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It’s now no secret that I’ve been planning to expand my at-home storage and computing resources. In my last post, I outlined some criteria that I used to help me consider what hardware to purchase. I thought it’d be a good idea to expand on that list of criteria in case anyone else wanted to use it to help them work through finding some new hardware. This is going to be a long one, so settle in!
Continue reading “What to Consider When Planning Homelab Hardware”
The last couple of weeks have been a flurry of learning, planning, and (for now) window shopping. Some earlier attempts at spinning up a few VMs at once on my desktop have been met with sluggish disappointment and a really warm office at best, and incompatibility and wasted time at worst. Despite being more than enough for gaming, it seems as though my desktop won’t cut it for what I’ve got planned. It’s for this reason that I’ve decided to look into expanding the resources at my disposal.
In preparation for a few new series of posts, last night I made a some changes to the site and added a few pages. After trying to make a few new themes work, I decided to keep it simple for now and stay with the current theme. Check out the new pages below, or at the top of the page. On a mobile device? Hit the “Menu” button!
Like most folks, I like streaming movies and TV shows from Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and a few other places instead of subscribing to cable TV. When I want to watch something in the living room, I use an older Roku set-top box to access most of the content I want to watch. Sometimes, however, I want to watch video files from other sources, usually in formats not natively supported by my Roku. In these cases, my usual streaming services don’t have the content available, leaving me two choices: watching on one of my computers, or plugging an HDMI cable in to my laptop and watching from my TV that way. For occasional viewing, that’s an alright option, but why not find something better? After all, I’d love to be able to use my laptop for something more than just streaming a video.
As is common in when learning or trying new things, sometimes you end up doing things the long way. In this case, I most definitely did. Being a little new to Ubuntu 16.04, I decided midway through the install of the server version that I wanted to use the desktop version. Rather than stop, download a slightly larger .iso file and install over the existing version of Ubuntu, I forged on, taking far longer than I needed to. Below, I’ll include links to both the server and desktop (GUI) versions of Ubuntu 16.04.
