The SSH and VPN traffic is encrypted. Unless your private keys have been compromised, nobody can see what is going over the tunnel. They can log things like the IP addresses that are connecting to it and how much data is being transferred though.

Or self driving cars.

Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t recommend putting something power hungry like a GPU in one of these. A NIC will be fine though.

The DE won’t really make much of a performance difference on a high end computer.

They are not USB based, they just happen to use a USB 3 cable to carry the PCIe signals.

If you don’t want to risk modifying the slot, try one of the cheap PCIe risers on amazon and send it back if it doesn’t work. You will need a case with a couple of extra slots under the motherboard in order to fit the riser in there though.

It will run slower, but that probably won’t be an issue unless you plan to max out all 4 ports simultaneously.

Are there any good log monitoring programs that will automatically blacklist the IP of any crawler that ignores robots.txt?

There’s also a PPA if you don’t want to use a flatpak. Just be sure to uninstall it before upgrading to Mint 23 to avoid any issues.

Yes, a used PC can work great for a home server. Just don’t go too old or it will be power hungry. Obviously you will want one with an integrated GPU to save power too. If you want to run jellyfin, make sure it supports hardware video encoding, preferably AV1 or H.265.

Any Japanese made surround sound receiver and speakers than you can pick up from a thrift store or craigslist will sound way better than the modern junk. It will have a big, heavy power transformer and linear amplifiers. There will be no internet connected spyware either. If you find one from the 90’s, it will likely have a phono preamp for your record player too.

It’s never worked for me either. The ClearURLs addon has a function to copy a clean URL and that works great though. It’s open source, so maybe someone could turn its cleaning function into a program that could be used for the clipboard.

There’s musikcube if you’re looking for a terminal based player.

It still can’t sort or browse by album artist, which makes it a real pain to use. You have to apply a patch and compile it from source to make it usable.

Zonemider is accessed through a web interface. Just enable HTTPS and put a lets encrypt certificate on the web server. Of course if you don’t have a publicly accessible IP address, things get more complicated since you will need a VPN or some sort of tunnel.

You could install ZoneMinder and set it up with your webcam. It will do recording and basic motion detection. You don’t have to mess with any docker stuff, it just needs a recent version of Debian or Ubuntu. If you want to access it from a phone, I would suggest using the zmNinja app since the web UI sucks on mobile.

Some actual CCTV IP cameras would be better than a webcam if you can still find any that provide an RTSP stream and don’t require any of that cloud crap.

There’s NetSurf, which is really lightweight for a graphical browser. There’s also Falkon and Otter Browser. They are more capable, but use more resources.

Reinstall using btrfs as the root files system and enable automatic snapshots. The data on your home partition will be fine, just make sure the installer doesn’t format it.

Idle power is not usually that high unless you are talking about a multi socket server.
A gaming PC is usually less than 100W and an office PC is usually less than 25W at idle.

Use it for a firewall / router, but don’t bother with WiFi. There are no antenna connectors, so it probably doesn’t have a card installed and normal WiFi cards make terrible access points anyways.

If you want to use OPNsense, make sure the NICs are supported. If it has Realtek NICs, you will probably have to use a Linux based firewall.

A used SAS card can be found on ebay for $20-$30. You just need a PC with an open 8 lane PCIe slot and a few drive bays. An older 6gbps card is fine for a few mechanical hard drives.