I used to own both a Series X, PS5 and have my gaming PC (all in the same room - desktop currently has an i5 13500, RTX 3090 24GB, 4TB of NVME storage & 128GB ram)
Got myself a 5m hdmi lead capable of driving my 4k/120 TV and just ended up using my pc for everything now.
I just switch sources between my monitor and tv when I want to game on the couch. Any mouse/keyboard input needed, I do it on the Unified remote app on my phone and fire up Steam big picture on the tv.
Sold the PS5 and XBOX and ditched two more subscriptions hitting me every month.
I was pained to move to iOS when my kids decided they wanted iPhones and I needed one to manage their parental controls, but boy do I love the form factor of the 12 mini I got.
Everything out there seems so huge now.
I’d love to have more options for smaller, manageable phones, especially as my workplace have given out work iPhones now, I could realistically go back to Android again come upgrade time as I can manage their accounts with that.
When I was on Android I used to love the F-Droid open source repository. Both Newpipe (3rd party YouTube app) and DNS66 (local VPN on device that blocked ads throughout the phone).
I switched to iOS and really missed those applications and needed a solution for my new phone. Those 5 things above (Vinegar, Banish, AdGuard, WireGuard and PiHole) have worked wonders helping me when I switched.
Wouldn’t be without them now.
Edit:
If anyone happens be be on android or still uses Android devices with their Apple things, here are the apps I used to use:
To get that ad-free YouTube experience, I use Vinegar safari extension and have pinned the YouTube site to my home screen rather than using any apps.
I also use Banish to remove all those annoying "Open in our app" pop-ups in Safari.
Lastly, I use AdGuard to block ads on the phone locally and have also set up my own Wireguard VPN server at home with PiHole so that I'm always protected ad-wise when I'm out and about over 5G and on any public Wifi (I used to use my own Wireguard VPN with my old Pixels too).
Keep a log of anything you do successfully find that you may need later.
I’ve started bookmarking anything I do find genuinely useful as there’s a chance that the a similar search would yield different results that wouldn’t help at all.
I’ve also installed archivebox on one of my home lab pcs to grab a snapshot of any sites and pages that I want to keep (you never know if you’ll go back and it’s gone).
Retaining good information for yourself is just as important on the web now given all the bot spam and affiliate laden shit out there that Google and Bing seem to be promoting these days.
Hospital emergency rooms across the UK are likely to be declaring a major incident to deal with the rash of injuries caused by the force of facepalming and banging heads against desks throughout the tech sector.
We have English (United Kingdom) as a localised install.
Not any more bloated then English (US) but if this English (World) install is even cleaner as Andi says, I’ll start using that instead for fresh installs.
Working really great for me. I originally just bought it to run Pihole on a dedicated machine and have a secondary pihole instance on my Unraid server in case either of them went down but leaving it sitting there with just PiVPN and Pihole duties seemed wasteful.
I'm getting even more out of it running some of the lighter containers on it with plenty of spare room to do more.
I've logged/uploaded my upgrade process here just so you can get some ideas on what I did. https://imgur.com/a/ExcLdtt
It is bulkier than a raspberry pi, being around the size of a router but the low cost and being able to utilise hardware that I had sitting doing nothing made me go this route rather than just getting a pi.
If you want something small and cheap, it might be worth getting a used thin client PC.
I got a cheap £20 Igel thin client from eBay as raspberry pi’s were still far too expensive, plus I already had a spare 4GB ddr3 sodimm to drop into it and a 120gb wd green ssd that I’d stripped from its case and fitted internally into the thin client.
After upgrading it one ended up with a 1.2ghz AMD GX-412 cpu, 4gb DDR3, 120gb sata ssd and an external usb 3 1tb hard drive i also had laying around.
As a component of my homelab, it’s running Debian 12, docker with a few containers (pigallery 2, Libreddit, portainer, searXNG), it’s my backup Emby server and my main Pihole and PiVPN client.
Completely silent, sips power and still has capacity spare to run more containers and other projects that catch my interest.
IMHO, Powerslave/Exhumed was one of the best first person shooters on the 5th generation consoles and the Powerslave engine (Slavedriver) enabled the Saturn to run an amazing port of both Duke Nukem 3d and Quake.
I remember being ecstatic that a game I could only play on a friends PC when I visited back in the day (Duke3d) was not only playable on my Saturn, it was a fantastic port too. DeathTank Zwei was a lovely hidden bonus game included on the D3D port.
Likewise, Quake was an impossible port, bought to a console that traditionally struggled with substandard 3d games vs the psx.
I remember seeing a psx owning buddy play a superb port of Doom on his psx, only for me to be burned by the absolute 💩port that Rage software put out on the Saturn. Even the 32x cartridge version of Doom was batter.
Console shooters have come on in leaps and bounds each generation but Exhumed on the Saturn was a real highlight for me in my younger years.
Somehow, us Brits think that by sticking it to these needy people, our own lives will get better all the while the elites get to hoard all the wealth and live lives of luxury.
Of course it's immigrants and their families wanting to escape a war/economic destruction we most likely meddled in that are causing all the issues over here, not the years of shit governance by the clowns that keep getting elected.
Dehumanising the needy and striping me of more of my rights is the new hotness right now.
Still playing Starfield.
Game is immense in scale and I’ve been doing random quests and POI hunting and enjoying it thoroughly.