You can get an adapter board that will make it work with an M.2 SSD. I believe it’s only PCIe 2.0, so there’s no point putting a high end SSD in it unless you need a high write endurance. Any SSD will be a huge improvement over a hard drive.

Most Linux distros will run on it since it’s using a 64 bit Intel CPU. If you have the version with 4GB of RAM, you will need something very lightweight though. I would run Debian if I was going to use it as a server or Mint if I was going to use it as a desktop.

The Mac Mini should still be perfectly usable if you put Linux on it and upgrade it to an SSD.

Run an iperf test to see if the ethernet adapter is working correctly. The speed tests on my USB ethernet adapter are almost identical to an integrated one as long as it’s connected to a USB 3 port.

I would recommend installing Heroic Launcher too. It works good for GoG, Epic & Amazon games.

So what happens when the certificate expires? Do you get locked out if you don’t have physical access?

The Pi 5 is perfectly capable of streaming 4K video, but only if it’s DRM free. Free content on Youtube will be fine. Paid streaming services will likely be limited to 480p because of the DRM.

There is a PipeWire module for ASHA. It looks like it has issues with a lot of devices though.

My windows XP install kept breaking and I got tired of fixing it, so I tried Linux and never went back.

You can also use the Arduino hardware without their IDE or libraries. You just need avr-gcc, avr-libc and a makefile. The AVR microcontrollers are very easy to program. The Arduino libraries really just get in the way once you need to do anything with timers.

Yes, that’s fine as long as whatever you’re hosting is designed to be safely used on the internet. Just keep it up to date and only expose the stuff you need to. I would suggest setting up fail2ban to block IPs that repeatedly fail to log in though. Depending on what you’re hosting, you may need bot protection, but if all they can see is a login page, they shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

Just make sure you’re not using an EUI64 address. That significantly narrows down the number of addresses per subnet to scan. The bots found one of my computers that was using one. It took them 3 years to find it though.

I use inleed.xyz. It’s free, has IMAP/SMTP access and you can have as many accounts as you want. It’s limited to 1GB of storage shared between all accounts though.

If it was the 80’s, the text would be gibberish because you can’t figure out what the correct code page for the file is.

If you use the web UI, you can adjust the zoom in your browser.

Try a different cable too.

Yes, if you have IPv6, you can open a port in the firewall and have external access. Whatever you are accessing it from must have IPv6 as well though.

If you have multiple computers, you can always set up a caching proxy so you only have to download the packages once.

Use SSH. Ether open a port in the firewall or connect it to a VPN. If the backups are done on a schedule, you could also setup a cron job on the Pi to send the WoL packet a few minutes ahead of time.

You could use a very low power computer that’s always on like a Raspberry PI Zero W to send the WoL packet to the backup computer. It only uses about 1 watt. Some routers have the ability to send a WoL packet as well.

I’m surprised they don’t have torrent downloads for it. That would save on bandwidth costs and it’s more reliable since torrent clients verify the checksum and automatically redownload any corrupted blocks.