From a technical level you should use something lossless in this situation, but it really quickly becomes impractical. Actually lossless 1080p60 is going to be something like 500mbps, so if you’re playing for an hour I hope you have a spare 2tb drive laying around. The artifacts in really high bitrate compressed video are so minimal that they basically don’t matter. Often codecs do noise removal first thing so whatever minor artifacts still exist will get smeared over by that anyway.

Also when you are testing make sure there’s some movement in the video. AV1 especially has modes for presentations and things that basically make a PowerPoint, so sizes might be unrealistic if you’re just recording your desktop. I don’t think that gets enabled in handbrake but it’s been a while since I looked.

If you’re seeing any artifacts in the original video, you probably need to re-record in a higher bitrate. It needs to look identical to uncompressed. Your later encodes will be trying to encode all the artifacts in the original video, which could be why the file sizes keep getting bigger - you’re giving it noisier video than the original.

50mbps for recording as an intermediate like that is well within the realm of normal. You can try having obs record in 264 with a quality setting instead of a bitrate setting, which can save space when things are more static - something like cq 6 or lower can do pretty well.

Unfortunately, yeah finding the sweet spot does take forever. One thing I would recommend is once you have an idea where you want to land, try a few much longer videos and see what the differences are. Slower paced sections might compress much better than the fast action stuff in one codec or another. Again it’s all kind of a balancing act on where you want to be.

In the third screenshot, preset is on 7, change that to 4. That’s the speed setting - 7 is trying to do it in close to real time, 4 will take much longer but be much more efficient.

Can you post a screenshot of your Handbrake settings? You should definitely be getting better efficiency than that.

Because it’s just for personal archival, I would recommend recording in super high bitrate 264 or 265 depending on what your card can do in real time, then compressing that file later using either av1 or 265, depending on which works better for the content.

If you’re playing in 1440p165, then you should record that to start although if it’s an option I would play and record at 1080p120. 1440 is a bit of an odd duck resolution that some stuff doesn’t really like, but it’s getting better all the time so it’s not a huge deal. More important is 120fps because if you decide to go down to 60 or even 30fps they split evenly, which is important since it means the extra frames just get thrown out. There’s no 82.5 frame so it either has to blend two together or pick one that’s at the wrong time, and neither looks good.

Record in OBS using like, 25-40mbps in whatever your graphics card can do realtime, with all the audio tracks in something lossless like FLAC. High enough it might as well be uncompressed.

Once you have your gameplay recording from OBS, use either Handbrake or FFMPEG to convert it to your long term storage format. Since this is such a big project I would make some samples using cheats to get an idea what the bullet-hell-iest parts will look like, then try a few different handbrake or ffmpeg settings, and see what gives you the tradeoff of file size and quality that you like. It’ll also give you a ballpark idea about how much long term storage you’ll need.

Non-realtime encoding like ffmpeg and Handbrake is much more efficient than realtime done by your graphics card, like on the order of like half the file size for the same quality - that’s why you want the two step process. It also allows you to play in 120fps for that responsiveness, but watch at 60 or even 30fps to save some file size.

When you set up handbrake, you’ll have a few settings to play with and make samples from - encoder, quality level, speed, fps, and rescaling.

Encoder is probably the most important. Use either x265 or SVT-AV1. In my experience, they’re close in terms of efficiency, but AV1 pulls ahead in certain situations. AV1 is more efficient about large static sections and when it breaks up it just looks blurry. 265 is better at retaining texture, but when it fails its gross digital blocks. 265 is faster than AV1, but when you push AV1 and it takes 1000 years it does a better job. Basically, run a lot of tests and then decide.

Scaling is where you go from 1440 to 1080 and is probably the least important for file size. I honestly wouldn’t bother with it, but you can try. Like I said, technically some TVs don’t like 1440, and everything supports 1080, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much.

FPS I have the least experience with. My guess is that going do something lower is going to save you some size, but its really going to depend on the codec and the content.

Quality level is the most important setting - just set it to what you think is watchable. It doesn’t use a bitrate, it adjusts the bitrate to get a constant quality level, so it’s much more efficient. It’s important to note that they aren’t exactly the same at every speed setting, so be careful.

Lastly is the speed. 265 goes from very fast to very slow, and AV1 goes from 9 (fast) to 0 (stupid slow). Personally I use slow or very slow for 265 and about 4 for AV1, but if you have a lot of video to crunch through you might want to crank that up a bit.

For audio use OPUS. 96 is the default “bitrate” and I find it to be enough. Some players don’t like it but if you’re thinking about using AV1, anything that would support AV1 supports opus.

The main thing will just be doing a bunch of video encode samples and finding the settings and workflow that’s right for you.

5 KILOwatt hours is a typical laptop battery? Aren’t they more like 50-100wh?

Love the idea and article, but…

just 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop,

I want to see a laptop with an 800w charger.

Ah, ok. The Unifi stuff is a bit weird like that. I recommend installing the controller on a computer if you continue to have issues. You don’t have to run it all the time, just use it for config and then turning it off is fine. It’ll give you way more information and control over exactly how the AP is set up.

Which model is it? As far as I’m aware all the Unifi APs need the controller for config. It doesn’t need to stay running unless you want a couple features for large deployments but you do need to run it to set things up initially. The Air Max / uisp lines are the ones with web based config.

Do you have a continuously running unifi controller or is it only running when you do the config? Does it do the same thing with the controller opposite to how it is now (ie if you aren’t running it does it do it when you leave the controller on)?

Are you running the 2.4 and 5 as separate SSIDs or the same one?

Are you on the latest controller and firmware?

This is the correct answer - I know because I was there 10000 years ago and had to decide between this and buying a special case from koolance. Amusingly they still sell one for the outside.

They can also be handy if you have to do anything weird like route display cables from the GPU to the motherboard like for a thunderbolt display.

It entirely depends on how much and what you’ll use them for. They’re going to be around $200 USD all in, so if they’re for occasional use probably not. If you’re going to use them a lot like for work or a regular hobby then it’s not a crazy amount to spend. They tend to be more comfortable than flange earplugs, and a little better than foamies, but for me at least I don’t want them in for more than 3 hours.

Etymotic makes a few different ones for general noise, sleeping, music, and they also do ones for their earphones.

Look for a local print or embroidery shop that you can get like work shirts and business cards and whatnot made. Unless you’re really in the middle of nowhere, there’s probably a local print shop that will at least be able to point you in the right direction. If you want a one off instead of a small batch look for a place that offers embroidery - it sounds more expensive but because they can just throw whatever on the machine and do a one off, it’s usually actually less expensive than traditional screen printing. Specifically for hats in not sure if you can get them digitally printed in most smaller local shops.

If you are working with a specific company to produce a personalized / custom product, they will generally have at least one person on staff that can do design, or at least deal with any file conversion and technical stuff like that. They should be able to quote you a price.

If you are working with an artist first, they may have a company they’re familiar with to have the item produced, and if they do, should be able to handle most of it themselves. If they don’t, or you would like it produced somewhere specific, just let the artist know - most places will have all the information the artist will need on their website, or the artist can just get in touch with them directly.

In general, if you’re going to an artist or design shop they should be able to give you some kind of quote with a very rough idea of what you want - especially if they do this professionally, talking to people who don’t have an art background is basically half their job. If you want to be specific it’s much more useful to send something like a mood board or a collage of similar things than a bunch of text. It’s also generally a good idea to be open to their ideas, as they often have experience that may be helpful and will see some problems much quicker than you might.

We use a few Schlage connect zwave deadbolts, and they have been basically rock solid. We’re using them through Smartthings, but home assistant should work just as well. We have hardwired zwave light switches next to all of them, apparently that can help with the reliability since they will act as zwave repeaters in case the lock doesn’t pick up the signal first time - especially for changing the codes.

Are they a perfect lock that no one will be able to pick? Probably not, but it’s a lot faster to just put a brick through your window no matter how good your locks are.

Propaganda from who? Big newspaper? Big book publisher? Big stick and wheel?

Have them printed from a service. A normal deck of cards should run about $30 USD. The paper, laminate, ink and maybe sleeves will probably cost the same or more and will come out with way lower quality especially if this is your first time crafting them.

I’ve done both and unless you want really quick and dirty prototype cards or something that is super handmade that you drew on yourself instead of designed on a computer, the ones from a printing service win hands down.

Basically, it’s “why not both?”

So first, kubernetes is a different ball of wax than containers, and if you want to run it on one machine you can, but it’s really for running containers across a cluster of machines. I’m guessing you just generally mean containers so I’ll go with that.

Containers are essentially just apps running on a virtual os. Virtual machines are an OS running on virtual hardware. You can abstract both layers and have virtual hardware running an os that runs a virtual os for your containers, and nothing will really mind - in fact that’s kind of the way to do it if you have one big machine you need to run a bunch of services on. You might cut up a server into a Linux VM, a Windows VM, and a BSD VM, and run containers on each one. Or you might run 3 Linux VMs and have the containers for 3 different services split between them.

It really depends on what you’re hosting and trying to do for how exactly to go about it. Take for instance a pretty common self hosted stack:

Plex Radarr Prowlarr Deluge TrueNAS

Now you could install TrueNAS scale and run all of those as containers on it, and it would work ok, but TrueNAS scale isn’t really meant for managing a ton of containers right now. You could make a vm on it for each service and have them all talk to each other but then you’re probably wasting resources by duplicating the OS 5 times. Also, what if you want to run TrueNAS core instead of scale? Can you get everything else working in jails – maybe? – but it’ll probably be a pain.

Instead, you might install proxmox and pass through the drive controller, and set up one VM for TrueNAS core. Then you might make another VM for the arrs containers, and a third for Plex itself.

It gets you the best of both worlds. TrueNAS can run on BSD instead of Linux, your arrs are easy to deploy and update in containers that keep everything separated, and Plex is sequestered in a hardened os with read only access to everything else since it gets a port forwarded and is more of a security risk. Again that’s just one option though.

VMs get you a ton of really handy things like snapshots and for simple VMs, very easy portability between relatively similar hardware. I’ll probably get ruined for saying this but they’re also a security tool that you should probably keep in your belt. If someone manages to break out of a container and your files are just sitting there for the taking that’s not great. If someone manages to break into your VM and “the good stuff” is on another VM that’s another layer of security they have to break through.

Containers on the other hand use way fewer resources, especially ram - and are much easier to wrangle than many OSes for updates and config.

There’s really a lot of self hosted stuff that assumes you’re running docker and treats regular install as a kind of weird edge case, so you’ll probably run docker even if you don’t want to.

Kubernetes on the other hand I would argue isn’t really meant for self hosting where you probably have a one or two servers that you own. Its meant to deploy containers across various cloud servers in a way that’s more automated to manage. If you need storage in a kubernetes cluster you’ll probably use something like s3 buckets, not a hard drive.

If you want to learn it you can totally deploy it on a computer running a few VMs as nodes or with a few laptops / SBCs as a cluster, but if you just want the services to run on your server in the closet it’s a bit like using a sledgehammer to nail a chair back together. That’s why you don’t tend to see it talked about as much - it’s a bit of a different rabbit hole.