I know you’re meaning that it’s so good you’ll never go back, but I’m hearing that you’ve handicapped yourself for public restrooms, lol.

Fancy Japanese bidet at a Hawaii resort, heated seats, temperature control, three speed blow dry, aiming modes—the works. It was horrible.

Smoked a dab, butt still wet, instructions unclear.

But what about the chapped butt? For real, the three times I’ve gotten to use one for more than a week (fancy ones in hotels), I end up feeling like a baby with diaper rash. I’d use triple the TP gladly just to avoid that feeling. I’m not someone who has that happen to them normally either, so it was definitely the bidets.

But then what is the drying strategy? That is my biggest problem.

£99 is going to run you 125 bucks and 79 cents.

Every time I’ve tried to use a bidet, I’ve hated it. The water feels uncomfortable and sudden, and then I feel like I either can’t get dry with toilet paper and get chapped later, or it breaks up from the water and leaves pieces everywhere. The air dry varieties seem to contribute to chapped butt too. I know some people use wash cloths, but frankly the idea of leaving butthole cloth out in the bathroom weirds me out also.

What is the secret to enjoying these things? Am I just too damn American for them?

That may be true, but I have had nothing but reliability from mine. Hell, there was one with a broken plastic SATA pin support and bent pins, and that thing still worked and tested fine for 3 more years.

As with all things, results may vary, but if you have a decent backup of your most important files, they are still the best bang for your buck to get a huge amount of storage, imo.

Moving your files back and forth should be no problem, especially if you have a decent router. Local networks are freaky fast these days, and are often only limited by the read/write speed of your disk.

It’s so easy that you’ll never go back. There are options depending on what you want to do too. I primarily store entertainment media, so I ran a simple Ubuntu Server for years with cockpit installed so I could easily mount and manage drives and PLEX to serve the media. It got me hooked, and worked flawlessly.

I have since become more ambitious and run ProxMox with an Open Media Vault VM to serve the media through NFS to other VM’s. My experience with Open Media Vault has been that it is a bit more complicated than my previous setup, but has resulted in a lot more flexibility with how I can access the data from multiple computers.

I will warn you though that the collecting can get addicting. It’s always easy to justify adding just one more drive to the system, and they get cheaper and bigger every year.

Dude, all those cloud services are tough to get data out of. That’s why a lot of them charge an arm and a leg to have it mailed to you on physical media.

If those disks are the big plastic WD externals, they can be easily shucked and used in a NAS—much cheaper than buying the bare drives without the casing for reasons known only to WD. I have 80+ TB across 5 shucked drives, and the oldest has worked perfectly for over 6 years of heavy 24/7 use.

I get all that, and I wasn’t trying to suggest HDMI cords are useless. I just got the feeling that there was a cleaner way to accomplish what OP was trying to do since there were scant details about the end result in the post.

I ran a computer directly to the television for years before switching to PLEX and an Apple TV, hence the suggestion—the user experience increased so significantly that I would never go back.

What are you trying to display on the TV? I feel like most media can be handled better with something like PLEX rather than directly displaying it with an HDMI cord. Much easier to browse with a remote anyway.

It feels like you answered your own question—a second server comes with advantages and sounds like it isn’t a significant increase in price.

Found the lizard person.

I’m a Memmy man. ™

I’m with you on all except for the top, and if you’re down, I’d like to hear more about your opinion on supernatural beliefs. If you told someone 500 years ago that there is a minuscule and invisible world all around us where the laws of physics break down, that would have been considered lunacy or witchcraft. Today, we commonly accept quantum physics as a part of our normal reality.

Of course, there are instances where people are clearly engaging in delusional thinking, but there are also plenty of examples of people who have had experiences that they are struggling to explain, and they are progressively building a hypothesis to explain it. Is it more rational to deny your own experiences to make your worldview fit the commonly accepted consensus? Or is it better to keep an open mind and continue to investigate if you can?

I ask primarily because I know I hold a few woo woo beliefs, but I try to refrain from making drastic decisions based on it. I’ve often wondered if some of the things I’ve experienced would be explained in the distant future, because I can loudly attest to the perceived realness of the experience when you’re having it. If you see, feel, and smell an elephant in the room, it’s a little hard to ignore it even if everyone else says it isn’t there.

This got longer than I anticipated, but I look forward to hearing your response if you have time.