tburkhol

@tburkhol@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Uses for a SBC (When You Already Have an x86 Mini-PC?)⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Colon is part of your large intestine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SanDisk introduces the first 8TB SD and 4TB microSD cards - Liliputing⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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%⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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%⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Any MythTV Users Here?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s even easier with digital broadcast. I finally had to give up my PCI tuner, because who puts PCI slots on a modern mobo? $25 will get you a USB TV tuner capable of getting all the OTA and cable channels. I used to get, like, 7 analog OTA channels - ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and a regional independent - but I get 30 digital. All the majors have added 3-5 channels of SD reruns or other filler. I mean, it’s mostly shit, and the only thing I actually watch is local news, but for a one-time $25 cost, it’s a great supplement to streaming.

  My biggest problem with MythTV is it doesn’t interface with streaming, so I use Kodi on the frontend to source from mythtv, netflix, hbo, or whatever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your thoughts on exposing a tool like dockge to outside of your man?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I just don’t like my logs filling up with scripted login attempts. Even with fail2ban, for a while there I was getting 100+ login attempts every day, and it upset my sense of order.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your thoughts on exposing a tool like dockge to outside of your man?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I do ssh because I’m more comfortable with it: it’s ubiquitous and as close to bulletproof as any security. Put it on a nonstandard port, restrict authentication to public keys, and I have no qualms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Electricians of fediverse, should I have my selfhosting box grounded?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Heh. House I rented was built before ubiquitous electricity. At some point, someone slapped a fuse box on the outside of the back wall and drilled a bunch of 1" holes in said wall to pass wiring. House was built on piers, so they just dragged wires around to places where they wanted outlets, which were mostly planted in the floor. Not a ground wire on site. I have no idea how they got away with renting that out, but it’s not like I called code enforcement, either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What are your thoughts on exposing a tool like dockge to outside of your man?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I think it really depends on use case. Like, I’m trying to imagine what aspect of my home lab could go so wrong, while I’m out of the house, that it would need fixed right away, and there’s nothing. I only leave my house for work or maybe a week of vacation, though, and I can imagine someone who’s occasionally away from home/house for 6-month deployments, or has a vacation home they only visit four weekends a year, might want more extensive remote maintenance. I’d still want to do that via ssh or vpn, but that’s me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why not serve fried chicken on Juneteenth? How is it different from serving corned beef on St. Patrick’s day?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon_Chicken_Inn Black people and chicken was like leprechauns and breakfast cereal for a while.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF Happened In 1971?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The US Libertarian Party was founded in 1971. Not saying there’s a causative link…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is replacement for home device controls so complicated?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  HA doesn’t require 4/4/32, that’s just the hardware the HA people sell. (which, given that your phone may be 8/16/128, is hardly “robust”). Generally, the Home Assistant crowd kind of target an audience that’s probably already running some kind of home server, NAS, or router, and HA can probably be installed on that device.

  Theoretically, there’s no reason the HA server couldn’t be installed on your phone, except then your smart home functions would only work while your phone is in the house and not sleeping. Kind of defeats the point of a lot of it, unless you’re just thinking of smart home like “remote control for everything.” Regardless, much smaller niche for an already-small market, and apparently not a priority for the dev team.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owners of a domain, which domain registrar did you choose and why?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  +1 porkbun. $1.60 for a .top whois privacy. 2FA with security key. Even let me host my own nameserver, so I can have separate internal and external views.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Appreciation / shock at workplace IT systems⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I recently set up DNSSEC on my home domain, and I have been shocked to learn that none of my financial institutions use it. Going back through my logs, the only external host that even tries is api.weather.gov, and only for the CNAME pointing to a CDN host.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with Docker?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to have this with homeassistant and zwavejs. Every time I’d pull a new homeassistant, the zwave integration would fail, because it required a newer version of zwavejs. Taught me to build the chain of services into one docker-compose, so they’d all update together. That’s become one of the rationales for me to use docker: got a chain of dependent processes? wrap them in a docker so you’re working with (probably) the same dependencies as the devs.

  My other rationale is just portability, and docker is just one of many solutions there. In my little home environment, where servers are either retired desktops or gee-that-seems-cool SBCs, it’s nice to be able to easily move stuff independent of architecture or OS.