FrederikNJS
@FrederikNJS@lemm.ee
- Comment on ‘Alexa, what do you know about us?’ What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything my family’s smart speaker had heard 5 days ago:
Even if all support is dropped, everything is running on open source software, so nothing is going to stop working as a result of dropped support.
Finding replacements might become tricky at some point though.
- Comment on ‘Alexa, what do you know about us?’ What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything my family’s smart speaker had heard 5 days ago:
It doesn’t really matter whether Zigbee was merged into something else, because it simply doesn’t have any technical means of phoning home. It simply can’t access the Internet.
There’s no intermediate corporate owned servers, there’s no proprietary software.
So it doesn’t really matter what the corporation does because it can’t affect my “smart” devices.
- Comment on ‘Alexa, what do you know about us?’ What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything my family’s smart speaker had heard 5 days ago:
That depends on the kind of “smart”.
I have a bunch of IKEA “smart” light bulbs, but they are connected through a Sonoff USB Zigbee dongle. And all of it is controlled through the open-source zigbee2mqtt and home-assistant.
No one, but myself and my family, have any control or ownership of any of those devices.
- Comment on How can I contribute processing power to the community? 1 week ago:
That’s definitely not what I’ve heard, please elaborate.
- Comment on What are the minimum or recommended requirements for a personal home server? 1 week ago:
As soon as I had migrated to a proper desktop (the i7-920), then it was a piece of cake upgrading. Shut the machine down, unplug, swap the parts, plug in, turn on. Linux has happily booted up with no trouble with the new hardware.
Since my first server was a classic bios, and the later machines was UEFI, then that step required a reinstall… But after the reinstall, I actually just copied all the contents of the root partition over, and it just worked.
The main limiting factors for me has been the amount of memory, the amount of SATA connectors for disks, and whether the hardware supported hardware transcoding.
For memory, ensure the motherboard has 4 sockets for memory, that makes it easy to start out with a bit of memory and upgrade later. For example you could start out with 2x 4GB sticks for a total of 8GB, and then later when you feel like you need more, you buy 2x 8GB sticks. Now you have a total of 24 GB.
For SATA ports, ensure the motherboard has enough ports for your needs, and I would also strongly recommend looking for a motherboard with at least 2 PCIe 16x slots, as that will allow you too add many more SATA or SAS ports via a SAS card.
Hardware encoding is far from a must. It’s only really necessary if you have a lot of media in unsupported formats by the client devices. 95% of my library is h.264 in 1080p, which is supported on pretty much everything, so it will play directly and not require any transcoding. Most 1080p media is encoded in h.264, so it’s usually a non-issue. 4k media however often come in HEVC (h.265), which many devices do not support. These files will require transcoding to be playable on devices that do not support it, but a CPU can still transcode it using “software transcoding”, it’s just much slower and less responsive. So I would consider it a nice convenience, but definitely not a must, and it depends entirely on the encoding of the media library.
- Comment on What are the minimum or recommended requirements for a personal home server? 1 week ago:
As long as it’s capable of booting into Linux, then you can start building a homelab…
Initially I had a 2-bay Synology NAS, and a Raspberry Pi 3B… It was very modest, but enough to stream media to my TV and run a bunch of different stuff in docker containers.
In my house, computer hardware is handed down. I buy something to upgrade my desktop, and whatever falls off that machine is handed down to my wife or my daughters machines, then finally it’s handed down to the server.
At some point my old Core i7-920 ended up in the server. This was plenty to upgrade the server to running Kubernetes with even more stuff, and even software transcoding some media for streaming. Running BTRFS gave me the flexibility to add various used disks over time.
At some point the CPU went bad, so I bought an upgrade for my desktop, and handed my old CPU donown the can, which released an Intel Core i5-2400F for the server. At this point storage and memory started to become the main limiting factor, so I added a PCI SAS card in IT mode to add more disks.
As this point my wife needed a faster CPU, so I bought a newer used CPU for her, and her old Intel Core i7-3770 was handed down to the server. That gave quite a boost in raw CPU power.
I ended up with a spare Intel Core i5-7600 because the first motherboard I bought for my wife was dead, so I looked up and found that for very cheap I could buy a motherboard to match, so I upgraded the server which opened up proper hardware transcoding.
I have since added 2 Intel NUCs to have a highly available control plane for my cluster.
This is where my server is at right now, and it’s way beyond sufficient for the media streaming, photo library, various game servers, a lot of self-hosted smart home stuff, and all sorts of other random bits and pieces I want to run.
My suggestion would be to start out by finding the cheapest possible option, and then learn what your needs are.
What do you want your server to do? What software do you want to run? What hardware do you want to connect to it? All of this will evolve as you start using your server more and more, and you will learn what you need to buy to achieve what you want to.
- Comment on European Citizens' Initiative to "Stop Destroying Videogames" is missing ridiculously low thresholds. 2 weeks ago:
The individual country thresholds does not matter anymore. 7 countries have reached the threshold, which is the important bit.
Now we just need 1 million signatures total, it doesn’t matter from which country.
- Comment on Social media sites should have 'reverse' Parental Controls; where adult children can block their boomer/senior parents' accounts from viewing conspiracy and radicalizing content. 5 weeks ago:
Solid password of what? The router admin panel? On the router that is physically in his home? He can just factory reset that router, and presto… Password is gone.
- Comment on Tesla odometer uses “predictive algorithms” to void warranty, lawsuit claims 1 month ago:
Forbes article about it: forbes.com/…/tesla-exaggerated-its-cars-driving-r…
- Comment on Yo, Duplo, what you doing on the 24th? 5 months ago:
I have both bought and been given some of these “knockoff” sets, and while the resulting build. The resulting build is pretty, but fragile. The tolerances on the bricks are bad, to the point that some required a lot of force to join, and others are so loose that they can barely carry the weight of the bricks on top. I have also consistently found at least 1 brick that wasn’t molded fully, and was therefore useless, with no spares. The colors are also usually quite uneven. The instructions are usually fairly easy to follow. But the build methods are bad. I often see bricks stacked directly on top of other bricks, with no interlocking, resulting in whole walls being able to easily fall over.
The knockoff are fine if you don’t have the money to spend on Lego, but you really also get what you pay for.
- Comment on Yo, Duplo, what you doing on the 24th? 5 months ago:
I have both bought and been given some of these “knockoff” sets, and while the resulting build. The resulting build is pretty, but fragile. The tolerances on the bricks are bad, to the point that some required a lot of force to join, and others are so loose that they can barely carry the weight of the bricks on top. I have also consistently found at least 1 brick that wasn’t molded fully, and was therefore useless, with no spares. The colors are also usually quite uneven. The instructions are usually fairly easy to follow. But the build methods are bad. I often see bricks stacked directly on top of other bricks, with no interlocking, resulting in whole walls being able to easily fall over.
The knockoff are fine if you don’t have the money to spend on Lego, but you really also get what you pay for.
- Comment on What should I bring to far-north Scandinavia? 6 months ago:
Mittens take away too much dexterity for many things. But a 3-finger glove is the perfect compromise: snowsportprofessionals.com/…/8272aca90cb09ec2c85e…
- Comment on D-Link refuses to patch a security flaw on over 60,000 NAS devices — the company instead recommends replacing legacy NAS with newer models 6 months ago:
It’s usually possible to replace the firmware of d-link routers with open alternatives, such as dd-wrt.
