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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 14th, 2023

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  • As a professional, my reasoning for NOT using AI is as follows:

    1. I don’t want to lose the muscle memory of what I do. Sure AI might be able to do annoying things like test templates… But that’s not a skill I want to forget or lose, as self written unit tests have actually helped me catch mistakes that “would have worked” in prod (i.e. Code functions, but has undesired outcomes). AI can’t usually spot that.
    2. As a person who digs deep in cyber security and monitors heavily the malicious realm, I’m paranoid of malicious or weak code being spit into my repos.
    3. I’m a privacy nut, too. Most “good” AI solutions are anti privacy.
    4. If anyone here has done a proper code review of AI generated code from coworkers, they should know it adds a ton of extra time because of errors, inconsistencies with repo practices, etc and actually wastes the time of the developer and reviewers.

    Am I saying “NEVER AI?”? nah. But it’s far from ready for me personally to even consider for programming purposes. I’m also well aware this isn’t what many others think or feel; I don’t scream at people for using it if it’s what they feel helps them.


  • I’m not familiar with those two… But I’ve always been hunting for the perfect replacement.

    I started with Nextcloud Deck and used it extensively until they got rid of my markdown support.

    So then I tried taiga and a few others before landing on Wekan. Really great software, but the terrible API, horrible mobile support, and slow outdated UI drove me away…

    Now I’m on Vikunja, which ironically doesn’t support markdown text. So I basically returned to square 1 with a better UI lol. I almost stayed on Wekan because of the checklist support, but the faster speeds, nice API, and slick UI in vikunja landed me here… for now.




  • My personal advice, secure it down to only permitting what needs it, regardless of your trust to the network.

    Treat each device as if they’ve been compromised and the attacker on the compromised device is now trying to move laterally. Example scenario: had you blocked all devices except your laptop or phone to your server, your server wouldn’t have been hacked because someone went through a hacked cloud-connected HVAC panel.

    I lock down everything and grant access only to devices that should have access. Then on top of that, I enable passwords and 2FA on everything as if it were public… Nothing I self host is public. It’s all behind my network firewall and router firewall, and can only be accessed externally by a VPN.


  • Yeah, in my example, I have various genres of music I listen to and some days I’m in the mood for one and not another. Some of those might have subgenres I am in the mood to listen to. For example: Metal might break into subfolders called black metal, thrash metal, melodic metal, etc. Based on where I feel they belong the most. If I’m in the mood for some melodic metal today, I’ll go there. Or EDM, I’ll have a folder for Psytrance, another for House, etc…

    Rather than trying to edit the metadata on thousands and thousands of files every time I change media systems as I’ve done over these years, it’s 100x simpler for me to just navigate to the folders directly and not care about how the system “wants” to organize it. Every media system wants to organize differently and I’m kind of tired of having to spend hours editing all my music just to get it to organize the way that works for me, so that’s where I’ve gotten to the point of just using folder structures.


  • I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I’m actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I’ve yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.

    For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I’m into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I’m in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn’t have folder structure view and even though it’s one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it’s never been added…

    I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren’t introduced due to Emby also improving, I’ll finally jump over.

    I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.



  • Raid 1 has saved my server a couple of times over from disaster. I make weekly cold backups, but I didn’t have to worry about it when my alert came in notifying me which drive went dead - just swap, rebuild, move along. So yeah I’d say it’s definitely worth it. Just don’t treat raid as a backup solution - and yes, continue to use an external cold storage backup solution as you mentioned. Fires, exploding power supplies, ransomware, etc don’t care if you’re using raid or not.


  • I’d say anyone wanting to go this deep into a home monitoring setup will likely go with what works best for them instead of reading and following the entirety of this guide… I’m one of those people…

    Wrote my own log parsing software to put into a database, display and alert through grafana, which is alerting through a homemade webhook that sends a notification to ntfy based on severity… And I also use uptime Kuma like mentioned, but my notifications channel is ntfy. No cloudflare for my internal services, only wireguard to connect home and use everything. And definitely no telegram.

    Plenty of other stuff setup, but my security alerts and monitoring rely heavily on the syslog/grafana server which helps me monitor everything.


  • Not an opinion, I have an actual situation with my eyes where they twitch uncontrollably when presented with bright lights for a long period of time. I have tried minimum screen brightness, lowered contrast/colors, auto brightness based on the environment, various software solutions to removing blue light 24/7 from the screen - none of it worked. Went permanently dark theme on everything, magically eyes haven’t twitched in years.

    Light theme vs dark theme is not just a preference, it’s an actual accessibility need for some of us.


  • I converted my gaming machine into a server as well. I actually took the graphics card out as I couldn’t find a major use for it, but kept the 12 core Ryzen and upped it to 128gb memory. It now self host way too many things, including a few game servers my friends and I play… But even with all this, CPU carries along nicely and not even at half memory consumption (yet).

    But as others have asked, what’s your goal? Don’t overkill it if you’re only hosting one service or something. If you’re doing a lot like I do, then up the RAM. And seriously consider whether the GPU is even useful or needed if you’re not using a desktop environment.



  • My solution to this question a year or so ago was to take my gaming desktop, which was collecting dust after I moved to my gaming laptop, and gut it down to a 4U server rack case. Best decision I’ve ever made. 12 core Ryzen and 128gb memory. Got a 10g adapter in the pci express, 8xHDD for data and then 2 mirrored nvme for the OS itself. Only thing I kept out was the video card since I had no use for it (yet)

    An equivalent “server” on the market would probably cost a fortune and cost you a ridiculous amount of electricity.


  • I’ve had the opposite experience and was actually referring to this generation in my comment, specifically for the series X.

    With Xbox 360 and even some Xbox one games, I was able to come home with the game and put it into the console knowing I could play it right away from the disc (or install for the Xbox one and play). When I buy a game now, referring to physical copies, I’m unable to play without requiring internet. I understand some games have limitations on disc size, but once upon a time, that’s where multi disc came in. Just the other day I forgot to unplug my console from the network to play a game and was hit by a firmware update request that I couldn’t say “later” to. Once that finally finished, I unplugged but I guess the console already got wiff of an update for the game I wanted to play and said I need to be connected to the internet to continue.

    This is definitely not something I ran into with older generations, personally. That being said, it sounds like your experience was different, so I suppose mileage may vary



  • Lots of comments already mentioning the differences. I have tried these, including the mentioned ipfire, and decided on the end to use opnsense plus openwrt on two different devices.

    I chose opnsense at the time many years ago because it supported wireguard out of the box, where as pfsense required some weird install process I didn’t want to deal with. Plus I liked the UI to opnsense more.

    My moden has been literally replaced by my firewall so I have the ONT connected to it and then use it to do all the heavy lifting for… Well, firewall stuff. It connects to a VPN so my entire network routes through the VPN. Then my openwrt device is connected to that. It also handles firewall stuff, but more at an internal level (keeping network devices only permitted to communicate with devices I say are okay, blocking internet access, etc) and also hosts my nginx setup to route to various servers.

    While I could do everything on one machine with opnsense, I’ve got a particular setup that allows me to have multiple devices at the firewall level, truly isolated from the rest of my internal network (for a couple of internet open port services). And it gives me peace of mind that if someone found a zero day in opnsense, I’m not totally screwed unless they also got one in openwrt.

    To answer “which is better to begin with”, I personally find opnsense way more flexible and robust than the other 2 options. Has a lot more capabilities and upgrading is super easy without requiring jumping through weird hoops and such like openwrt does.