The comments aren't doing a great job of explaining this but Plex can run on virtually any reasonably modern hardware: old laptops, thin clients, an old desktop, scrap parts. If you can get linux running on it, you can run plex for local network usage with one or two users.

Where hardware starts to matter is if you need to expose it to lots of simultaneous users or you need to do lots of transcoding. I do know of some users with giant libraries where the libraries can be a little slow to browse but it can be helped with a cache SSD for the metadata.

At this point the iGPU on intel processors is the easiest way to do transcoding and can handle a lot of streams with hardware transcoding. I used to have a nvidia card in my box and realized the iGPU was actually better anyway. I also think your streams should be direct play as much as possible. It's much easier and more efficient to have your library on a flexible format to start and just avoid on demand trsnscode.

If you need external access and need a VPN, you need a little extra power - or a separate device.

Now, OP didn't ask but I'll give my two cents on Plex vs Jellyfin.

Objectively, Plex is still the easiest to set and forget and is the most feature rich. I used it for something close to 15 years. I finally dropped it when I couldn't watch live tv anymore because of a known bug they just refused to fix for over a year. That was the last straw for me on top of all the enshittification.

I tried Jellyfin and found it lacking features and it was more difficult to manage securely. That led me to Emby. I'm not sure why it never comes up in these discussions. It's a nice middle ground. Jellyfin is a fork of Emby from when Emby decided to go closed source to try to figure out a sustainable financial model so they're very similar but Emby gives you back some of the convenience features from Plex.

But ultimately I think this is a personal preference and none of these are one size fits all. Plex is a reasonable place to start but, in my opinion, Emby is worth a look. Jellyfin is the ultimate choice for open-source, personal control, and privacy that the other two can't match because of their financial models.

...he had to keep explaining to his bosses that “They are not a vendor, there is no NDA, we have no leverage, your VP has refused to help fund them, and they could kill three major product lines tomorrow with an email.

(Emphasis mine)

Just chef's kiss, I love it.

Also, seems like a good time for one of my favorite relevant XKCD's.

Are you trying to track expenses or budget? The difference is in how you're using the data. Busgeting is a much more active process of making sure money is going to the right place. The difference is a deep topic that might be beyond the scope of your question so I'll leave it at that for now.

For budgeting, the gold standard is still YNAB. There are plenty of valid criticisms to level against it but I've done a lot of research and tried out a lot of tools and it's still the best.

I am keeping a close eye on ActualBudget. It's not ready for me yet, personally, but they're doing fantastic work with that project. If you don't mind a little extra technical maintenance (barely any with PikaPods as another comment suggested), it can get you a long way. Notably, this is the most private recommendation I can make. Since you run your own instance and it's open-source software, you can tell exactly what its doing with your data. Automatic bank import is available but not required or pushed on you.

If you're interested more in tracking, Mint used to be the easiest tool to get into. Unfortunately with it shut down, I'm not aware of any similar replacements. If I were looking for more of a tracking and reporting tool, I would probably import my bank data into a spreadsheet and go from there. I think there might be a gap in the market here (though I also think there were a lot of Mint users who really needed a budgeting tool and, IMO, it wasn't very good for that).

I've started looking at PocketGuard which might be a good replacement for Mint and fit your needs. I can't speak much about it myself yet but it looks interesting.

Oh boy, seems I missed something again. What's wrong with PIA? I've been using them forever.

I have tried to solve this many times as I want to regularly back up my Google content - mostly the images for the same purpose you mention.

Unfortunately there is no good solution I've ever come up with or found. I even looked into scripting with something like puppeteer. It requires regular confirmation of your authentication and I just haven't found a good way to solve that since there's no API access. It also won't let you use any cli tools like wget. You could probably figure out how to pull some token or cookie to give to the cli but you'd have to do it so often that its more of a pain than just manually downloading.

My solution currently is to run a firefox browser in a container on my server to download them. It acts as sort of a session manager (like tmux or zellij for command line) so that if the PC I'm using goes to sleep or something, the downloads continue. Then I just check in occasionally through the day. Plus I wanted them on the server anyway, at the end of the day. Downloading them there directly saves me having to then transfer to the server.

Switching to .tgz will let you make up to 50GB files which at least means fewer iterations and longer time between interactions (so I can actually do something useful in the meantime).

I sincerely hope someone proves me wrong and has a way to do this but I've searched a lot. I know other people want to solve it but I've never seen anyone with a solution.

I would like to switch to another app, preferably FOSS, but I haven't found another decent one that has the filters feature from PocketCasts. This is the feature that lets you apply a preset filter to the total list of episodes. I use it to auto-build a queue of just certain podcasts, instead of all of my subscriptions.

Any chance someone has seen that feature elsewhere?

They don't refer to it as Lyme because it's a different issue. It just happens to also be spread by ticks. Lyme disease and Alpha-gal Syndrome are different things but are sometimes comorbities since both are commonly spread by ticks.