Mastodawn

Parenting kids often requires tricky compromises. When his friends started getting gaming consoles, we wanted to give our son the same opportunity so he wouldn't feel left out. However, we have a small apartment, no TV, and I wasn't keen on buying hot, loud hardware or getting locked into walled gardens. Working in sustainability sciences, I also try to avoid unnecessary resource consumption. I wanted to see if I could build a viable alternative to buying a dedicated console.

I ended up buying a used 4U Supermicro server on eBay (I lucked out and broke even by selling the included Tesla V100S GPU) and installed a 24GB RTX 4000 Blackwell. This machine sits 130km away, running on remote PV-solar power. I set up a cloaked Windows 11 VM with GPU passthrough, streaming via Sunshine over a rock-solid IPsec (IKEv2) tunnel.

For his device, I rescued an old 2017 Galaxy Tab S3. I flashed a clean ROM, set up TimeLimit via F-Droid (allowing 30 mins/day, 2 hrs on weekends), and attached a GameSir G8 controller.

I also wanted him to be somewhat independent, so I created a simple Home Assistant dashboard. When he wants to play, he taps a single button that sends an IPMI Redfish command to boot the remote server. A minute later, he opens Moonlight and is playing Forza Horizon 5 fluidly. A 2024 game running flawlessly on a 9-year-old tablet!

The flexibility is absolutely great. Whether we are traveling with an old laptop, using my Pixel phone (greetings #Graphene), or visiting his grandmother's TV, the setup just works. Best of all, I only have one central OS to maintain. The Xeon CPU has 72 cores and barely hits 9% usage during gameplay, so I'm planning to add a second GPU to share the server with a friend's family.

I am aware that having the technical capacity to build this is a unique privilege. I still wanted to share this to show that alternatives to constant hardware consumption exist. By pooling resources and reusing old tech, we can escape walled gardens without sacrificing the experience.

#HomeLab #Parenting #ScreenTime #Upcycling #SolarPunk #CloudGaming #Moonlight #Sustainability

nydus 9h ago

*Neue Ära bei Xbox: Frisches Logo und Sound prägen den Startbildschirm*
Microsoft plant in den kommenden Tagen eine sichtbare Umgestaltung der Xbox-Startsequenz. Mit der Einführung der Xbox Series X|S erscheint ein neues Logo begleitet von einem modifizierten Soundeffekt.
{ #Games #Gaming #Community #Plattformen #CloudGaming }
>> https://nydus.org/news/135668-neue-ara-bei-xbox-frisches-logo-und-sound-pragen-den-startbildschirm.html