I've used ebay before many times, just be diligent. The problem with these bazaar style marketplaces is much less accountability and LOTS of fakes.
Not the best prices, but it seems like Best Buy, B&H Photo, Costco, stuff like that, might be the better "straight from the source" retailers.
I don't trust Newegg anymore. Used to like them but they've been chasing the wannabe-Amazon rabbit and have been caught doing shady crap to customers.
my own plex server (or something else if there's a better alternative idk)
-- complexity level 1:
First off a heads up, Jellyfin will serve you much better. Plex is commercial software, and they've treated their users quite poorly numerous times to appease copyright pressures. Commercial software always has an incentive to screw you.
Lots and lots of well-made guides and stuff on YouTube and such for getting Jellyfin setup, but if you want a little more in depth, I've detailed a bit below 👇
complexity level 2:
Even better than a Pi for media hosting, if you can swing it is those "1 liter PCs" that IT departments throw out en masse anymore. (At least I hope they still do? They might just burn them now since reusing them has caught on /s)
Basically, something you can stuff a bunch of hard drives in. You can turn any old PC and hard drives into a decent little server. The only other important thing is offsite backups for what REALLY matters to you. I use a cloud service called "iDrive" that's decent enough. That way my family pictures and artwork aren't obliterated if my office burns or floods or something.
Self-hosting IS a project, but you learn a lot and it can be really fun! I want to preface that I'm not an IT professional by any stretch.
--complexity level 3:
I currently use an OS called "Proxmox" to host virtual machines. It's really powerful and gets easier as you get the hang of it.
It hosts a little virtual server that only runs PiHole, which blocks ads and tracking across my entire WiFi network. It's amazing. (Not YouTube ads tho. Long story. Other tools for that.)
But it mainly hosts OpenMediaVault, which is great for just hosting a file server, and it's well integrated with Docker for setting up "containers." Lighter than virtual machines, consistent, and easily managed. (Imagine getting to wipe Windows but leave your D:\ drive untouched every time, and everything comes back configured like you want it.)
Right now, I'd say experiment with stuff within virtual machines, try it out. Figure out how you want to set yourself up. The best part is, you don't need to open up anything on your home network.
-- Complexity level 4:
There's a neat service called Tailscale for accessing your network securely from out of the house, but don't worry about that yet.
There's a service for everything. I've replaced all of Gsuite with a self hostable called NextCloud, for instance!
Facebook clone for just your family? Minecraft / Terraria / whatever server? (Private MMO server?), the sky's the limit really!
TL;DR: Just take it one step at a time. Take notes. Learn to take good backups. Ask questions. Lots of questions. We're all in this together. :)
Dude, Halo: Master Chief Collection removed a LOT of perfectly timed tracks from key moments of Halo 2, because they were Breaking Benjamin songs.
I remember when a pair of Hunters is just about to bust open these massive gates in New Mombasa...here comes the sick instrumental from "Blow Me Away"...!
...No, just some vaguely Halo-esque drumbeat on loop.
The music licensing industry has pretty much always been Satan, but the sheer arrogance to think they have the right to claw audio out of existing works because they're not getting infinite revenue out of it is a new friggin low.
Wait what? What joke? :O That's ridiculous!
Quite rude towards a total stranger simply admitting they don't know something yet, but okay.
Yeah I honestly agree. Memories is a vast improvement, so much so that it should just be the default at this point. I went so far as to get a menu customizer addon to just remove Nextcloud Photos as an option. I feel like it puts off new users more then helps anything.
I'm glad there's other options like the OP link, but I seriously enjoy Memories / Nextcloud for hosting it on my own hardware. Very little maintenance, has an app. Uploads from my phone whenever I plug it in to charge. Basically more than enough feature parity with Google photos that I could finally dump that mess. :)
Thanks for this insight, seriously. Because of course, it sounds really scary, and we all know which side of the fence relies most heavily on fear based rhetoric.
The "common sense" logic feels sound, but you're right that it's deceptive, and trying to use some "system" to both read the future AND use it to scare everyone into thinking it's doomsday every week? When you think about it, gee, that HAD to be a fashy business fund manager idea lmao.
Hang on there. Yes, NextCloud photos is kinda a dump, not gonna lie. Do not like.
But Nextcloud Memories is a labor of love, and it's been freaking AWESOME. A little bit of Docker knowhow and the NextCloud AiO image is a great combo.
Yeah I'm pretty sure the title was a bit of a tragic, click-baity, foot-gun. Lol
That'd be a banger title actually. Nice job! The concept of "benefitting from world hunger" is still bizarre enough for a doubletake, but doesn't instantly piss off 99% of potential readers by headline alone lol.
You could attach an external drive to a slim laptop or low-power PC like a Pi, only accessible by yourself, and technically you've got a media server!
You can host things from a virtual machine on your main computer, with a chunky external drive attached, if you wanted. :) That's the fun part, you can start from basically craigslist or hand-me-down hardware, and expand as your knowledge and space allow!
You could also run services from a paid hosting server, but I don't think the returns would be great for packing tons of data on there. :p