This. I made a similarly boneheaded mistake a few months back and lost a fair amount of stuff. Thankfully 95+% of it was ancient program files and such that gave me a good excuse to go through and make some much needed cleanup actually happen for once.
Idk what your connection looks like, but I have to agree that site feels insanely fast. Everything other than the store page click-to-full-load for me was probably ~1/3 of a second. Even the store page for me only took a second or so.
Make sure there is a warranty/decent return policy and test obviously as others have said...but I've bought more 3 and 4TB HGST drives than I care to admit and have very rarely had any issues. At the price you can find even larger TB sizes for I personally consider it worth the gamble for certain use cases.
My Hue bulbs are the "original" (3rd gen I think) before Bluetooth was a thing...but I just walked through this whole exact same thing and I could not get them to reset with any number of power cycle routines.
The only way I could get them to actually pair with my HA/Z2M was to manually add them to my old hub (long story why they weren't already in there), and then delete them.
Yes, it was a pain. But it worked well and once I got the process down I just did 3-5 at a time and worked through them all. YMMV.
Personally I purchased some cheap 10" Lenovo tabs for my new place. Haven't moved in quite yet, but some PoE to USB-C adapters and 3D printed wall mount cases outta get me out for ~$150/unit. Not the cheapest, but far from the most expensive. Should work well enough for what I need.
I think you're on the right track considering those factors and others (integrations with HA is another big one for me). IMO it's always a balance though - a perfect example for me personally is I still use Nest Protect devices because they just freaking work, and work well. Same with a smart display I have and some minimal smart speaker usage. So sure, there's a little bit of "lock in" there, but as long as your risk tolerance is ok with that (mine is) then you're golden.
The factors you mentioned, among others like HA integrations (preferably official), company reputation (I'm personally ok with some minimal lock in if the cost/benefit calculation works out), etc. are my first considerations when looking at new products. Wherever possible local first control is a great plus and can be an absolutely huge factor to be sure.
I get that - I was just confused at your "torrents would be detected" comment. I understand using a VPN would be visible and may be against whatever TOS they have.
I've had exclusively Amcrest's in the past, but for my new house bought some rebadged Dahua's from empire tech. Only set one up so far but seems good too! Reolink often keeps some pretty damn impressive pricing for their feature set, too.
VPN sure, but if he's using a VPN then all visible torrent activity should be terminated at the VPN server correct? Assuming they aren't installing management software on whatever endpoint device OP is using, how would they be able to view the specific traffic between him and whatever VPN server he is using?
In any case, I would agree with another poster that Linux ISO's and cars to a seedbox and then transfer via SFTP would be the best route.
Nothing like a week and a half notice, eh? I honestly don't care for how much control over the internet Cloudflare has, but I've been extremely happy with them since transferring my domains over to them a few years back.
This is sorta where I'm at. It's not an apples to apples thing I get that, and while I don't have a Prusa their standing in the 3d printing community is straight up legendary I know.
Wish it were a hair cheaper, because $1,300 assembled with enclosure kit (to make it as close to, say, X1C as possible) is still a bitter pill when only $200 more gets you abrasive printing ability, larger build volume, faster still, 4 color MMU, etc.
There is the quality angle, and the angle that a Prusa is conceivably infinitely repairable...which is a big deal. Just wish it were a few hundred cheaper to sort of compensate or allow for some of those upgrades.
Ooooph. Owning both a modded to the nines Ender 3 v2 and a vCore 3.1, there's a part of me that wants to add the simplicy and MMU functionality of the X1C to the mix at some point....but this is uhhhhhhh scary. No thank you lol!!
This. I made a similarly boneheaded mistake a few months back and lost a fair amount of stuff. Thankfully 95+% of it was ancient program files and such that gave me a good excuse to go through and make some much needed cleanup actually happen for once.