Having lived without a dishwasher for many years, I’m never complaining about loading/unloading the dishwasher. From starting the kettle to finishing a pour over is more than enough time to unload.

And never again having to schlep clothes to the laundromat because we have laundry in our home? Likewise, I’m not going to complain. The only reason laundry takes real effort is when we opt to use the clothesline instead of the dryer.

Not everyone has a dishwasher, washing machine, and clothes dryer, so I absolutely recognize that I’m very fortunate here. And the crazy thing is, these devices aren’t even particularly expensive, especially since they can be had used — I think a big reason folks don’t have them is the installation+room required. Which probably says something about landlords and the general cost per area of housing.

When the son of the deposed King of Nigeria emails you directly asking for help, you help. His father ran the freaking country, okay?

I used Photoprism years ago, so my knowledge is probably pretty outdated.

My experience of Photoprism was that mobile was not tightly integrated. At the time I used Syncthing to sync photos — it worked ok for me, but I wasn’t going to set it up on my partner’s phone, for example.

Immich Just Works on both mobile and desktop. Multi user is great, sharing is great, and the local ML and face detection work remarkably well.

Whatever works for you is the best of course! Immich fits the bill for me, and it was very much worth it for me to “buy” it.

That’s how I start my refried beans. After pressure cooker add oil (lots…), salt, and a little vinegar. Sauteed onions, cumin, chili powder also good.

I think it’s way better than any vegetarian refried beans that you get in a can. Probably because they have more salt and oil…

Flagship Nvidia is around $10k. Easy to spend at least another $5k on the rest of the computer+setup (monitors, peripherasls…).

Alt text from memory: #4: Boston

Edit: it’s actually Prank #11: Boston. I was close.

xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.

I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.

IIRC sshfs will work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.

Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.

The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe sed is slightly different, and the flags for ls must be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).

Regarding DNS servers, what router do you have? Some routers have simple enough DNS capabilities — I have a MikroTik, and have it set up with DNS entries for internal services (including wildcard). Publicly accessible services just use my registrar’s DNS (namecheap — no complaints).

Oracle Free tier, amd64. Only use it because it’s free—limited bandwidth, but given I have slow upload at home it’s never really been a bottleneck. Hate to admit it given it’s Oracle, but I’ve been completely happy with it.

If I switch to a paid VPS I will probably go with racknerd (suggestions welcome though if you have thoughts).

Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…

What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.

Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.

I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.

Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)

https://health.osu.edu/health/dental-health/metallic-taste-workout

In an otherwise healthy person with no other symptoms, there is no significant medical concern.

There’s an interesting discussion in the comments about the architecture: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/10/20/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-board-offers-2x-10gbe-sfp-cages-6x-10gbe-2-5gbe-gbe-ports-wifi-7-support/

Sounds like there are bottlenecks, and you can’t run all ports at line speed. User TLS says:

Is it just me, or is the MaxLinear MxL86252C switch connected to one of the 10 Gbps PHYs? The MT7988 only has a single 2.5 Gbps MAC and it’s shared with the second 10 Gbps MAC. It seems like they’re routing a 10 Gbps signal to the MxL86252C, which has two 10 Gbps SerDes interfaces, making the second set of 10 Gbps connected via the switch. This suggests that if the 10 Gbps port is running at full speed, you won’t be able to use the 2.5 Gbps ports.

You’re right, for new drives it looks like a little more with this 20GB retailing for $230, or $11.50/TB.

For refurbished, I recently got a factory renewed 12TB Seagate for $112 ($9.33/TB), but that price is now up to $199 for the same drive (!).

Official numbers here https://www.debian.org/mirror/size

About 4.4TB, but that’s all architectures and (I believe?) all distributions (stable, testing…).

If you only want source+all+amd64+arm64, and only want stable, it will be smaller of course.

Not nothing, but at $10/TB or so, it’s not much.

And if you’re following 3-2-1, I’m pretty sure the “1” is already handled for you :)

On low end CPUs you can max out the CPU before maxing out network—if you want to get fancy, you can use rsync over an unencrypted remote shell like rsh, but I would only do this if the computers were directly connected to each other by one Ethernet cable.

If you’re running it via docker compose it’s trivial to upgrade, and there are no breaking changes. Pull, down, up, you’re done.

Frigate is pretty good, too. I’ve only been running it for a few months but I’m very happy with it.

Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.

I rsync as well, but use snapshotting on the remote drives. So, a bad rsync would suck but shouldn’t really result in data loss. Ransomware on my local+remote server would of course be very bad…

I do something similar — I have a raspberry pi and a HD, with daily rsync and snapshots (monthly retained indefinitely, weekly retained for a month, daily retained for a week). It’s at family’s house, connected to my home via WireGuard via a VPS. Tailscale (or anything really) would also work here.

It’s a great setup! Just have some watchdog reboot if it can’t talk to home (a simple cronjob with ping -c1 home.lan || reboot or similar).

Even our “slow” 35Mbps upload speed is way more than enough for incremental rsyncs of my Immich library. The initial sync was done in person, though.