You’re better off with the LiFePO4 batteries even if you don’t care about weight. A lead acid battery will wear out quickly when you cycle it daily. Lithium also has a higher charging efficiency, so you get more usable power from the solar panel.

The helium slowly leaks out over time. That will increase drag and decrease thermal conductivity. It will run hotter and use more power. There is a SMART attribute that will warn you when the helium is running low.

The CUPS web UI is just for configuration. As long as the printer is shared, it should automatically show up in the printers list for any Linux PC on the same network.

That’s a helium filled drive, so it’s got a limited lifespan whether it’s running or not. I would at least set it up as a NAS and use it to store your backups.

Many routers support more than one SSID per radio.

I’ve got 12 years and 5 months on a Western Digital WD20EARX HDD. It’s starting to get some bad sectors.

I’ve got a similar runtime on a SAMSUNG SpinPoint F2 and it still seems to be healthy. There’s nothing important on either of them, I just want to see how long they will last.

Any analog headset and microphone will work. Avoid bluetooth, it has terrible latency issues and two way audio sounds like crap.

A UPS can keep the modem and phone running for a couple of hours. If you have satellite internet, it will work for as long as you can power it. Cable or DSL will go out when the battery dies in the ISP’s equipment.

Landlines have gotten a lot less reliable in a lot of areas because the phone companies don’t want to maintain them. Mine would go out as soon as the power did when I cancelled it.

Large, high performance SD cards aren’t cheap either.

If you want something cheap, go with smart cards or RFID cards that will launch a game that’s already installed on the computer.

If it’s a windows game, you could put the entire Wine prefix on the card and it would be portable. The performance would probably be pretty bad though. 2.5" SATA SSDs and a docking station would work a lot better.

Have you tried using a different SATA cable. I had one go bad and the drive started throwing all kinds of errors.

RAID isn’t an alternative to a backup. If a second drive fails while rebuilding the RAID-5 array, all of the data will be lost.

It was DXVK that really made thinks work, not Proton.

If the computer has a serial port, you can use SLIP to get an internet connection. Then you could host a simple website from it. It will run at dial-up speeds and you may have to write your own software though.

If you’re buying a PC for OPNsense or pfSense, look for one with Intel NICs. Realtek NICs tend to be unreliable.

Cloudflare won’t even allow you to use your own nameserver. Avoid them like the plague.

The router running OpenWRT will usually be a lot less power hungry than a mini PC, ethernet switch and access point.

Mobile apps bit rot pretty quickly when they stop updating them. A web UI would be better. A server or internet connection is not needed, a web UI can be hosted directly on the device.

I’ve been using KeePassXC. I use Syncthing to keep the database synchronized between computers.