To anyone and no-one:

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” Kevin Alfred Storm, noted Neo-Nazi caught with a non zero amount of child porn, talking about Jews. Also, paraphrased by William H, talking about Muslims.

I fought against getting a contactless debit card for so long. I used to call my bank a month or so before my card expired demanding a non-contactless card. “But sir, you could just not activate the contact…” I don’t want any of it. I’d say “when I forget my pin it’s time to go home” paying chip and PIN like a peasant. I probably said “PIN Number” for how stupid I was being.

Anyway, contactless payment is awesome.

My fears are still grounded. Originally it was because, near weekly, I saw someone paying with a card they just picked off the floor. I hated the limit being so high long before they raised it, let alon after they raised it again. Also a skill check before ordering another beer has some merit.

“Cults do like to cut off and distance their members from outsiders and their families” In the same email that he was threating to block me for suggesting his quoting of a Nazi might be a bad thing.

Close second: “Trump (married to a woman) is misogynist” but also “I (British), married to a Malay, can’t be racist because I’m married to a Malay”.

Honourable mention: “I don’t like the word ‘Islamophobia’ or your Newspeak”. My guy, Newspeak was famous for doing something to the dictionary, and it wasn’t adding words to describe more concepts.

Anyway, he blocked me… Like cultists do. All quotes are paraphrased, I CBA digging through the emails.

Hardware wise I’d go AIO. A mini and a pair of mirrored USB drives is my setup. I have an off-site backup running: another mini + USB. Finally, I have an inherited laptop as a redundant network box/local backup/immich compute. I have 5 households on my network, and aside from immich spiking in resources (hence the laptop), I have overhead to spare.

An n100 mini (or n150, n200, whatever) is cheap enough and powerful enough for you to jump in, decide if you want to spend more later. They’re small, quiet, reasonable Value for Money, easy Wife Acceptance Factor, and can age into a bunch of devices if you decided self hosting isn’t for you. I’d make a retro console out of any spare mini.

This way, when spending £x00s on a server, you’ll have some idea on what you actually need/want. The n100 can the age into a firewall/network box/local back up/etc if/when you upgrade.

All that said. An AIO storage-compute box is where I’m headed. I now know I need a dedicated graphics card for the immich demand. I now know I want a graphics card for generative AI hobby stuff. I know how much storage I need for everyone’s photos, and favorite entertainment, permanent stuff. I know how much storage I need for stuff being churned, temporary stuff. I now know I don’t care about high availability/clusters. I now know… Finally, the ‘Wife’ has grown used to having a server in the house: it’s a thing I have, and do, which she benefits from. So, a bigger, more expensive, and probably louder box, is an easier sell.

“TRaSH-guides” into your favourite search engine. Even if you don’t want to set up a *arr, the pros and cons of file format are discussed there.

Prowlarr suggests Knaben, then TheRARBG are my most successful sources of Linux ISOs.

There is, but that kicks the can (hehe) down the road. It’s not a big issue, I live where petrol is expensive but readily available. I set trip counters on the dash, I know roughly how many miles a full tank does and exactly how many miles since I last filled the bike.

The convenience would be to never have to think about petrol again. That’s more than the convenience to never plugging my phone in again.

Ignoring the loophole of using petrol to generate electricity. I can run my house on generators etc.

I don’t mind charging my phone everyday. Managing my motorcycle’s energy is a right pain however. Do I have enough petrol for the trip/day/week, I just want to go home but I have to find a station, is there one on the way, do they have premium. My phone I plug in and let it sort it self out.

The specific works? Who knows. It’s irrelevant

My point is your original premise was wrong. Creation DID happen without IP laws. People DO create with out the need for compensation/copy protection.

I propose, people will create things because they always have.

Creation happened before intellectual property laws existed.

Creation happens that can be immediately copied with no compensation now, open source software is an example.

I thought Libation merely broke the TOS, not violated the law (UK). Doesn’t matter, I’m on a different vendor now.

Me? None. But I left room for someone who might.

Seeding to ratios is self correcting, in my inexperienced opinion as I only share ISOs.

Unpopular thing sits on someone’s computer (not mine) for ages just happily waiting until it’s useful. Popular thing is in and out. Purely for files intended to be churned; try a distro (in facebook’s case a book), use it, and delete it.

1:3 could be said to be a minimum (1 for to pay back, 1 to pay forward, and 1 to pay for a leecher)

Things that are going to be archived can be set as limitless as long as strain on hardware can be tolerated.

I’m glad I’ve already pulled my audible library in to audibookshelf, I didn’t have many ebooks so didn’t bother with them. I’m moving to librofm this month I think.

History is what it is. Reality is what it is. It won’t be productive while you imagine it to only be a tune in my head, and resort to insults.

As predicted, not going to be a productive conversation.

Same with those civil rights people, they were always marching, and shouting, and angry at an unjust system, and scared of police beatings. Always complaining about lynchings and how they were oppressed. So scared and hate filled.

Funny how history rhymes. They’re scared and angry because they have something to be scared and angry about.

I’ll leave this here. If that doesn’t make you scared and angry then I’m not sure we’re going to have a productive conversation.

Update went fine on a bare metal install. Customising the webUI port is a little easier now, instead of editing lighttdp.conf I think you can do it in the UI.

I struggled to find some settings, I looked for ages for the API token. Found it in all settings: expert, scroll for half a mile down the webUI API section.

Also, struggled with adding CNAMES in bulk, I thought you could do that in the old UI. You might be able to in the new UI. I just 'one by one’d them.

Docker update went flawlessly.

I have an lxc and to go which is a task for another day, unless TTeck’s updater beats me to it.

+1 for running pihole in an LXC, and a redundant pihole in a docker container.

They never update at the same time, or in the same way so near as dammit constant uptime.

My main storage is a mirrored pair of HDD. Versioning is handled here.

It Syncthings an “important” folder to a local back up only 1 HDD.

The local Backup Syncthings to my parents house with 1 SSD.

My setup can be better, if I put the versioning on my local backup it’d free space on my main storage. I could migrate to a dedicated backup software, Borg maybe, over syncthing. But Syncthing I knew and understood when I was slapdashing this together. It’s a problem for future me.

I’ve been seriously considering an Elitedesk G4 or Dell/Lenovo equivalent as back up machines. Mirrored drives. Enough oomph to HA the things using the “important” files: immich paperless etc.

My big problem is remote stuff. None of my users have aftermarket routers to easily manipulate their DNS. One has an android modem thing which is hot garbage. I’m using a combination of making their pi be their DHCP and one user is running on avahi.

Chrome, the people’s browser of choice, really, really hates http so I’m putting them on my garbage ######.xyz domain. I had plans to one day deal with Https, just not this day. Locally I just use the domain for vaultwarden so the domain didn’t matter. But if people are going to be using it then I’ll have to get a more memorable one.

System updates have been a faff. I’m 'ssh’ing over tailscale. When tailscale updates it kicks me out, naturally. Which interrupts the session, naturally. Which stops the update, naturally. Also, it fucks up dkpg beyond what --configure -a can repair. I’ll learn to update in background one day, or include tailscale in the unattended-upgrades. Honestly, I should put everything into unattended-upgrades.

Locally works as intended though, so that’s nice. Everything also works for my fiancee and I remotely all as intended, which is also nice. My big project is coalescing what I’ve got into something rational. I’m on the make it good part of the “make it work > make it good” cycle.