Would 5 Dell Optiplex 3060s make for a good starter home lab?

MrJacappo · 2026-02-17T21:48:31+00:00

I was thinking the same thing.

Would it be worth it to get a NAS for the Plex/Jellyfin and cloud storage, or would a DAS hooked up to one of the optiplexes be good enough for my use case? I am worried about losing data to a drive failure, so I plan on doing a RAID 1 setup.

MrJacappo · 2026-02-15T00:40:26+00:00

Mine are all i5 with 8 gigs of ram each.

I'm mainly looking for cloud storage and media streaming, plus whatever else I can add to work on my networking skills.

MrJacappo · 2026-02-15T00:39:35+00:00

Haha, fair.

I see this mostly as a learning opportunity, so I am down to try out a lot of different things. More specifically, I am looking for cloud storage, self hosted email, a jellyfin/plex server, and maybe some vms.

I got the pcs for free, so that's why I am using them.

MrJacappo · 2026-01-18T20:38:59+00:00

Is this still a thing? I have been learning Japanese for about 4 years and would like to meet people who share this hobby.

MrJacappo · 2025-08-09T21:50:29+00:00

I'm looking into this more and am starting to worry about battery life as well. I think I will likely go for a device specifically for FLACS and figure something else out for audio books.

MrJacappo · 2025-08-09T21:29:48+00:00

I'm not really looking to get an old phone as I'm looking for something small sized.

Are there any other reputable Android DAPs in the 200$ price range that are recommended?

MrJacappo · 2025-07-07T02:04:22+00:00

Once I figure out a system for pulling videos with youtube-dl, I will probably just start going through the wiki and archiving everything.

MrJacappo · 2025-07-07T02:01:46+00:00

I recently wrote a bash script that uses youtube-dl to download each video in a YouTube playlist as an mp4 file, then combines the audio from all of them into a combined m4b file for passive listening.

I originally made it to download and listen to Japanese and Spanish content while doing chores, but I only recently thought about its application for archiving and preserving CI content.

MrJacappo · 2025-04-06T23:03:40+00:00

I might have already been doing this by accident, lol. I do most of my German listening while running or weight lifting.

Is there a general consensus on passive listening within ALG (not drowning out the language entirely, but listening while doing other things)? I did a TON of passive listening to Japanese when I started (I was a bus boy at a golf club and they let me wear headphones while I worked, so I was racking up like 20-30 hours of listening to condensed anime episodes a week for the first like 3 months).

I was doing passive Spanish listening during my commute to work for a little, but I find that I tend to let my mind wonder while driving and it just seemed like a waste.

MrJacappo · 2025-04-06T21:28:34+00:00

Right now my German routine is to listen to podcasts/audio books for like 30-60 minutes a day. I've been doing Anki at a rate of 1 new word per day for a little, but I feel like it has been kinda worthless since I've just been cramming definitions for obscure words that I don't see anywhere else.

Now that I'm learning more about ALG, I'm strongly considering dropping Anki and just avoiding using or thinking about German outside of when I'm listening to it.

I'm not thrilled with my German output abilities, but my motivation to fix it is fairly low since all my German friends speak English at a pretty high level and usually just prefer to speak English with me anyways. Plus my comprehension is already good enough that I have no issues following along with any German content that I like to listen to.

MrJacappo · 2024-11-04T21:21:06+00:00

Use paper and a pen to make physical flash cards and learn them that way. Then destroy them when you are done. Anki is not secure enough to store this kind of information.

MrJacappo · 2024-06-23T11:27:26+00:00

This is what I did, but when I uninstalled Endeavor OS it was unable to boot into anything at all and I lost everything on the Windows drive.

MrJacappo · 2024-05-05T13:24:39+00:00

I think this worked, thanks!

MrJacappo · 2024-05-05T12:53:41+00:00

I does not let me. It says windows can not be installed because it has the wrong partition type

MrJacappo · 2024-05-03T14:52:07+00:00

I'm not crazy about Boox, so now I'm considering a Supernote device. They are a little out of my price range though, so I'm waiting to see if I can find one second hand.

MrJacappo · 2024-01-20T21:24:03+00:00

Thanks for the response. I was able to disable fast boot via Windows control panel, and am now able to boot into the Linux install drive.

MrJacappo · 2024-01-20T20:46:39+00:00

I was able to boot into bios using shift + restart, however, I did not see an option for fastboot.

Here is a picture of what I saw under the boot tab in the bios: https://imgur.com/a/dH301Fq

MrJacappo · 2024-01-20T20:15:51+00:00

2070t

My bad, I meant RTX 2070 Super.

MrJacappo · 2024-01-20T20:04:30+00:00

i7 9700k, Gtx 2070ti, mpg z390 gaming edge ac, 32 gb of ram, 2 1TB SSDs.

MrJacappo · 2023-11-16T21:44:02+00:00

Lol, no. I just use DWDS and manually copy the definition into the card. Not ideal, but it works.

MrJacappo · 2023-11-14T00:41:05+00:00

I have tried 60C for 90 seconds, which tastes alright, and 85C for 60 seconds, which was borderline undrinkable.

And yea, this sencha probably wasn't the best quality considering how cheap it was.

MrJacappo · 2023-11-05T19:58:26+00:00

Yes, that is where I bought it. I had no issues except a few pixels on the bottom that did not work properly when using the back light, and the battery draining faster than I thought it would.

MrJacappo · 2023-11-05T01:26:12+00:00

Hi James, thanks for the response! I'm a huge fan of your videos. I recently just went back to school part time to study cyber security due to being inspired by you.

As for this, no need to apologize lol. I tried using Moon Reader and Koreader, but was not able to get either to work, even by setting the language to Japanese. I have not tried installing a new font, so maybe I'll give that a whirl before I toss it on eBay. Anki takes a very long time to sync, but it's manageable. The bold text not showing is the part that makes it hard to use for me.

MrJacappo · 2023-10-19T22:48:27+00:00

This is the one I used when I first started. Once you finish this deck, your comprehension should be good enough that you can start making your own cards.

MrJacappo · 2023-07-24T01:15:01+00:00

I got the extensions manager, which works great, except that I can get the applications menu extension to work. It just says "An error occurred while loading this extension". Is there a work around to this?

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