The N100 has a reputation for decent performance and good power efficiency at a cheap price. It’s a basic quad core CPU with only efficiency cores (no performance cores) and no hyperthreading, but it comes with modern codec capabilities. It will certainly give you more power than a Raspberry Pi for everyday tasks, but don’t expect to do anything too demanding with it. If your needs are basic an N100 mini PC seems like a good option.

I just found the general combination of security - mindedness and cheap Chinese hardware curious / amusing.

I think it can make sense, since there are so often vulnerabilities in consumer router firmware, and because those devices are so common the vulnerabilities are profitable to exploit. Running a BSD-based router on a cheap Chinese PC is likely to be better security for the router’s OS and software itself, even if you don’t know for sure about the firmware on the board (which you don’t with consumer routers either, really). Overall you could still have reduced your attack surface compared to a popular consumer router.

I use one with 6 LAN ports and a fanless 10th gen i5 running OPNsense, and it has worked well for years. It runs many services including Unbound DNS and Suricata with capacity to spare. It’s much better than any consumer router, though I run WiFi separately with an Asus AI Mesh set to AP mode.

The only concerns are that you don’t get BIOS updates, and you don’t know for sure that there’s nothing nasty in the firmware. But then you don’t really know that on consumer routers either.

I run a fanless mini PC with OPNsense and it’s by far the best router I’ve ever had at home. I can keep traffic separate in different VLANs, configure my own firewall rules, run a recursive DNS resolver and use Suricata for intrusion detection and blocking. It cost a bit more upfront but it has been worth it. Instead of attempting WiFi on the OPNsense box I added a consumer WiFi mesh router in access point mode, but any old router would do for this.

Or gravity-sync. I use two Pi-holes with gravity-sync and it’s very reliable and effortless.

I haven’t used PFSense, I’m afraid. There’s a fairly recent comparison here:

https://homenetworkguy.com/review/detailed-comparison-between-opnsense-and-pfsense/

I like Joplin too, and I use it when I can instead of Keep. It supports a pretty good range of synchronization mechanisms. But it doesn’t have the collaboration capability of Keep, so when I’m doing shared shopping lists or to do lists, I still end up using Keep.

I use OPNsense on a reasonably cheap mini-PC with 6 ethernet ports that I bought from AliExpress. You can do a lot with OPNsense. For wifi I could have added a wireless card, but to avoid any potential driver issues instead I just plug in a wireless router set to Access Point mode.

How much this kind of setup costs depends on what kind of hardware you buy. If you stick to the minimum spec for OPNsense and buy a cheap wifi card or a used wifi router from eBay, you won’t need to spend too much.

Yes, that kind of thing. I can’t guarantee it will work but I’ve had good luck with Intel cards in the past. You can get 4-port ones too.

You can buy multi-port Intel ethernet cards cheap on eBay. But a used one and drop it into your computer. If you stick to Intel you should have a better time with driver support under OPNsense, and it would enable you to have separate ports for VLANs if you wanted to get fancy.

There’s this company, which makes ebook readers that don’t seem to be tied to any particular vendor:

https://shop.boox.com/collections/all

They have so many models, though, that I have no idea where to start with them.

Tor exit node, public Lemmy instance.

Yes, I really need to do this too. It’s a fairly daunting task because my significant other is not at all comfortable with even slightly complicated operations on a computer. I need to figure out a way to make a really easily accessible backup of everything.

As far as I know, the BOINC client just pulls down new data for processing when each batch of work is done. There’s no pushing and no open tunnel or port. The software risk would be malicious code in a particular project (e.g. if it said it was folding proteins but actually mined bitcoins). I hope there’s some vetting of project code.

The other risk is hardware (especially CPU and RAM) running its lifetime down more quickly because of the continual heavier usage.

You just follow all the wires and read all the config files. Easy!

Mine is, er, self-documenting, and my partner has instructions, in the event that I die, to plug the wifi router into the modem and unplug all the other crap. The router has a sticker saying ROUTER and the modem has a sticker saying MODEM.