I personally do ShareX, with an SFTP destination for an nginx webserver. It has an image editor built in as part of the workflow if you enable it, and it can automatically copy the clipboard URL.

You could certainly go the extra mile and setup an image sharing manager or a more complicated solution if you wanted to though, if that makes overall administration easier.

The level of self-righteousness on that forum is hilarious, so it’s nice when the achievement is appreciated for what it is.

Companies can have multiple business lines.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

Oh awesome! So pleased to see Mistral AI integration for paperless-ai.

It can technically be used to extend your stay in Palau long enough to establish tax residency since it would allow you to stay in Palau for longer than 183 days a year. Not unusual for people sitting on big crypto stashes to move abroad or buy citizenships in order to cash out their crypto without capital gains tax (or at least that’s how it goes - I imagine the IRS doesn’t go down that easily).

The whole point of this card is basically to bypass KYC requirements for crypto exchanges that don’t allow US customers. They are very explicit about this in their marketing.

China scary tho

The X3 CPUs were essentially quad cores where one of the cores failed a quality control check. Using a higher end Mobo, it was possible to unlock the fourth core with varying results. This was a cheap consumer Acer prebuilt though, so I didn’t have that option.

I had a old Acer SFF desktop machine (circa 2009) with an AMD Athlon II 435 X3 (equivalent to the Intel Core i3-560) with a 95W TDP, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 2 1TB hard drives running in RAID 0 (both HDDs had over 30k hours by the time I put it in). The clunker consumed 50W at idle. I planned on running it into the ground so I could finally send it off to a computer recycler without guilt.

I thought it was nearing death anyways, since the power button only worked if the computer was flipped upside down. I have no idea why this was the case, the computer would keep running normally afterwards once turned right side up.

The thing would not die. I used it as a dummy machine to run one-off scripts I wrote, a seedbox that would seed new Linux ISOs as it was released (genuinely, it was RAID0 and I wouldn’t have downloaded anything useful), a Tor Relay and at one point, a script to just endlessly download Linux ISOs overnight to measure bandwidth over the Chinanet backbone.

It was a terrible machine by 2023, but I found I used it the most because it was my playground for all the dumb things that I wouldn’t subject my regular home production environments to. Finally recycled it last year, after 5 years of use, when it became apparent it wasn’t going to die and far better USFF 1L Tiny PC machines (i5-6500T CPUs) were going on eBay for $60. The power usage and wasted heat of an ancient 95W TDP CPU just couldn’t justify its continued operation.

I really liked Miniflux and its clean design too too, but I found without an adequate categorization functionality, it quickly became overwhelming. Since I don’t check my RSS reader as often as I should, it eventually got overwhelming and I had to switch to FreshRSS.

My understanding is that the 2021 Corsair RM850x variant is manufactured and relabelled from a Channel Well Technology (CWT) PSU with Japanese capacitors from Nippon Chemi-Con (the RM-e variants use Taiwanese capacitors, I think from either Teapo or CapXon).

Check DeepCool and Thermalright for cooling options. I run Noctua too but they’re definitely not the best value.

Check FSP, Seasonic in case they have something for a PSU in the price range. They both actually make power supplies, rather than marketing like many of the other ones on that list. I have a Seasonic-made Corsair from 2012 still in use. Runs 24/7. Buy overspecced unit. The beefier it is, the cooler it runs, the less the fan spins / the longer capacitors last.

I ended up switching my CPU cooler to the Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 EVO, since my PSU choice changed to the RM850x which has a top 29dB noise level. The log calculations made the Noctua D15s less appealing given the price point.

I’d install all the RAM I’d ever need on this machine because DDR5 is even more sensitive to chip differences than earlier standards. Also I have no idea who Team are. I would use Crucial since they actually make RAM chips. Keep in mind that using 4 DIMMs drops RAM speed dramatically on AM5. I think the AMD docs say 3600 or 3800 for 4 DIMMs. You could run them faster but you won’t get to the rated speed.

I also ended up buying a 64GB ram kit and will sell the 32GB kit I already purchased. You’re right in noting that 2x DIMM is the best config.

Stay away from Gigabyte. Check what ASRock has if it makes more sense than MSI. I recently got their X870 Pro RS and it’s been great so far. Few PCIe slots on this one but there’s 2x USB 4 which seems to work well and it can be broken out to many USB 3 ports if needed. E.g. a 40 Gbps port can be split to 4x 10 Gbps ports or perhaps even to 7x 5 Gbps ports.

I was already hesitant about going Gigabyte since I know their brand reputation has tanked and their B650 board has horrible VRM. People on r/bapcsalescanada warned against the Gigabyte boards, even the Eagle AX option.

Thanks for all your input!

Thanks for all the input! I’m going to swap out the RM-e with the RM850x. The top dB of that PSU is still 29dB at high load, so I’ll just compromise and swap out the Noctua D15S with the Thermalright Phantom Spirit.

Point taken and I will order a 64gb ram kit and sell the 32gb on FB Marketplace. Thanks for the input.

I’m not convinced my workload will really justify over 32GB of RAM yet, and there’s 2 leftover RAM slots that I can always slot in additional memory down the road.

Point taken on the HDD, I thought that it would be possible to set up the HDD to just spin down when not in use but apparently the HDD I’m considering still has an annoying hum in idle. So that was a fair thing to challenge.

I definitely thought about it, especially since people on r/buildapc say they tend to replace every 5-8 years with upgrades along the way, but the truth of it is just that the first time I tried to replace the cooler, I didn’t realize you need to warm up the CPU to loosen the thermal paste to the CPU. As expected, I used a lot of force to get the cooler off and ended up destroying the CPU by accident when the cooler finally gave way. Dumb way to blow $500 CAD.

In general though, the build isn’t optimal for airflow. The case definitely is not great airflow wise and I always had a game plan to turn it into a file server (with some undervolting). Thanks for the advice!

A lot of these comments are downright unreasonable.

It’s important to evaluate your threat model critically. The average tourist (that isn’t going to Western China) or student is not a target for surveillance or data extrication attempts, especially firmware level attacks that are very specific to devices and are expensive to research and implement.

Companies tend to require employees to carry burner devices for international travel because that’s just good practice. You’re far more likely to lose your device when traveling, border officials have broad discretion to search for and access your devices, and companies tend to have high value information available to their devices past the corporate gateway, like trade secrets, technical designs, accounting records or employee data. That applies to any country, even Western countries.

Take your privacy seriously, but the notion that anything that touches Chinese soil means your devices are instantly compromised is a bit of a fallacious claim. Critically evaluate your role, the information you carry and why you might be the target of anything.

Anyways, as far as VPNs go - technically not illegal. Companies, universities, etc. all have sanctioned MLP gateways in Hong Kong to bypass the firewall. Every expat in China uses a VPN. There’s only one public case of anyone ever being arrested for using a VPN (and it was under a catch-all law), the others were all operators of ShadowSocks/V2Ray airports.

Tailscale and WireGuard is dicey in Mainland China. If you’re just a short term visitor, just buy a 3HK roaming sim for China and call it a day. As a best practice, you don’t really want to expose your self hosted services to the web anyways, so I would probably not even bother trying to VPN from a mainland connection directly.

I never got Plex or Jellyfin to work well on actual Mainland internet connections, simply because the Chinanet backbone that most people in China use is excruciatingly bottlenecked to the point that torrenting from other Chinese peers is just a much more pleasant experience.

People who are looking for direct integration between podcast players and SponsorBlock seem to be missing that a lot of podcasts these days that do have advertising in them oftentimes have dynamic ads where the ad audio will change depending on the day, the geographical location of the download, etc. So SponsorBlock can’t actually account for what are essentially dynamic timestamps Whereas with YouTube you typically have fairly static timestamps that can be shared across a user base, only smaller podcasts are really going to be able to be captured by SponsorBlock unless someone discovers a way to mod an Android APK to essentially prevent the client-side compilation of ads and the original podcast audio assuming that there is a podcast app that does this on the client side.