Just research ahead and don’t buy one with a known hardware defect such as the 5As which are notorious for frying motherboards and screens. Went through 5 of them with the extended warranty over my phones life and they all died while in my hand abruptly. Less than a year or life per device almost always failing around 8 months for me.

If grapheneOS wasn’t so damn good I would’ve left pixels after that, Pixel XL abruptly died, 2XL had both cameras and the fingerprint sensor die out of nowhere, then the 4 5As. On an 8a right now and love it so fingers crossed it lasts!

If they had a user repairable device that ran it I’d buy it in a heartbeat

This is pretty great advice to get into it. I previously ran 3 poweredge 2950s but have since switched to nothing self hosted and back to everything self hosted but on a much leaner setup with a NUC and 14tb WD my book drive with a dual Noctua 4020 fan shroud I 3d printed that it absolutely needed as I killed the original drive in two weeks.

My replica is just a 14tb in my desktop I run rsync to pull the data occasionally after checking SMART status on the primary. It’s not versioned or perfect but it works great to give me a chance to backup my jellyfin media. Everything I care about also gets backed up via restic.

Eventually plan to run a build with the Modcase MASS with multiple drives but for now this setup has been working fantastic.

Definitely keeping me far away from upgrading, newest vehicle is an early 2000s Corolla and still does 40mpg.

Honestly with how cheap and easy it is to fix at home, barring safety improvements I really don’t see a point in upgrading. Infotainment is just another component that will eventually go obsolete like the ones from ~2010 that are dog slow and a pain to go aftermarket on.

Adding to this, automatic plate flippers exist and are pretty popular for show cars to display something else when parked. Typically wired to ignition so it shows your plate only when the cars running.

Issue is if you street park dependent on the state, if the vehicle registration is hidden by the plate being flipped they can likely tow it. Would work great for at work/in your driveway though. Could maybe just have a bypass switch for if you need to park somewhere and display the plate.

Still a pain in the ass that it’s this bad though.