I suspect that some of the ‘lazy union worker’ stereotype is workers following their contract and refusing to do non-contracted work, which is, of course, essential to maintaining the value of that contract. Pride in your own work/trade doesn’t mean cleaning up after the other trades; professionalism in your own work doesn’t mean unpaid overtime to fix someone else’s fuckup.

In the old days, university IT put essentially no access controls on their networks, so students’ dorm computers were completely exposed to the internet. Any service you started was immediately, globally accessible. Some big sites, including slashdot and facebook, got their start in some kid’s dorm room. I feel like access controls really got going in the early 00’s - first for residential, then for broader campus.

Check with your IT people - they may have policy or conditions under which they will expose ports on your personal computer to the internet. Otherwise, your best bet is probably free-tier AWS or Oracle.

Not free, but there are some ‘KVM VPS’ providers out there that will rent you a small, internet exposed computer pretty cheap. They can be a good platform for experimenting with self-hosting services, without exposing your personal equipment or home network. eg: 1CPU/1GB RAM/24GB SSD $12/year https://my.racknerd.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=903

Good discovery tools are essential on a federated platform. An important part of twitter, facebook, and reddit success is/was that that they were the place for their particular style of content. You had a pretty good chance of being able to discover your old high school friends, because they were on the one platform. Then the (early) algorithm started discovering for you all the obscure content similar to your history.

Discovery has to work differently in a federated system. You can search for communities on Lemmy, but if your instance doesn’t already have someone subscribed to a community, then you’re not going to find it.

I realize you’re looking for new toys, but ‘anywhere in the flat’ includes ‘under a pile of pillows.’ Otherwise, for personal photo-sized storage, just put a couple 2.5mm format SSDs in the QNAP.

Depending on the board in your mini-server, you may have enough SATA ports to plug in directly. I have a system similar to what you’re describing (N100 with 4x 2TB HDDs with 1.5TB data): 2 of those drives are set up in RAID1 (mirror), and once a month, I plug in one of the spares, rsync the array to it, and unplug it. Every 3 months or so, I swap the offline drive with an offsite drive. I used to use a USB dock for the offline drive, but I got a 3-bay hot-swap enclosure to make the whole process faster and easier.

The server shares the array via NFS and SMB, and it is absolutely a NAS for all my other systems.

If you expect to exceed 2TB data within 2 years, then you’ll need to replace all 4 of those 2TB drives in 2 years. You might, today, get a pair of 4 TB drives and one 2TB, use the 4TB as your main storage, the 2TBs as rotating backups, and wait until you actually outgrow 2TB to upgrade the backups.

I’m not interested in their narrative, I’m talking about their numbers. They measured plaque formation - colonies - of bacteria from surface wipes around the toilet after flushing a contaminated toilet bowl. Depending on the location & lid state, they got, generally 10^3-106 plaques. 10^5 with the lid closed, 10^6 open, which is a 10x difference. There’s no difference in the surfaces directly facing the bowl; hardly surprising that there’s little contamination left by the time you get all the way to the walls - 1/r^2 effect. Look at the surface you sit on.

Are you sure you read that right? They report contamination in log units, so a reduction from 6.23 to 4.81 is a 26x difference. There’s not much difference on the faces of lid & seat that directly face the bowl, but even the seat top had 15x more contaminants with the lid up than down.

The study where gustofwind got the illustration says it’s around 10x reduction of deposited bacteria with the lid down.

https://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(23)00820-9/fulltext#tbl0010

I see you’re getting lots of advice just to use c/selfhosted as a free consultant. That’s good advice if you’re self-motivated and focused.

If you want someone to be a coach through the process, to keep you focused and moving, that’s a) a slightly different skillset and b) worth putting in the description. I mention this only because I have a bunch of aspirational projects on my to–do list that have just sat there for literally years because of perfectionism, anxiety, and maybe some undiagnosed ADHD. I’ll also counter by noting that a lot of people, this time of year, buy a gym membership on the theory that spending the money will somehow force them actually to go to the gym, only to find that spent money is not actually a motivator.

Great project. I like the 1-star reviews complaining about the lack of advertising and tracking.

If you want it to be an actual community service, then you want it to be something that outlives your residence, your tenure as event coordinator, and your interest in being the neighborhood IT guy. It’ll be much easier to transfer control of a VPS to your successor than to give them hardware that also hosts a bunch of your personal services.

You can start with a very small, nearly free VPS while you recruit users & scale up as (if) anyone bites. Probably even get the HOA to pay for it.

I got my Pi4 to be a media player - LibreElec or Kodi - for my old, not-smart TV. It plays my library of CDs&DVDs, frontend for OTA TV, and a variety of streaming services. Fanless, so it doesn’t distract from audio, low power, so I don’t mind leaving it on 24/7. You can configure it to listen to a USB IR receiver, but I control mine from phone via web. The actual media library/NAS and tvheaded run on an old desktop in another room.

My favorite thing is all the sensors you can hook up. Adafruit & Sparkfun have a wide array of sensors with breakout boards for simplicity and well documented python libraries. I started just logging temperature, humidity, then air quality, CO2 to my own database and web page, but eventually expanded to full HomeAssisstant system.

Pihole.

This is one of those questions where it’s very easy to project one’s vision of their own mortality onto the mirror of their pet. Like, for me, personally, I dread becoming so enfeebled that the tasks of daily life slip beyond my strength, to say nothing of mental incapacity, and I very much do not want to live that way. I know people who would rather lie in bed, maintained by machines, ass wiped by a stranger, for years than give up. We can’t ever know what the internal life of our pets is like, can’t know if they’re aware of their own mortality in the way that we are, but we will be responsible for their geriatric care and end-of-life decisions. ‘What I would want for myself,’ is the best place to start.

Tandoor: I ended up there because it has an API that I can access and cross-reference to my grocer (Kroger.com also has API) to get current pricing, calculate recipe costs, nutrient costs, or find what’s on special this week. It’s theoreticcally possible, but I haven’t sorted out how to integrate that directly into tandoor & its shopping lists.

The “resist government tyranny” people have always been a (very vocal) fringe group. Quasi-historical, quasi-fantasy, a little bit like historical re-enactors, but with a plot that makes it seem like they could be talking about today and real life. AFAIK, no one outside the groups actually think they will be the people to lead an armed resistance, mostly because no one outside of the groups actually thinks there will ever be a circumstance involving a widespread, armed resistance.

The one I knew, we’re sitting in this little pizza shop having lunch, and he starts going on about how he’s mapped the exits and positions of cover in the restaurant, in case a crew would barge in to rob the cafe and its patrons. Had his eye on a couple of people who might be troublemakers. Obviously had his gun with him, but probably too many people around to use it if the place did get raided. All in this nice, quiet, suburban neighborhood.

A lot depends on how many users you expect and how much media you expect. For one or two users with that stack, transcoding media is really the only CPU load. If most of your media is already in your desired format, then that’s not a big deal.

My stack is pretty similar (no *arr, plus tvheadend, homeassistant and a kodi frontend) for two users and it sits near idle all day long. It runs on an N100 NAS system off Aliexpress with 16GB and will transcode 1080p to x264 at just about playback speed… System runs from a 100 GB nvme, with a couple half-full 4 TB WD Reds for data. 35-ish Watts, maybe an extra 5 when actively transcoding. Used to be ~150 USD,

If you want a lot of 4k content, then I’d definitely go with the GTX 1660.

Same. Eventually upgraded to a Pi 4, which doesn’t have any trouble with 1080p content. Pi 3’s onboard wifi was also problematic, and I had to run it over wired networking. Kept that for the Pi 4, so I don’t know if its wifi is any better.

Honestly, don’t know about recent versions, either. I got sick of Intuit extorting me to upgrade every few years, so I’m frozen in 2012 (which is obviously useless for taxes). According to https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=120 Quickbooks 2004 & 2007 run ok.

Didn’t realize Quickbooks was so much more complicated than Quicken; kind of assumed it was just some kind of business-reskinned Quicken.

Can’t speak for Quickbooks, but Quicken works fine in WINE; you can set up a shell script in ~/Desktop to start it, so it works just like on Windows. Quicken (and 20 years of fin data) was one of the last things holding me to Windows, and getting it transferred to linux was hugely liberating.

I made a self-hosted forgejo repository of /etc. Commit messages aren’t always informative, and I’ve never actually gone back to the repository to figure something out, but it’s there, just in case. Me cosplaying a sysadmin.