Finally opened the box

My good friend Mr Dan Patterson got me one of these as a gift when I joined TWiT. Haven’t had much time to touch it. At the very least, I now have it assembled.
Not sure what I’m gonna do with it other than see how much I can edit photos on it. I’m not as geektacular about hardware as you all are. I ran Ubuntu at home for many years, years ago because at the time I couldn’t afford a computer upgrade. But i finally got tired of fighting with Xorg for dual displays. (I know that has been deprecated/updated now, but I still have no desire to run Linux as a daily driver. Not at this moment, anyway)

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They do make a fine NAS, now that you have fast USB.
You can also run something like HomeAssistant on it to wrangle some smart home things, even in a docker container to avoid any conflicts with other things.

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The best time-invest / return-of-use relation for a Pi, in my mind, is to install a Pi-Hole (https://pi-hole.net/). It’s incredibly easy to do and extremely useful.

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I currently have seven Raspberry Pi’s running for personal use and four Pi’s running for a work project. Their relatively low performance and cost makes them best suited to dedicated tasks like a NAS or whole house ad blocker.

If you have time to spare definitely give it a try as a desktop replacement but I suspect like me you’ll find it severely lacking. To get up and running fast and more easily find answers to problems use the officially supported Raspberry Pi OS. https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-os/

Assuming you don’t find it powerful enough for genral purpose use, here’s a photography idea. Get the brand new high quality Pi camera that uses C-mount lenses.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera/
Then run one of the software packages that makes it a time lapse camera system. I use this software on one of my Pi Zero W’s with the old fixed lens low res camera module as a nature camera on my porch.
https://elinux.org/RPi-Cam-Web-Interface

Another good photography use is as a dedicated DLSR controller.

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It’s always fun to open a box with electronics in it - even if they require some work :stuck_out_tongue:

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That’s something I did not think about. THX

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I’m thinking of getting a Pi 3 and running Pi Hole and Unifi’s AP Controller software (on Open-Java). Do you think it’s powerful enough? (I think Yes, but looking for confirmation)

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could also leave it running a Tor relay if you’re feeling charitable with your bandwidth

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I would clarify/recommend not being an exit relay, just a middle relay. Back in the days before HTTPS was widely used I ran an Tor exit relay. I then found in my firewall logs all the URL’s and user/pass. I could see where everyone was going. I started “investigating” what people were using the Tor for. This lasted around 5 mins as after a few normal sites visited the logs were full of the Internet’s most unsavory content and very illegal… and all exiting from my home IP… I never had a knock at my door thankfully as I would of had some explaining to do :rofl: I moved on to being middle relay.

I have not run any relays now for years but I still donate to Tor as I think is a valuable service for good overall.

I do have a Pi running a Tor hidden service (Dark website) I am experimenting with this on and off atm with the idea of running my existing Pi 4 8gb Nextcloud installation as a hidden service. Not that it needs to be hidden but atm I have a domain name but the registrar has control over this. As a hidden service I would be in control of the server address or at least more control. Pi 4 8gb is great! I like having 7gb of ram free! :rofl:

There is a TWIT thread of peoples uses for Pi here: Rapsberry Pi - What’s your usage?

mine atm.
Pi 3 - email server
Pi 3 - Pi-hole
Pi 4 - Nextcloud
Pi 3 - Tor hidden service
Pi ? - Remote central heating control - future project - I have the relays etc just need to get round to putting together.
Pi ? - 3d Printer controller for my 3d printer - future project
Pi 3 - RetroPi gaming retired

I also like the idea of a video doorbell. I purchased the camera module a while back but have not even opened the box yet… So many things to do with a Pi so little time.

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Thanks, yes I should have mentioned this. As an individual you really don’t want to run an exit on your network.

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I use a Pi 3 as a pihole, NAS, an openVPN server, a node-red based home automation controller including MQTT, and a mariah (mySQL) database server for all the sensor and automation data. If you have never tried the DietPi distrubution, I highly recommend it. It makes easy work of installing many of the most common tools (there are images for many common SBCs and also VM images).

I would say the feature I use most and can’t live without is the openVPN server. Not only can I access my home resources remotely, but I can also use the pihole on my phones/computers when not on the wifi.

The NAS works ok for normal use, but prior to the Pi 4, the bandwidth is constrained.

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Hey Ant, you can use windows as your main OS and have an old Linux system as a virtual machine system. That is what I do with my old thinkpad. I believe where people have several pis that do different jobs I have several vms in my old thinkpad.
This includes Plex, piehole, and the ubiquity controller software.
I also experiment with certain flavours of Linux plus I use it for development purposes.
I do have a pi which I use as a remote ssh system, with tinyproxy installed on it.

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I’ve not fired that thing up in about two months. :man_facepalming:t5:

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Yeah, those little systems are quite powerful, choose a task for it and let it ticking, I have not rebooted mine for a few years now, apart from power outages that is.

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Whenever I see a Pi, my mind always says to install Pi-Hole on it. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
…or a dedicated machine for emulating retro games.

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Funny experience last week… Pi 400 connected to my new 43" 4K monitor! BIG monitor teeny-weeny PC. :smiley:

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Hey there and sorry I did not get back to you -only just now returned to this thread and never noticed a notification of your question, sorry!

The pi handles pihole well for, I’d suppose, a handful of people using it intensively. It’s pretty light weight, so a good match. I do not no the other software you mention. If that’s light weight too, I’d be optimistic. Maybe by now, you will have found out.

What the pi turned out to be too weak for is hosting my local NextCloud instance. On one side to narrow/shared of a data bus, too slow of a CPU and too inefficient of a software, running mainly as PHP via Apache. I moved that to an Intel NUC and never looked back. Syncing my 130 GB now takes 90 minutes and not 1 1/2 days with fifty crashes.

So the Pi is awesome, but if you need more oompf, the NUC is my go to “big iron” :wink:

Hehe even putting pi on the same sentence with big iron, shows how capable these things are :slight_smile:
Definitely not build for high IO but quite powerful for several use cases :slight_smile:

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Well thanks for getting back. I missed notification of your reply until now, too!

So I got a Pi 4 and then was sidetracked by configurations NextDNS, which makes PiHole a little less critical, and new M1 Mac! I’m still in process of setting up the Pi but will try running PiHole linked to NextDNS in addition to my Unifi controller, which runs on open Java.

I will try to remember to post back here in week to 10 days…

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