One of those 3 cent one time programmable microcontrollers would be sufficient. Something with enough power to run a web server is just wasteful.

It’s not really worth the trouble to try to host your own e-mail. There are lots of e-mail hosts that you can use with your own domain. A few of them are free and there are plenty of low cost ones. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch hosts whenever you want and keep your addresses.

Hydrogen balloons are fun. Be sure to get some fuse to tie on them.

The last console I bought was a PS3. I only bought it because it was one of the cheapest bluray players at the time. The games were way too expensive. Now I only play PC games and I wait a few years and buy them when they are on sale and have hopefully had all of the major bugs fixed.

An old surround sound receiver and some decent speakers will sound better than any PC speakers.

The WiFi calling can be a bit buggy. Sometimes I answer the phone and there’s no audio. I have to reboot the phone to get it to work again. I should just get a VoIP line to use at home.

Syncthing and Nextcloud are both FOSS. You don’t need to sign up for anything.

The denatured alcohol you typically find in the the US contains a lot of methanol. It’s much more toxic than IPA.

In a lot of places it got worse. At least I had reliable service inside my house on 2G and 3G. Now that those are gone, I have to use WiFi calling or try to find a spot outside where I may be able to get a bar of 5G if I’m lucky.

Not all smart glasses have cameras. A camera is not needed for real time subtitles.

There is Luanti if you want something Minecraft like. It has a built in modding API and tons of mods available. It supports multiplayer over the LAN. It’s also very lightweight, it will run on almost anything.

I think switching to 12V only is a good idea since almost all of the load is from the 12V rail, but I don’t like the smaller power connectors. I’m worried we will have motherboards catching on fire in addition to our GPUs now. The Molex Mini-Fit Jr connectors are reliable and well proven. There is no need to switch to anything else.

It’s for development, not production use. You can’t even buy it. They want to sell a service where they build your circuit and let you test and modify it remotely.

FM radio stations can transmit up to 100 kW. You can probably receive some just by sticking a paper clip in the antenna jack even if you are a long ways from the transmitter.

That motherboard has a very limited number of PCIe lanes. Using the second m.2 slot will slow down the second GPU. All of the other slots are coming from the chipset and are only PCIe 2.0.

I would get rid of the second GPU, then there would be enough lanes to run 3 SSDs at PCIe 3.0 x4.

It would probably make a good terminal if it had an RS-232 serial port. The CM5 would be overkill for that. A Pi Zero would be sufficient and a lot less power hungry.

There’s no way I’m going to be doing much typing on that tiny keyboard though.

These aren’t real bitmap fonts. They are all ttf or otf.

Most kids don’t know anything about computers these days. All they know are phones and tablets. Maybe this will get them to learn some basic computer skills.

The Faraday cage will keep the WiFi signals inside the building. Nobody will be able to track you from outside and your own trusted devices will work fine inside. Just don’t bring any untrusted WiFi devices inside the Faraday cage.

That could be fixed by using WiFI calling, getting a VoIP line or installing a cell booster.