BromSwolligans

Tired. Tired, tired.

A little minor struggle with Immich. It happens sometimes that I cannot upload MOV files. Not all, just some. I’ve tended to circumvent its making big refusals by switching between my reverse proxied address and my local IP address for it but that didn’t work today, and since these are videos of my baby, I’m a little frustrated. I don’t really have the time to dig into that though.

I wonder whether it’s possible to split tunnel traffic bound for the app from web traffic so I can serve it to my family members without exposing it to the web. Right now I don’t trust its security—the authors even state you really shouldn’t—so I have it behind a Cloudflare Zero Trust MFA prompt. But I get comments sometimes from family that it feels like a hoop to jump through since the longest CF will let them stay authorized is 30 days. Not a real ‘today’ thing, but just a general thing. It’s the app I use the most besides Jellyfin, both to free myself from Microsoft, Google and Apple’s monthly subscriptions, but also, to share privately my baby photos with the family so I can protect the kid’s privacy and all that. I wish it was smoother for my end users but I’ve done what I can for now.

I tried migrating to new hardware recently because I wanted to virtualize most everything. I thought there was sense in being able to get snapshots in proxmox for rollback and ease of backup purposes. It ended up that only about half my servers made it over, and Immich and Jellyfin didn’t make the cut because they need a Quadro T400 that lives in the original machine. Chatbot led me to think passing that GPU through virtualization was going to be a major complicating factor.

I’ve got a backup NAS off-site at my parent’s house ~20 miles away but it has been offline since I changed ISPs because my silly ass hard-coded my public IP address into WireGuard’s config (it auto-launches WG on boot) rather than a DNS address that gets dynamic DNS updating and resolves to whatever my home IP is. I should get to make it out to fix that on Thursday, finally. I went to all this trouble to buy and set up a backup NAS and it has been totally without backups for probably two months now.

Back to the subject of Cloudflare, I know they have a laundry list of security things I need to look at and I want to take those things seriously. With the new baby, and with how demoralized I have felt from work, and with of course all the normal obligations of life, I haven’t ever had the time or felt like dealing with it, but I have a degree in cybersecurity and I want to take my home network / home lab security seriously. For protecting myself of course, but also because I think it’ll be a big growing opportunity technically; maybe some stuff I learn can end up on the résumé. I desperately need to get out of my current role and anything that would help the résumé would be good. But there never seems to be time. Or if there is time there is no will.

I had a Cisco 2960x in my basement that I never did much with because I was suspicious it was drawing a lot of power (likely coincidence but it seemed like the electric bill went up every month I tried plugging it in), and it didn’t seem to have enough memory to run without constantly causing me issues. I wanted to learn Cisco switches with it since I don’t get enough hands-on time at work but it just didn’t seem to work out. I was going to sell it on Facebook but never made time to do that either, so today I just put it back in the rack to have one less thing on the floor. Ironically, now we’ve upgraded to 3Gbps Internet and none of my home network stuff supports it. If I’d thought about that I would have likely let the ISP install their own mesh APs but I had put so much money and time into my own setup, I thought, surely I don’t need them putting their hardware in my home. Well, here we are, and neither my little baby switch, nor my Cisco switch, nor even my OPNsense router support 3Gbps and there’s no money to upgrade any of it 🥲

That’s about all I can think of for today. Check in next Sunday, and I bet the update would be precisely the same :p

Thanks for doing that. I was typing the original comment from my phone, in a hurry.

I know this is not one size fits all, but I switched to a Seiko watch like a year ago and I’ve been so much happier. I can weigh myself on my scale, take my blood pressure with a $40 Braun device from the pharmacy, and everything else I can intuit: I know for a fact when I’m not walking enough, when I feel bloated and over-salted, when I haven’t slept long enough, when I get winded going up stairs, etc.

Again I’m not saying health stats aren’t or shouldn’t be important for you, but I do think the Web 2.0 / smart-everything era got us all so hooked on the constant feed of data points from all aspects of our lives that we came to feel things were required that really aren’t.

If you’re diabetic, or have a heart condition, or the in and only way you will ever exercise is if you can gamify it or whatever, then of course, try to find a health tracking solution that minimizes the sale of your data to brokers or whatever (if that is even possible). But for many average people who’ve just gotten used to health tracking, I gotta say, take a walk on the wild side and try going without.

I can’t put a price or a good enough description on how much happier I am to have one less thing sending me notifications and pulling my poor, abused attention all throughout the day…one less entire category of stats to keep up with, micro-manage, get anxious over. I’ve still got my Apple Watch if I ever absolutely need it but so far I haven’t needed it at all. I do not miss health data.

Google the FUTO Guide to a Self Managed Life. Louis Rossman far overstates how simple it is (“if it was too complicated for my grandma I rewrote it until it was something she could handle” is giving himself too much credit) but it is still a super super comprehensive guide anyone should be able to follow for getting an exceptional amount of home infrastructure self hosted. It includes owning and managing your own router, setting up a VPN to get your services away from home, setting up replacements for all the cloud services 99% of us rely on, and goes as far as self hosting security cameras and PBX phone systems and stuff. If you get that far into the guide, even if you don’t wanna run those things, you’ll have learned enough to host anything else you want.