Mine so far seems to be hardware as it fails when the phone gets hot, and works if I restart once it’s cooled off

Sony is even worse than ASUS in regards to length of software and security updates. It hasn’t been a deal breaker for me, but I have a Xperia 5 III and at only 3.5 years I am beginning to have issues with my fingerprint reader.
Apparently it’s a fairly widespread issue that moisture can get in the edges and degrade the backing, and they are still to this day using the same fingerprint reader design. I’m pretty irritated about it. I feel like I could get at least another year out of this phone otherwise, but it’s surprisingly annoying to have to go back to passwords for app logins.

SSO is single sign on, so you don’t need individual username and password for every service. It’s a bit more advanced so don’t worry about it until you have what you want working properly for a while.

DNS is like the yellow pages of the internet - when you type www.google.com your computer uses a DNS server to look up what actual IP address corresponds to the website name. The point of Adguard or pihole is that when a website tries to load an ad your custom DNS server just says it doesn’t recognize the address

Check out Cosmos, I struggled piecing things together but when I restarted from scratch with this as the base is has been SO much easier to get services working, while still being able to see how things work under the hood.

It’s basically a docker manager with integrated reverse proxy and OpenID SSO capability, with optional VPN and storage management

I haven’t used any but have researched it some:
Minisforum DEG1 looks like the most polished option, but you’d have to add an m.2 to oculink adapter and cable.
ADT-Link makes a wide variety of kits as well with varying pcie gen and varying included equipment.

While I’ve heard mostly good stuff about Nothing, I noticed an interesting tidbit about early investors on Wikipedia:

raised $7 million from investors including Tony Fadell, Kevin Lin, Steve Huffman, and Casey Neistat.

Steve Huffman of Reddit fame, as a Lemmy denizen I’d say not ideal to be pouring more money in his pockets lol

Homebox has this capability too, you can generate QR codes for assets and scan it later to identify whatever’s inside.

The current version does have the ability to create QR codes for your assets and scan them later for identification, but I don’t know of a way to scan a new item and identify it automatically.

I think it becomes more useful as you accumulate stuff - I get frustrated when my wife buys crap on Amazon that we already have. So while I don’t have the time or energy to sort everything in our house, I am beginning to catalogue things as we buy or find them in the hope it becomes more useful over time to find things we rarely use and/or avoid re-buying excess items

https://a.co/d/hh2N98y Something as simple as that, though I’m not sure 5v/3a is enough for a pi5 you’d have to check power specs

I would especially advise against relying on battery banks due to the heat, if you’re just going to use it in the car and already going to the trouble of customizing so much hardware I’d find a way to run a power supply off a switched 12v fuse or wire from the car - just convert to 5v/USB power. I’m sure there are generic kits online

You know, my thumbnails load super slow on my phone but your comment made me think I should check where the thumbnails are located. First though I noticed I had this setting on, after disabling it they now load almost instantly:

My setup is exactly what you’re aiming for: Immich and it’s database resides on the main SSD while the photos and videos are uploaded to my NAS using NFS shares and a bind mount to /mnt/
I run Cosmos Cloud so the manner in which it’s implemented may be slightly different to your setup.

It isnt the snappiest experience loading media off the HDD’s but it’s been very reliable.

While you are right that the V20’s implementation was limited use, it added an ease of interaction with notifications and controls you mentioned.

I’d argue a 10% screen share implementation is limited use as well though. The article even spends a lot of time talking about how you can’t see much on that sliver of screen, it’s just an easy way to swap between apps - which we can already do by double tapping the square button.

Congratulations to Android for discovering the LG V20, whose 2nd screen did the same thing in 2016

My first time I started winging it with a raspberry pi, docker, and nginx and it took me like 2 months to get one service up and running and I didn’t feel it was very secure - fail2ban didn’t work, geoblocking didn’t work, and updates were manual.

When I re-started from scratch with an x86 device and cosmos it has been shockingly easy in comparison. Not only is it much quicker to spool the service up (app store), they can be automatically updated, the proxy has options for geoblocking, rate limiting, etc.

I’ve even got some of the services below built from a custom compose file instead of the app store, some use remote storage and some are set up with OAuth SSO. There’s still mild troubleshooting for a lot of things but it’s been much easier for me to understand and fix issues, plus there’s an active discord community as well.

I’m all in on Cosmos Cloud, been very happy with it

I don’t know about all manufacturers but Sony and I think Samsung both allow you to limit max state of charge to 80%, I just hit 3 years on my device consistently using that feature, and haven’t seen much degradation yet.

I only have my one anecdote to go off of, but if you are located in the US eBay is full of enterprise computer reseller postings and mine arrived in very clean condition. And eBay generally has pretty strong buyer protections.

The beginning of your post sounds like you are still looking at hardware to buy, but the later half seems like you already have the NUC?

If not I’d suggest looking at a used HP Mini, Lenovo Tiny, or Dell Micro ex-enterprise PC. They can be had very cheap off ebay, run with similarly low power demands but very capable devices. I run an HP 705 G4 mini Ryzen 5 2600GE with 16gb ram, 256gb SSD, cost me about $95 and averages about 15w