I’ve not had good luck finding something that gives me the confidence to go about it

Now’s a good time to make sure you have good backups.
Knowing you can fallback to your backups helps a lot with confidence.

One this that’s really hard to replace is DDoS protection.

I use this one:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.orrs.deliveries

It can usually get the status of most courriers unless they’re actively hostile against API/scraping.
Worst case you can still track status manually, or open the webpage.
It doesn’t track payment, but I don’t usually have a tracking number before paying.
I think you could technically add your own custom status entry.
I keep them as active until shipped and verified after which I mark them as completed.

Works well enough for my needs.

You can use an adapter just fine.
Or use a 5.5" drive caddy, that’s just a little drawer that slides in and out.
Real question is it you have enough SATA connectors available.

Paintable caulk

chown -R nobody:nobody /usr/lib

Warrantied drives still fail, they just happen to ship you a replacement.

Commercial drive trashing solutions are basically a smaller, fancier version of the mechanism in a log splitter.
You could probably rig a sketchy drive wedge/bending thing with a pump jack rather easily.
Wear PPE.

The odds of someone taking a failed drive and transplanting the platters to a working drive is pretty low to begin with.

Me? I don’t have tons of drives to destroy, so I just unscrew the thing, get the platters out and smash those.

I can’t wrap my head around a service being so much shit but people still forking some cash to them.
I know for a company, $1000 is change but still.
$1000 for a glorified support ticket that gets auto-closed by some AI is fucking bullshit.

Imagine Support that sucks so much that you end up paying $1000 a month for premium support, only to still have to basically social engineering your way back into your account by messaging random employees.

Your examples seem vaguely related to home automation, so maybe they’re already in Home Assistant.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/

It has a bunch of sensors and media related integrations. You can also add custom REST API queries.

For me, Plex would often end up having audio drift lag and it was annoying as fuck. It’d start fine, then the lag would gradually increase until you changed encoding back and forth, then gradually increase again.
Jellyfin just works.
That was enough to get me to switch and not look back. I’m also rid of the bullshit plex login that I never cared for, and also of their push for whatever “recommended” stuff is supposed to be about.

Make sure you test this from outside your network and not simply by using the public IP, but from inside your LAN. Odds are your ISP modem doesn’t support NAT loopback (also known as NAT hairpin).

Speaking from experience?
That seems rough.

Browse by ‘subscribed’ instead of ‘all’.
Block communities you dislike that you dislike this much.
Unlike ShitBook and TwitHeil, you’re the one curating your feed here and not some algorithm clickbait algorithm.

That was supposed to be ‘address’ as in email address, not sure how autocorrect figured that one.

Yes and no… say if you gave the email address lemmyworldthingy@sgarcnlsdomain.com when signin up and you start receiving garbage on it, you just delete the alias and move on.
The trick is that you can have several aliases go into the same inbox so you only have to check one place, but each thing is given its own IP making it easier to identify and filter culprits.

Buying your own domain.
You can then use whatever provider, or host your email service… but at least you don’t need to change addresses when switching anymore.

Yea, it’s not the first time I’ve seen this discussion either.
I don’t wanna seem like I’m not believing you or belittling your experience, I just find it weird that we (we, users, as a whole, not just you and I) have such wildly different experiences with it.

As is, I have a vastly better experience with my own nextcloud than with corporate’s onedrive, with more stuff on mine.

Wish I knew why it’s so inconsistent.
Even though my nextcloud experience is fine, I know plenty of people with the opposite.

Legit have had none of these issues.
I do get a notification once in a while if I modify a picture fast enough, like a quick crop and it’s still uploading. Like snap pic and edit within the same 5 seconds or so.
Basically just a: “there are multiple versions of the same file (which is true), which one do you wanna keep”.

Then again mine is running on a pretty beefy server which might hide issues rooted in performance.
I remember it being hell when I was running it on a RPi.

Yea only times I’ve had issues is if I run out of space allocated to the container that runs it.
I currently have 16GB of phone uploads and 540G overall, it works fine