• 4 Posts
  • 201 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2023

help-circle
  • The two top ones host invidious, searx, and yacy on one and lotide (what I’m talking to you on) and matrix on the other, they both have Intel Atom D2550s. The bottom one has an Intel Core i5-4570TE, and hosts basically everything else including my reverse proxy server.

    At some point I’d like to move to low-end ryzen embeddeds, because they are either as powerful or more powerful than anything I have and remain fanless, but one step at a time (and finding something that powerful that’s inexpensive and scavenged from a roadside sign is tough sometimes)











  • The way I’ve got it set up is I have a Nextcloud\Desktop, Nextcloud\Downloads, Nextcloud\Documents, Nextcloud\Pictures, and Nextcloud\Videos folder, and on each machine I use I point each of those points in windows to use the folder in the nextcloud folder instead of my users folder, then I run the official client to sync the entire nextcloud folder. By doing that, whichever computer I’m on I’ve got the same stuff in my main folders and anything else I have I can keep in the nextcloud folder. I’ve also got it on my mobile device just to automatically upload new pictures to the InstantUploads folder, but the app is a bit limited.

    I live equally on the road working as at home, and I’ve got completely different computers for home and travel, so in this way I’ve always got all my files available since once I start up the computer it automatically starts pulling the local files. If you don’t want a full copy of everything on both machines, I think you can tell it to just create links of the files and the client will download the files from the server as they’re required, but I prefer having a local copy of the files myself.


  • I use nextcloud for syncing between different computers, because I tend to have different machines that are far separated geographically, and it works well. I put all my home folders on each computer into the nextcloud directory so I have all the same files everywhere I go and if I don’t have one of my computers I can still log in and access those files.

    I used to use nextcloud as my solution for everything, but a big problem with photos is it isn’t really very navigable, and a problem with nextcloud as a general platform is everything is a plugin so if the plugin doesn’t get updated you can be stuck on an older version of the software which carries its own risks. As well, given the interface, You have your media but you can’t really go back and look at it. What I did instead is I set up a library in jellyfin with all my photos sorted into directories, and you can scroll and navigate through them fairly intuitively. I pulled my data out of google and facebook before deleting the accounts and so had many many photos but no way to really enjoy them, but that solution worked really well for me and I’ve been able to look at my old photos easily.


  • I wonder if you’ve ever used a Chromecast based on this criticism.

    For a standard Chromecast, you open the app on your phone, then press the cast button, then the device you want to cast to, and the the device begins to stream the media independently of your device. You can shut off the device you used to start casting and it doesn’t matter because Chromecast is pulling the data on its own.

    On some websites such as YouTube on PC, you also have a cast button and you can press it, select the device and it’ll start playing. you can get this button to work on all kinds of sites, and a lot of open source software supports it to a degree such as VLC, Peertube (through a plugin), and Jellyfin.

    Using google chrome you can cast your current webpage or your desktop, but that’s not the standard use of Chromecast.

    It takes some finagling, but you can cast from Jellyfin to a standard Chromecast right from your phone.

    The latest version out is Chromecast with Android TV, which is really nice (for now). It’s running a version of android and has the play store, so you can set up the Jellyfin android TV app, and stream from your home server without requiring a domain name or https like you do to stream properly on straight Chromecast.

    The big issue with Chromecast in my view is that it’s a Google product which means 3 things:

    1. it’s proprietary, which has many risks coming from that nature and a crappy largely hidden API
    2. it can be shut down any moment if they desire (see google graveyard), and being an always-on device it’s possible they just brick it on the way out
    3. it will suck up as much data as they can from you to try to sell you more crap



  • The most important risk you face is if somehow mains voltage ends up contacting somewhere you get electrocuted and die.

    There are 2 purposes of an earth ground: First it can be used as a reference for certain signals, such as microphones. Second, it can be used to protect against turning yourself into a sparker.

    There is a clear separation between mains voltage and system voltages so it’s typically not going to be a problem, but if a little wire ends up contacting the power supply case it can become energized and things start to get really bad.

    Most of the electrical code where I live focuses on grounding as “Bonding”, which is purely safety related for giving dangerous voltages a safe place to go.