local model could probably give me the commands to do whatever I wanted based on the repo.
I bought a 1000 foot spool a few years back when wiring my house and have used it for helping out friends and family ever since. I’m not sure how much I have left, but I’ll probably pick up another whenever I do.
Cat 6 is what, $0.15 a foot? Plus maybe another $0.50 for the connectors and boots? That’s a 16 foot snake for $3.00.
I’m not really a KISS fan, but my brother-in-law was and he had two extra tickets. That concert was the best showmanship I’ve ever seen.
Or you can go straight to the source and use the Trash Guides
Like all projects, you should think about needs, budget, and time. You’ve got a good list of what you want to run which is a good start. Budget is next, particularly considering the price of hardware these days.
FWIW, I run Jellyfin, Navidrome, the entire arr stack, Forgejo, Paperless, mealio, and Immich on a NAS with 24GB RAM and have never needed more. 8GB would have been a bit tight but probably doable. 16 will be plenty for you.
From TFA, emphasis mine:
What veans is for#
Coding agents keep their own to-do lists. Claude Code has TodoWrite, other tools have their own scratch files, and either way that list lives inside a single session and disappears when the session ends. You can’t see it while the agent is working, your teammates can’t see it at all, and nothing survives to the next session.
veans replaces that ephemeral list with real tasks in a Vikunja project. The agent claims a task before it starts, moves it along as it works, and leaves it in review when it’s done. The result is that the agent’s work is visible in the same place you already track everything else: you can watch a task move across the board in real time, comment on it, reprioritize it, or pick up where the agent left off. When the session ends, the trail is still there.
veans itself is built for machines, not people . Everything prints JSON, so it’s made to be consumed by an agent or a script. The human side of the workflow happens in Vikunja.
What Taskwarrior lets you do is something like this for people:
task add priority:high due:thursday depends:32 something I need to do
task ready # shows all of my tasks that aren't waiting on something or depending on something
task project:home-repairs export > home-repairs.json # export my entire home repair project to a json file to process into a gantt chart, budget (since I can add a price tag to each task) and whatever else
but then I can also have a script that looks like:
# taskfile.sh
infile="$1"
proj ="$2"
while IFS= read -r line; do
[ -z "$line" ] && continue
[[ "$line" =~ ^[[:space:]]*# ]] && continue
echo "Adding task: $line"
if [ -n "$proj" ]; then
task add "$line" "$proj"
else
task add "$line"
fi
done < "$input_file"
which lets me have preset task lists for various things, like:
taskfile.sh ~/tasks/packing-list.txt proj:work-trip
taskfile.sh ~/tasks/xmas-list.txt proj:xmas-presents
Thats an administration cli, not a daily use cli.
And, I mean things like being able to take tasks, pipe them through whatever tooling you like, pipe them back in, sync them from any other task system, etc. TaskWarrior has a fully customizable priority and urgency system, tagging, dependency management, and status system. I also like that TaskWarrior is usable completely offline and then can be resynced whenever you feel like it.
Vikunja is great and probably the right choice for most people. But if you do significant project planning for yourself AND want to be able to deal with you todo list programmatically, the only other thing close is orgmode.
Fair enough! The lack of a cli is the deal breaker for Vikunja for me.
There is a WASM ticket being worked on that once it is completed will allow for all sorts of fancy web UIs for TaskWarrior as standalone PWAs or whatever. I should check in on how that’s going.
I’ve taken a brief look at it. The ui is fairly slick, but you have to use it their way and it doesn’t have a cli. How much that matters is up to you.
Instead of new and exciting, how about old and boring? https://taskwarrior.org/
Sync server is self hosted, it’s more configurable and programmable than anything else and has a variety of front ends on different platforms.
And give up the best weather and access to 5 star restaurants in the world? Surely you jest!
If you want to have a fun “before times” theme, try something BeOS flavored. Or go really obscure and try to find one that matches the Dano leak.
Hi! I’ve been seeing your questions here and I think some basic terminology and background will help you out.
I’m going to try and avoid too much “whell acktully”, but there will probably be some.
A kernel is the core of any operating system, it usually provides basic hardware support for programs to use, and in the case of Linux, hardware drivers, filesystems, low level networking protocols and other very close to the hardware support.
But a kernel can’t really do anything by itself, so we run programs on top of it. Some of these are also very low level and most people don’t deal with them or know they are there, while others are things like web browsers, video games, and whatever else you directly use every day.
For Linux, there are often multiple programs that provide the same or similar functionality, with different features and tradeoffs, at all levels of the system. With Windows or Mac, there is often only one version of the low level programs that they provide and you never know is there.
Because of all the options, different groups have put together different sets of these programs together, along with configuration files, and installer programs. These are called distros, short for distributions. Different distros make different choices for at least as many reasons as there are distros. Also in Linux, a program plus whatever files it needs are often called packages.
Since even a small distro may contain thousands of packages, management of them is very important. Most distros have a package manager program to help deal with that and the package manager is how you will install most packages, though as always there are other options. A package manager is similar in some way to an app store from Mac or windows, only not shitty.
Some distros make a lot of package choices for you, others make you make basically every choice. Most are somewhere in between. So-called beginner distros are usually ones that have made all the choices for you, and aimed those choices at being easy to use for people that have only experienced Windows or Mac.
A desktop environment is an integrated graphical interface that has a bunch of programs that all work together and have a similar look and feel. You may also hear about a window manager, which is like a very minimal desktop environment that doesn’t come with a lot of features by itself.
Different distros provide different desktop environments by default, or maybe none at all! Some make it very easy to switch from one to another, but some don’t.
Most DEs try to look like either Windows or Mac in order to feel friendlier to new users. Window managers generally don’t, as they are assumed to by used by people with a lot of experience who want something very specific and will take the time to make it happen.
Some common DEs and what they sorta look like are:
And here are some common distros and their default DEs
I hope this helps!
Meh, it’s just the plague. Where I grew up a couple people got it most years and deaths were very rare. Antibiotics clear it up pretty easily as long as you get to it in time.