You cannot have much time in this or you likely have only ever worked on type of install. $120/drop is the price you charge for simple installs that have zero complication. Just wait until you see fire blocking, runs that go over really weird sections of building, etc.

Ask any veteran of this business and they will laugh you out of the room.

The typical price for a business that had drop ceilings and drywall is $150-$300 depending on number of drops ordered. A single drop is barely worth the materials to deploy a tech.

Using that understanding doing it in a house will easily add $250 for the headaches that can happen. So knowing it is $300 and then a possible $250. $900 seems reasonable in the aspect of they have to make money and they have to make sure that sending the tech is worth doing. She got a quote that was the “I don’t want to take this job” price.

Think about it like this. If you were to tell me that you would pay me $50 to come make you a pot of coffee plus all of my travel and materials. That job to me is not worth it. However if you told me you would pay me $500 plus travel and materials. That job becomes worth doing.

Just wait. There are VERY few devices right now that can even realistically use WIFI6 and generally it is only useful to large environments. If you had some reason like remote VR to use it then it would be different. But really you are not likely at all to even be able to use it.

If you were upgrading your hardware because it was dated and it didn’t work as well or you had a need it would be different. No reason to spend the money now when it really doesn’t benefit you.

For Plex specifically it is a pass. This will have Xeons and Xeons don’t support quick sync. You are going to be much better off buying one of those micro desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo.

Anyway, this is barely worthy of a post,

Shut up! This is always worth a post! We do this because we enjoy it. Not because we seek fame. Good on you for getting the job. Just keep learning and growing.

A word of advice for any one else and any future endeavors. Put your lab at the bottom of your resume. 10 year or 20 years in the game, I don’t care. Put it on there. Give the highlights and you are good. So far it has gotten me two jobs.

If they have DDR3 RAM, I personally wouldn’t use them Strictly for performance understandings. This being they would struggle to keep up with any more modern chip you can get that does support DDR4/DDR5 for a decent price.

That being said, if you need a server to run some basic tasks. You could do worse, but I wouldn’t say I suggest it.

If I were using that site personally and looking I would look more towards the HP DL380 G9 for about $500. But anything from that site is going to SUCK when it comes to sound. Not something you want in a room where you want it to be quiet. Mine is in my office and makes a decent but not unbearable sound.

Unraid, and TrueNAS are both solid options. You also have Proxmox you can run. It is important to understand though that Unraid and Proxmox are more than just a NAS. They also host VMs and Docker containers. You do have to pay for a license for Unraid though. It is a one time purchase.

The big thing with Unraid compared to the others is that you don’t really have to worry about the size of disks to get the protection of a parity drive. As long as your largest drive in the array is the parity drive you are good.

TrueNAS also has paid options but they do have the free version.

Proxmox is also open source. Which may be something that you like.

Personally I use Unraid. It is solid and I have had zero issues.

The Ryzen CPU is the best in terms of raw performance. Not by a ton, but it does perform better. I also don’t think those Intel CPUs support quick sync so no reason to even consider them really.

The Ryzen also boosts, while the Intel ones don’t.

It is only as risky as it is attackable.

If you use it internally and segment things so that only your server can reach it, then it is essentially impossible to attack.

Then on the other hand, is your network secure? How easy would it be to get in? Where is the weak point? You have to remember that this is a home. It is not likely to be a large target and generally as long as you have any kind of intelligence you will be fine.

So realistically, you will be fine as long as you don’t host it out to the internet in any ways.

Mac Address filtering works on wired too. If the switch supports it this is the easiest thing to do. But you may have to set a vlan and then only allow that mac on that vlan. Disable DHCP too if you can.

So there are two reasons.

1. As someone else mentioned. Marketing. Bit numbers and such
2. It is a better representation of how wifi works. It is not a flat plane and it doesn’t magically pass through, or around anything. It has limitations.

To clarify #2 a bit. Wifi works much like a flashlight does. When you shine it at objects it stops and you get a bleed around them. So if you shine at a 3 inch by 3 inch square, you will get a slightly less than 3 inch cube appearing on the wall as a shadow. (This varies with distance of course, but assume it is right on top of the cube.) Granted, wifi passes through a great number of objects too so it won’t be a perfect cut out, but it will be greatly diminished on the other side of the object. All this to say, it doesn’t really bend.

Now if you tell me that wifi broadcasts out to 100 feet. I am going to assume that it will go exactly 299 feet perfectly and the 300th foot will be where things flake off. No matter what objects are in the way. Because wifi doesn’t work like a gas, it works more like a fluid. A gas would fill its container entirely. Which is why balloons expand. Fluids however stop and go around objects and such. Wifi is very much the same. Kinda going through, but really just mostly going around, but not bending around like a gas would.

So now if you tell me you have enough water to cover 100 square feet. I am going to assume that the area is a bit nebulous. One side might be 100 feet, one might be 90 and another could be 115. If you look at the wifi pattern for pretty much any AP this will make sense.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/MR_Overview_and_Specifications/MR44_Datasheet

Specifically the pictures under the coverage patterns. These.

You can see they are not perfect circles. You can also see that the AP’s orientation affects how wifi is even broadcast.

I mean, the entire point of VPN like that is all time online. The better solution is likely a port forward for syncing.

I don’t think that really solves the problem here. That will still use the VPN all the time when mobile. So the battery will still drain quickly. Zero Tier I admit is quite heavy compared to Tailscale but the battery issue remains.

You know, honestly… If you want to get into self hosting your stuff. The better option is to get one of those mini desktops from Dell/HP/Lenovo. They are cheap and powerful. It will likely server you until the hardware dies depending on what you want to do. It also costs only the cost of the machine and the TINY amount of power it will consume per year.

Once we get a good, well priced E-ink tablet. I think e-readers are going to become much more common. But sadly every company wants to stuff them full of things that the display just isn’t really good for. Like the Huawei MatePad should have 2 weeks of battery life easily. But instead they put an OS on it that eats battery and it barely lasts a full day.

What I think would be a good thing to start looking into as you progress, is the ability to take these scans and other items and turning them into actual text. This can give you more freedom and make the user experience much better. Like the ability to take a book and turn the bright white pages into a much friendlier dark mode for night reading. This could also mean, when E-ink tablets do start becoming easier to own. You will be able to easily adapt to them.

What you are making honestly has no use to me, but I have been following none the less. It is an interesting bit of kit. Keep up the effort, it is not terrible to use for the bit I have used it. As others said of course though, a phone app would be the king. Sadly you also can’t benefit those users of other tablets for reading like Kindle. Using the email service is so hacky and just not great from a user experience.

There are a TON of ways you can do this. Since you have a NAS already it makes it super easy. You just need a tiny desktop for about $100 and you are golden.

Look on ebay for one of those mini desktops from HP/Dell/Lenovo. The one thing though is you will need to find one that has a CPU that supports quicksync. So 7th gen or newer. So you want to find as far up the chain as you can.

They are:

1. HP Prodesk
2. Dell Optiplex
3. Lenovo Thinkcenter

This is the cheapest way to get away with it.

There may also be an option to use one of the Intel Arc cards with a cheaply built desktop for quicksync support. But I have not seen anything related to comparing them to on die quicksync. I would be especially curious on the cheaper option from Arc and how well it works for video encoding.

Then you goto homelab and homeserver and they tell you X and Y things and bitch and moan about power usage. Or they suggest things that logically don’t line up with what OP wants/needs. Or they will say lines like “for just a little more” about 10 times until a build is $1000 or more.

Lets try to be helpful instead of just pushing people other places…hmm?

New tools get released every single day.

It is like this is an ever evolving space with new tools coming up all the time and people want the newer stuff to try and host.