More work travel abroad and next week will bring more of the same. Honestly, I’d rather not go especially as this one is long haul for over a week.

Walking the dogs just now was interesting. It is rather blowy.

How was yours?

My mum has one of those Satellite boxes that runs constantly even when she's not watching her shows, gives out tons of heat, and it uses Scart input so she can't even get the high Def stuff the satellite picks up. Plus it adds to the chaos of wires behind the TV.

So I decided to scrap it, and repurposed an old Raspberry Pi with an LNB USB stick^[Linux compatible ones are hard to come by. Sundtek is a good brand, but they basically no longer exist, so shipping takes weeks]. LNB/Coax cables usually need signal boosting, so I was nervous that a 5V Raspberry Pi couldn't do it^[13V/19V is usually the standard], but its genuinely fine!

Using Tvheadend as the streaming server^[Satellite Position --> Transponder Frequency + Polarity --> Scan for 'Muxes' --> Assign a Mux to a channel], and Kodi as the main interface. The LNB stick came with an IR remote and Kodi already captures most of the default signals, so everything just works. She gets HD satellite channels, and it uses less than 1p of electricity.

Plus, I put a PoE hat on it, so it's only a single ethernet cable now going to the back of the TV where I mounted the Pi, and I can SSH into it whenever I want.

I'm now thinking: well, finally found a use case to have an always on SBC at my mum's, maybe it's time to put HomeAssistant on it as well and start automating her house

Is the Pi OS on an SD card? I put all Pis I use on SSDs and haven’t had a single failure for five years. Before I did that a crash was an annual treat.

Obviously SSDs are expensive, even more so these days. With Linux disk writes the SD cards hold on only so long.

I've not had a single SD card failure since I've switched away from PiOS to debian, with sys logs in the RAM.

Plus she's not recording her shows, so nothing is being written to disk 99.999% of the time

Can you even boot from an SSD?

SSD boot, no problem. At some point I booted RPis over the network from an image, but that was more hassle than it was worth.

Yeah I do not understand the need for PxE boot, though I've jever had to manage more than 10 nodes at a time