Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

  • 3 Posts
  • 562 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • If you have old parts, use those, it’ll probably overkill. Most server stuff isn’t very resource intensive, so a little goes a long way.

    If you’re buying something new, I’d recommend something small, like a Mini PC or an N100 rig. 16GB RAM is probably enough, and anything with more than 4 cores is probably overkill. A dedicated GPU is unnecessary, something with a modern-ish iGPU will be plenty to transcode video.


  • crypto claims

    Well, that depends on what claims you’re interested in.

    Monero solves the problem of replacing cash while preserving all of the anonymity of cash. Transactions are reasonably fast, fees are low, etc.

    Bitcoin is a terrible currency IMO, and isn’t much better as a store of value because:

    • transaction fees are high - due to finite block size and frequency
    • it’s a huge target for speculation as the largest cryptocurrency
    • transactions are slow (see first bullet point)

    The problem Bitcoin is trying to solve is transparency of transactions, putting huge emphasis on the public ledger. That’s always going to be at odds with a currency, where most people don’t want their transactions tracked.


  • Here’s a laundry list, since you didn’t specify which concerns you have:

    • unprofitable to mine in farms, so fewer environmental issues
    • creates a ton of fake transactions to screw with the public ledger to protect your privacy
    • variable sized blocks, which keeps fees low and reduces transaction time
    • pretty stable, so pump isn’t really a thing
    • not as popular as bitcoin or Ethereum, so traditional scams to steal your coins aren’t as successful (also attracts more sophisticated users)
    • less of a target for speculation, so the currency is reasonably stable

    There are some downsides of course:

    • due to privacy features, it’s attractive to criminals, so many countries block direct transactions with fiat (need to trade some other crypto for it)
    • to maximize privacy, it’s strongly recommended to use your own node (boy required though), which can raise the barrier to entry
    • it’s even harder to find vendors that accept it vs other cryptocurrencies

    Monero does seem to be the best cash replacement though, since it preserves most of the privacy-relevant features of cash.



  • I have several:

    • keep work and personal accounts, since we have overlap there
    • reduce tracking nonsense - I have an “empty” container for media (YouTube, Twitch, etc), that I clear periodically
    • keep my accounts separate from my kids’ accounts, since they use my login
    • prevent random websites from easily connecting to my accounts - lots of places use GitHub as their auth, and this puts an extra barrier for them to connect (they need to be in the right container)

    Yeah, websites can track regardless, but Firefox containers provide most of what I want and a lot of convenience. The other end of that spectrum is Tor browser (or maybe Mullvad browser), but that comes with a lot of inconvenience.




  • The SOC also isn’t fully open, so you won’t get top tier performance with a purely FOSS stack. I push the limits on mine (Retropie mostly), so using their OS is the better bet (I use the one shipped by Retropie, which is super old).

    I actually kinda hate the Raspberry Pi because of how closed it is. It’s gotten a bit better over the years, but the Pi 5 took a big step back. But unfortunately, its competitors aren’t much better, so I still use my RPis, but I probably won’t buy more.

    I’m also not a fan of Debian in general, so if I switched, I would probably use openSUSE or Arch instead (I tried Arch, but it had issues syncing to disk after updates; they fixed that, but it shows that other distros will be a bit wonky). Raspbian works, so I stick with it.



  • Nowhere near as big as yours. I haven’t bothered checking, but probably something like 100 movies and about the same number of TV shows (only a handful of series). It consists pretty much only of what I’ve ripped from physical media, plus a handful of things my SO uploaded. Total storage is about 2TB, and mostly DVDs w/ a handful of Blurays. Rips are full quality, and mostly ripped from MakeMKV, with a handful ripped w/ Handbrake.

    We don’t watch a ton, but I do order new stuff periodically, so it slowly grows (most recent addition is Adventure Time).









  • I’m not OP and am a dev, but also prefer flat files. Here’s my reasoning:

    • versioning - I use snapshots in my filesystem (BTRFS), which is more than enough, and have a git hosting solution for things I care about more
    • sync is plenty fast on OCIS and Samba, it’s just kinda slow on Nextcloud; I’m sure Seafile is better, but it’s not something I do frequently anyway, especially since backups from devices is automatic and uses a different, fast system
    • incremental - not my use case, most of my files either never change (movies) or are small (text flees)

    My main concerns with Seafile specifically are:

    • developed by a Chinese company and doesn’t seem particularly open to contributions
    • mostly written in C, so there’s a good chance of security vulnerabilities
    • documentation about the disk format isn’t very open, so third party tools don’t really exist
    • main target is larger orgs, so I’m unlikely to get very good support

    With flat files, I can easily switch to a different service if my needs change.


  • Here’s what I’ve used and can recommend:

    • samba - just a network share
    • Nextcloud - full featured cloud suite (calendar, contacts, etc)
    • owncloud infinite scale (OCIS) or the Euro fork Open Cloud - the POSIX driver has a flat file structure and still supports users and shared data; OCIS is designed for larger installations, but running on a smaller, single instance totally works too

    Since you rejected NextCloud, check out the other two. I’m switching from NextCloud to OCIS right now, and I may end up using OpenCloud if development looks stable.