This is a rare case where a piece of consumer electronics is going to be quite a bit cheaper in Australia compared to the USA! Usually stuff costs more in Australia.
The Switch is currently US$450 and will probably go up with tariffs. Meanwhile, it's listed as AU$700 in Australia, which is AU$630 before tax (all advertised prices include tax), which is US$385.
I imagine this is going to happen for a lot of devices. I'm an Aussie living in the USA and I never thought I'd see the day when buying stuff in Australia would be cheaper. Australia has better consumer protection too, around things like repairs/refunds due to major issues even outside the warranty period.
Absolutely. The console is manufactured in Vietnam, which now has a 46% tariff. I really doubt that Nintendo's profit margin is high enough to allow them to just eat that cost.
But there's a US$130,000 exemption (the "foreign earned income exclusion") and tax treaties with many countries, so not many people actually need to pay extra tax to the USA. Realistically, the only time you need to is if you earn more than US$130k and the country you live in has a lower tax rate than the USA.
What hurts much more is the "exit tax" when you leave the USA (as a green card holder after 7 years) or renounce your citizenship.
The drivers have gotten a lot better over the last few years, and Nvidia even have an official open-source driver now, but there's still issues with them. Wayland works very well now, but not perfectly (especially on GPUs with low VRAM).
If you're on Linux and are buying a new GPU, stick to AMD. Their driver is part of the Linux kernel, it's more stable, and it gets all the newest features first.
On newer cards, the open source drivers work pretty well as of version 555. The process for installing them is usually very similar to the proprietary drivers, but there's often some flag you need to set to tell it to use the open source ones instead. For Fedora, the instructions are here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Kernel_Open (ignore the part about it only working for data center GPUs, as that's no longer true)
If you use Nvidia's installer, it automatically uses the open source driver instead of the proprietary one if you have a new enough GPU (20 series or newer)
There's no reason your media server needs to be directly exposed to the public internet. Use Tailscale. Get everyone that uses it to sign up for a Tailscale account, and add them all to your Tailnet.
Tailscale will perform better than a Cloudflare tunnel because it's a direct connection between the two peers, whereas Cloudflare tunnels route through Cloudflare.
Tailscale does have relay servers, but they're only used in very rare cases, if both peers have very strict firewalls. Almost always, the connection between two peers over Tailscale is a direct connection, so there's no extra latency (other than some small overhead for the encryption)
You could use Wireguard and manually configure it to be in a mesh config, but Tailscale makes it so much easier. I'm a big fan of their product.
Oh yeah, there'll be some overhead if you're running Wireguard on a router. Hitting your router's public IP won't go out to the internet though - the router will recognize that it's its IP.
It's common to run Wireguard on every computer/phone/tablet/etc where possible rather than just on the router, since this takes advantage of its peer-to-peer nature. For home use, that's how it was originally designed to be used. Tailscale makes it a lot easier to configure it this way though - it's a bit of work for vanilla Wireguard. Tailscale does support "subnet routers" if you have any devices that you want to access over the VPN that can't run Tailscale.
My point is that since the VPN uses a different subnet, it's fine to keep it connected even at home. It'll only use the VPN if you access the server's VPN IP, not its regular IP.
In any case, Tailscale and Wireguard are peer-to-peer, so the connection over the VPN is still directly to the server and there's no real disadvantage of using the VPN IP on your local network.
Yeah, this. Plus if you leave it connected, you can use the VPN IPs while at home instead of having to use a different IP when at home vs when out (or deal with split horizon DNS)
dan @ dan @upvote.au Posts 7Comments 3,377Joined 2 yr. ago
Maybe! I'm sure there's loopholes of some sort.