• 6 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My brain reads those as ‘thee’, or however that old English should be written (thee, thou, thy…), so the image is that someone pretty pompous Englishman from 1700s with a powdered wig found fediverse.

    Plus I tested those on duck.ai just for fun and it has absolutely no trouble of reading the thorns, so it only makes reading harder for other humans, specially for us whose native language isn’t English.


  • I’ve been using refurbished business laptops, thinkpads spesifically, for at least a decade. Both for business and for personal use. They just work and at least in here you can get pretty good deals from companies which re-sell previously leased machines. For some I’ve upgraded RAM and/or storage drive, but that 300-400€ gets you something far better than a new Acer from grocery store aisle. And reputable vendors even offer some kind of warranty even on used machines.

    Other brands might work just fine too, but as I’ve had thinkpads since the brand was owned by IBM I’ve just stuck with them. T, W and X series are all pretty solid. And there’s a reason why you don’t see Acer or other consumer brands on refurbished market.


  • didn’t he break into a network closet and patch directly into their servers?

    No. He placed a computer in a unlocked network closet and used that to download a bunch of data from JSTOR (which he had acces to, and a lot of the data is public domain anyways) and kinda-sorta caused DDoS attack against the service. Prosecution then slapped him with a shitload of federal charges which (in my opinion) were largely at least massively exaggerated if not straight made up. Threat of 50 year jail sentence and million(s) in fines then pushed him to take his own life.

    Wikipedia has pretty detailed info about him and the whole case.


  • Meh. As long as it’s a local only field on /etc/passwd or whatever I don’t really care. Actually I’d be for it if browsers and other internet-thingies could send rough idea of users age to the services. Not actual age, but something like child/teen/adult -scale. That would make it super simple to reputable services to block underaged users and parents could set that to their kids accounts as they see fit.

    But obviously the surveillance tool “they” are building is something totally different where the age is actually verified via some online service. For that I’m strictly against and if that becomes mandatory on Debian or whatever distro I’ll start my own with blackjack and hookers if nothing else is available.





  • Immich itself is running on docker, so it’s the same than every other setup. For me it just makes more sense to run that on a separate VM than keeping all the docker containers in a same operating system due to backups, manageability, access control and so on, even if it costs a bit of memory to run a full operating system. Biggest consumers on the host process list are immich-api, postgres-processes and immich. Actual used memory is around 2,5GB for the whole system with ~5GB on buffers/cache.

    But I often import hundreds of raw photos at a time from DSLR and/or 4K video footage from my drone and processing those takes quite a lot of memory. With less memory and slower drives the whole thing crashed when importing bigger batches to out of memory erros, but I suppose it could run just fine with even less than 4GB of memory, if the usage pattern is just to upload photos from your cellphone in a relatively slow pace.


  • It’s a full VM, so OS and docker creates some overhead, but before I upgraded the server it ran on far less resources and specially big imports were painfully slow. Also that’s just the number from proxmox console, so there’s likely some cache included, but stats show that the VM pulls over 10G every now and then with shorter spikes over 20GB of consumed RAM.

    As I mentioned, it can run on way less, but it feels a lot more responsive when it has enough resources.


  • 16GB of ram is a bit low for the load you’re planning. That can work, but Nextcloud and Immich are pretty hungry for memory. My immich instance right now is using 7GB of RAM and nextcloud uses a bit over 4. I have the hardware to give them pretty much all the memory they want, so those are not absolute minimum amounts, but I wouldn’t try to run either with less than 6GB allocated memory on my load (few users, about a terabyte of data on both).

    With 16GB you can pretty much forget using ZFS, but that’s not a big loss. LVM works just fine and with thin provisioning you can use snapshots too just fine. Bigger SSD/NVME for drive cache would be good. And of course all-SSD setup would be nice, but that gets expensive pretty fast. Second ethernet port might be nice to have, depends on how you’re planning to build your setup. Otherwise that hardware looks pretty good, altough I’d search for something second hand. CPU is most likely a bit overkill for what you need, I have Xeon E5-2620 v3 @ 2.40GHz and it’s running on around 10% load most of the time.


  • You’re of course correct on that, but Mullvad the company gave (somewhat) clear news release that their company is against far right (or left or any ‘far’ direction) politics. I’m not a customer and I couldn’t care less about Mullvad, but I think it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that company isn’t the same than one of it’s founders.

    Of course if that is a breaking point to you, feel free to vote with your wallet and I can very much understand the decision, but there’s very few fully reputable companies around so I can also understand if that’s not a hill to die on.


  • Don’t send spam, behave nicely, have proper configuration on postfix and dovecot, set up SPF and preferably DKIM, keep your domains reputation clean and so on. You’ll likely still end up on some lists, so you need to manually dig them trough and ask nicely for removal.

    Self hosting email has a pretty bad reputation and many will strongly advice against it, but in reality it’s really not that bad. But email as a whole is more complex beast to manage than simple website or running Jellyfin for your family and friends. You need to understand how the mail routing side of things work (SMTP itself, authentication for it encryption included and so on) and also you need to understand how DNS works and how various entries are related to mail transport. Then you’ll likely want at least some kind of spam filtering and so on. And with email you’ll need to have proper backup scenario too so that you don’t lose the likely pretty important data. All of that is perfectly doable and it’s not as difficult as many claim it to be, but there’s a bunch of stuff you need to understand and implement all of them correctly.



  • Fines are just the cost of doing business.

    In theory fines in EU don’t have a ceiling. 10% fine of companys turnover with OpenAI (or any other company running on borrowed money) would be a pretty steep cost of doing business and I don’t think all (if any) of AI-hype entities could actually swallow that.

    Obviously that’s just in theory, so far the fines have been a slight slap on the wrist, but mechanisms are in place to give actually meaningful fines for unethical practices. No one will go to jail tho, as EU doesn’t really have the power to jail US citizens.




  • It’s interesting piece of technology, but it’s not ‘radical’. The company behind the storage has done their homework and they seem to be well engineered, but the “technology” itself is pretty much as old as bonfires, people have used hot rocks to heat up tents for ‘a while’.

    But sand has pretty good thermal properties and size of these new iterations of old tech makes them pretty decent solution for energy storage with renewables. I’ve been following various ‘sand battery’ products for our own house, but the main problem with all of them tends to be the size required. In practise for our own house we’d need a sand battery roughly the size of 6m storage container (with heat pumps and all the other hardware) and that’d be so expensive that the investment wouldn’t pay itself back in my lifetime.


  • As others have said, this is something software can’t do, so there’s no linux tools for it. There is charge profiles which may help in the long run, similar than what your smartphone likely has. But that absolutely requires that your charger outputs the voltage and current your laptop requires.

    If the physical connector ‘kind of fits’ I personally wouldn’t use it, even if the voltage was correct as it’ll likely damage the connector on the motherboard and then you’re looking for a much more complex repair. Laptop power bricks are pretty cheap.