Tailscale still works here.

I agree however there is only 1 but and that’s the fact that the labor costs are much lower in China than in the West. Still a great job by China.

I have a old HP Elitebook with 8GB ram with Windows 10 and even on Windows I don’t notice slowdowns for daily tasks. Yes the machine swaps but because of the SSD you don’t notice much performance decrease. However, because it’s constant swapping the lifetime of the SSD will decrease and that’s exactly the problem of 8GB machines these days. Yes the machine stays fast (Windows or OSX it really does not matter) but there is extra load on the SSD.

Don’t believe Apple marketing bullshit that 8GB is enough because of the “super duper advanced memory management” of OSX. If it really was enough then Apple would not release MacBooks with 16+ GB ram. The only reason that the 8GB MBP still exists is to sell more 16+ GB machines.

I would gladly upgrade to W11 if MS just let me on my old hardware (which is still fast enough for my daily tasks)

Yes, get the Spotify link of a song, playlist or album. Then go to the options of doubledouble top, choose for MP3 320kpbs in the Spotify section.

In my humble opinion the Pi 5 is very expensive for what you get. You just don’t buy the board, you also buy the fan (cooling), case, power supply and SSD + connection adapter. For more or less the same price you can get a refurbished Intel NUC with a i3, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Or you can look for N100 at AliExpress. You will get the full blown experience and reliability + x86. And if you want to use Plex then you can make use of QuickSync for hardware encoding. I don’t understand why people bother with the Pi if they don’t need the GPIO. The extra power consumption of a NUC compared to the Pi 5 is minimal, in my case just 70 cents a month. Do yourself a big pleasure and get a NUC. The Pi is not the all in one cheap solution anymore it used to be. And x86 so no goofy community maintained as is ports to arm.

And you can upgrade a NUC with more RAM up to 32 GB if you pick a model which supports that amount.

First you have the open the ports in the security list assigned to your vm. Then you also have to open the ports with iptables on the vm itself. Took me a while to figure that out:)

What about Windows 10?

Just make a free account on Deezer, get the link of the song or album and paste it on the the doubletop website.

Try https://doubledouble.top

Download straight from the source like Deezer so you know your file is legit and not a user generated file who re-encodes a 128kbps mp3 to flac.

I use Portainer to manage compose files (called stacks in Portainer)