tburkhol
@tburkhol@lemmy.world
- Comment on Starting to self host 1 day ago:
If you’re already running Pihole, I’d look at other things to do with the Pi.
www.adafruit.com has a bunch of sensors you can plug into the Pi, python libraries to make them work, and pretty good documentation/examples to get started. If you know a little python, it’s pretty easy to set up a simple web server just to poll those sensors and report their current values. Only slightly more complicated to set up cron jobs to log data to a database and a web page to make graphs.
It’s pretty straightforward to put www.home-assistant.io in a docker on a Pi. If you have your own local sensors, it will keep track of them, but it can also track data from external sources, like weather & air quality. There a bunch of inexpensive smart plugs ($20-ish) that will let you turn stuff on/off on a schedule or in response to sensor data.
IMO, Pi isn’t great for transport-intensive services like radarr or jellyfin, but, with a Usb HD/SSD might be an option.
- Comment on dear republicans, what's the point of alienating every single ally of the US? 4 days ago:
Not just Russia. Any kind of meaningful restraint on multinational corps & billionaires requires international cooperation, or the entity just changes the region where it stores/performs/recognizes whatever thing.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 1 week ago:
Since this article is specifically about pm 2.5, I’m going to chime in and say I have a gas range with no extractor, and the only time my pm2.5 sensor picks anything up is when frying generates smoke and oil aerosols. That’s more a function of cooking temperature than fuel, and my induction hotplate will generate just as much.
CO2? Definitely more with gas. Trace chemicals? Probably more with gas, but all the studies I’ve seen are just about running the cooktop, with no food, in a sealed room. Run the extraction hood or open a window when you cook - it’s not just heat source.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 1 week ago:
I’ve got one, just a 120V, home-use thing, but it gets far hotter, faster than on my stove. Tends to have a cool spot in the very center, maybe 3" diameter, unless you circulate the wok, and you can’t flame food by tossing it in the fire (which you can’t really do on a residential stove, either). It’s a decent approximation of a wok jet for home cooks.
- Comment on Sooo, where did the blatant Nazism suddenly come from? 2 weeks ago:
Eugenics and the idea of a ‘chosen’ race is also powerful - you might be genetically destined for greatness, and the fact you have not achieved it is due to systematic oppression by a hidden conspiracy. People love that shit.
I think OP is asking why narratives around that theme keep coming back to the Nazi narrative, specifically. Why not another example of populist authoritarianism, unburdened by the systematic murder of millions of civilians? Why not invent a new narrative rooted in their own national history?
I think the answer to that is: creativity is hard. Once people have a successful first draft, they tend just to edit that draft rather than pitch it and come up with something completely new. People recognize any borrowed elements and return to the archetype. If you’ve every tried to write anything by committee or group project, you’ve probably seen people choose to edit a horrible first draft, retaining the same basic structure (however flawed) rather than start over. Committees where someone finds an existing, related text online, which then becomes an anchor for whatever the committee had planned to draft.
In short, Nazis serve as ‘best practices’ example for any new ethnic nationalist group by the simple fact of their existence.
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 2 weeks ago:
That’s my point: fusion is just another heat source for making steam, and with these experimental reactors, they can’t be sure how much or for how long they will generate heat. Probably not even sure what a good geometry for transferring energy from the reaction mass to the water. You can’t build a turbine for a system that’s only going to run 20 minutes every three years, and you can’t replace that turbine just because the next test will have ten times the output.
I mean, you could, but it would be stupid.
- Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes 2 weeks ago:
If you’re not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.
- Comment on What does the 3-2-1 rule look like for you? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve always understood 2 as 2 physically different media - i.e., copies in different folders or partitions of the same disk is not enough to protect against failure of that disk, but a copy on a different disk does. Ideally 2 physically different systems, so failure/fire in the primary system won’t corrupt/damage the backup.
Used to be that HDDs were expensive and using them as backup media would have been economically crazy, so most systems evolved backup media to be slower and cheaper. The main thing is that having /home/user/critical, /home/user/critical-backup, and /home/user/critical-backup2 satisfies 3 copies, but not 2 media.
- Comment on What does the 3-2-1 rule look like for you? 2 weeks ago:
3: RAID-1 pair + manual periodic sync to an external HD, roughly monthly. Databases synced to cloud.
2: external HD is unplugged when not syncing
1: External HD is a rotating pair, swapped in a bank box, roughly quarterly. Bank box costs $45/year.
If the RAID crashes, I lose at most a month. If the house burns down, I lose at most 3 months. Ransomware, unless it’s really stealthy, I lose 3 months. If I had ongoing development projects, a month (or 3) would be a lot to lose, and I’d probably switch to weekly syncs and monthly swaps, but for what I actually do - media files, financial and smart-home data, 3 months would not be impossible to recreate.
All of this works because my system is small enough to fit on one HDD. A 3-2-1 system for tens of TB starts to look a lot like an enterprise system.
- Comment on What is your self-hosting setup for home thermostat? 4 weeks ago:
TY. Looks like the T6 is pro-only. Googling around, it looks like ventilation control may be one of the things that separate their pro-level T6/T10 from their DIY-level T5/T9. That’s disappointing.
- Comment on What is your self-hosting setup for home thermostat? 4 weeks ago:
Does the Honeywell T6 give you separate control of temperature and fan? That is, can you turn air circulation on/off, even when the temperature wouldn’t trigger heating/cooling?
I’ve been watching pm2.5 in my house, and the HVAC filter does a pretty good job of keeping it down if I run the fan, but that fan takes a lot of energy, and I’d like to turn it off when the air is pretty clean.
- Comment on Uses for a SBC (When You Already Have an x86 Mini-PC?) 3 months ago:
Sensors. Especially sensors in your living space where fans or other noise from the proper server would be distracting, or in a tight space - inside your HVAC, for example - where a proper server wouldn’t fit.
Media front-end. Most of those SBCs are more than enough to run a kodi or jellyfin frontend, fanless for minimum distraction.
Robot. Low power requirement so it could be mobile; but there are lots of stationary possibilities. GPIO libraries are great for running servos and there’s tons of libraries to facilitate.
- Comment on Is a Quest 3 really worth it? 3 months ago:
I can see that. If you just want to hang out in a space, then VR Skyrim definitely has some cool places to hang, but how long are you really going to spend in that Skyrim tavern?
When OP asks whether VR is a long-term option, that’s what I think. My favorite 2D games I have 500+ hours, probably a half dozen of them; I can still go back to those, some 10+ year old, and sink another 50+ hours. The only VR game I have more than 50 hours is the mini-golf game that’s glorified chat.
For me, VR as an experience has been really amazing. It’s a level of immersion that’s just indescribably better than anything 2D, but each of those experiences has had limited staying power, which I think is because the physical demands of VR constrain my playtime and focus. I can left-mouse-button all day, but my back gets sore if I stand for three hours. So I can handle beat saber because I treat it like a gym session, but the idea of VR walking 7000 steps to Skyrim’s Throat of the World…just no.
- Comment on Is a Quest 3 really worth it? 3 months ago:
It’s not going to replace flat screen gaming. It’s hard to be in VR for hours, especially when you have to manage battery life, but I’ve had a headset for a year or two now, and it’s still amazing where it’s good. I’m better with smooth moving, but I still prefer teleporting, for headache/dizziness.
Tried Skyrim, couldn’t make it stick - VR just isn’t right for massive open worlds. Halflife Alyx is amazing - it’s the right scale for VR, the attention to manipulatable objects is amazing, and some of the puzzles just couldn’t be done in 2D. Blade & Sorcery is good, too.
Games I keep going back to are Beat Saber, because I’m old and need something to make me stand up and move, and Mini-golf, which is mostly a focus for hanging out with remote friends.
- Comment on Eat lead 4 months ago:
wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/isoig/period/pb_iig.html
Lead-204 is the only isotope that doesn’t derive from radioactive decay, and it represents only 1.4% of the lead on earth.
- Comment on I make games and this literally happened to me this morning 5 months ago:
I used to pay a particular company by purchase order for this exact reason. CC takes 2-3% of the payment, but purchase order - they’ve got to get themselves into the company system, track the PO, invoice, track the payment…at the time, a common estimate was $50 to process a PO, and if you’re only buying $100 batches, that’s a big hit. Did not like that company, but they were the only place to get whatever it was I had to buy.
- Comment on I make games and this literally happened to me this morning 5 months ago:
Revenue divided by time is a depressing metric for anyone who starts trying to monetize their hobby, but that’s not the point. Do your fun project because it’s fun. If you make enough to cash out on Steam, get yourselves some actual trophies. Or pizza. Trying to make money will force you to do all the depressing capitalist things the big studios do, and then it’s not fun anymore.
- Comment on How come LED Light Bulbs only last for about 2-3 Years? 5 months ago:
If you’re technically inclined, Big Clive has a tutorial for ‘fixing’ most bulbs not to overdrive the LEDs by removing or changing a single resistor. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HTa2jVi_rc
- Comment on YubiKeys are vulnerable to cloning attacks thanks to newly discovered side channel 5 months ago:
Also, at least for the Yubi implementation, fixable in software, firmware >= 5.7 not vulnerable. Also not upgradeable, so replace keys if you’re worried about nation-state attacks.
- Comment on Any non-tech-background self-hosters? 6 months ago:
University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.
Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.
- Comment on YouTube is Losing The War Against Adblockers 6 months ago:
Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.
- Comment on Smart sous vide cooker to start charging $2/month for 10-year-old companion app 6 months ago:
I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.
I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.
- Comment on I know Mormons can't have alcohol, but couldn't they just dip their tongue in a glass of beer and not move it? 6 months ago:
Colon is part of your large intestine.
- Comment on SanDisk introduces the first 8TB SD and 4TB microSD cards - Liliputing 6 months ago:
You’d need some way to cache that video, though, because it’d take 24 hours to write 8TB at SD card speeds of 80 MB/s.
- Comment on Why do so many people use NGINX? 7 months ago:
I came to MySQL and Apache because they were the backend for other services I wanted to start,. Later, when I wanted to build my own, I already had Apache running, so why would I add nginx? I did let other services add sqlite, but have (in most cases) figured out how to switch those to MySQL.
All of that has been running for 20 years. I’m sure it would be good for my dementia-risk to learn how to start ngnix and migrate all those services, but it’s far more attractive not to mess with what works.
- Comment on What do you prefer to selfhost? 7 months ago:
I have isc-bind running behind pihole so network clients can register their own hostnames, and as near as I can tell, that’s outside the scope of pihole’s DHCP and dnsmasq. Pihole alone is probably fine if you only want to name static hosts, but (I understand) Unbound doesn’t support ddns, either.
- Comment on What do you prefer to selfhost? 7 months ago:
pihole, in front of my own DNS, because it’s easier to have them to domain filtering.
mythtv/kodi, because I’d rather buy DVDs than stream; rather stream than pirate; but still like to watch the local news.
LAMP stack, because I like watching some local sensor data, including fitness equipment, and it’s a convenient place to keep recipes and links to things I buy regularly but rarely (like furnace filters).
Homeassistant, because they already have interfaces to some sensors that I didn’t want to sort out, and it’s useful to have some lights on timers.
I also host, internally, a fake version of quicken.com, because it lets me update stock quotes in Quicken2012 and has saved me having to upgrade or learn a new platform.
- Comment on Server build for Family 7 months ago:
Ditto on hardware raid. Adding a hardware controller just inserts a potentially catastrophic point of failure. With software raid and raid-likes, you can probably recover/rebuild, and it’s not like the overhead is the big burden it was back in the 90s.
- Comment on Tesla’s Share of U.S. Electric Car Market Falls Below 50% 7 months ago:
Once you have a microcontroller running things, adding new features is just a matter of software. Doesn’t add to the BOM, doesn’t complication production in any way. There’s almost no marginal cost to techify everything, and the people who don’t want those features can just not use them. The small minority of people who want a repairable car that they can understand and maintain in their own garage are undesirable customers who reduce after-market revenue.
- Comment on Tesla’s Share of U.S. Electric Car Market Falls Below 50% 7 months ago:
In the US, plug-in hybrid is a decent way to cover the breadth of consumer desires. Get a battery big enough for 50 miles of daily commuting, but have the ICE for 500 mile holiday trips. More complicated, having both power systems, and you still have the tie to gasoline, but you don’t have to lug a massively oversized battery pack everywhere you go and you still get most of your transportation energy from the electric grid.