Ludicrous0251

They’re all generally fine. WiFi thermostats open up more security holes than the others because they are designed to be chatty. I have an ecobee WiFi thermostat that’s isolated to only talking to HA locally using the HomeKit integration, which is fine, but I can’t say I’d recommend it.

When I set up my thermostat the ZigBee/Z-Wave options were quite frankly ugly and had limited wiring compatibility. Nowadays there’s a bunch more options on the market - you should be fine finding what you need anywhere.

ZigBee/Z-Wave/Thread are all pretty comparable, so I’d go with whatever you already have on your network - me personally I’m all in on ZigBee right now so I’d probably get one of those.

If you’re undecided, HA newest official hardware supports ZigBee & Thread so I’d go with one of those.

Bitwarden has a account custodian feature that will give my wife all the info she needs to access essential accounts and hardware, however, realistically the homelab will only continue to work until things start dropping - there is likely no easy recovery of crashes.

I haven’t talked to my wife about it directly, you’ve reminded me this would be a good conversation to have, but the first thing she should do when the insurance money comes in is (after paying off the assassin) buy a bunch of dumb light bulbs and pay to print any photos she cares about in case our digital backups die.

I uhh… I don’t think that’s right… But I also dont know enough about the idiom to prove you wrong…

I have a 4 bay Synology NAS and it draws ~50W when running. Not astronomical, but if always going is potentially ~$100/yr. If the disks don’t need to be spinning, it idles at a pretty minimal wattage, so realistically maybe I’m paying half that, but if we’re being frugal it’s a lot of headache for something that’s not much less than just picking 1 streaming service/month and rotating (before you factor in the cost of hardware).

In terms of drives, a 4k movie is ~50-100 GB, so 24 TB saves you enough space for ~240-480 4k movies. It’s up to you to decide if that’s enough. Last I checked, the optimal $/TB was ~12TB drives, so worth considering starting with fewer larger drives if it works for you.

In terms of processing capabilities necessary, that kinda comes down to how you consume your content. Encoding audio is trivial. Encoding video is difficult. If you’ll always be playing on devices that can handle the raw HEVC output of bluray disks, then your server CPU doesn’t matter.

If you want to play on devices that may not be able to handle the full uncompressed content, or stream outside your home network without gobbling up all of your bandwidth, you will need to transcode the video. This can either be done on the fly as content is requested (in which case you probably need a capable CPU), or you can take the time and do it in advance on a PC, and just upload it to the Jellyfin server and request the compatible version when needed.

Getting in the habit of encoding your own files to your preferred spec or automating it with something like tdarr is time consuming but worth it in that it let’s your Jellyfin server be leaner (but takes more space on your NAS).

For me, I only stream Jellyfin content to one client (my ShieldTV), which is always on my network and capable of playing all video/audio formats I need. For that reason, I have a raspberry pi as my Jellyfin server because it doesn’t need to do anything more than download cover art and serve files.

I can’t speak to the sound levels of the specific NAS you’re looking at, but if you’ve ever owned a computer with 3.5"HDDs (I’m guessing you have), you’re familiar with the brr brr brr seeking hum & low grumble they do when moving files around. That’s the main source of noise and it’s primarily when you’re using them (aka watching a movie) so it’ll probably blend into the background. But I wouldn’t put one next to my bed.