Sure, but it’s still really interesting from a historic point of view.
Sure, but it’s still really interesting from a historic point of view.
Not OP, but there is value in having competition. DDG is just a bing front-end. The big search engines have a major problem with the quality of results going down, as the internet is SEOd to death. The companies behind these engines don’t seem to be very eager to fix it, they are just hoping to replace them with AI. We’ve also seen how these engines have been turned into ad platforms, which changes the incentives… Instead of ranking quality, they are ranking who pays more.
Taking a different approach to ranking results that isn’t ad driven, that can punish AI generated content and low quantity results would bring a huge value.
If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge and want a distro with longer support, CentOS Stream isn’t bad. Sure, there was some controversy surrounding it, when Red Hat killed the old CentOS. But ignoring that, the distro itself is pretty good and stable.
Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don’t.
Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It’s up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).
PhotoRec and TestDisk are probably the best, but they don’t recover file structure.
Fuck up #1: no backups
Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.
Fuck up #3: no backups.
You can find a password checking utility on haveibeenpwned.com (the tool doesn’t send your password to the server, but only the first 5 characters of the hashed password, which is very safe). There are CLI tools on GitHub you can use to bulk test passwords. They also provide a downloadable list of hashes.
Alternatively, check if your password manager has a built-in tool for checking for passwords in known databases.
Android is not privacy respecting by design. Your best option is to use a normal PC running Linux. However that has its own drawbacks, like lack of HDR support, no Dolby Vision or TrueHD, incompatibility with streaming services DRM.
And the bad part is that it is being forced upon us. You can’t even find non-smart TVs to buy anymore.
I wouldn’t be surprised if appliances come with their own data plan, because the data they collect is valuable.
I wouldn’t recommend Optiplexes… HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts use proprietary parts making them a pain in the rear to work with. I recommend getting a PC made with standard parts.
Personally I prefer older PCs in standard formfactors. I avoid HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts because they use proprietary power supplies and motherboards, making them difficult to upgrade. Laptops aren’t really upgradable, they don’t have enough SATA ports, and USB isn’t reliable enough for storage. Raspberry Pies, while power efficient, are too underpowered. Old server hardware is also an option, but they are generally too noisy.
Containers are very useful because they isolate the application from the rest of your server.
This solves a lot of problems: no dependency conflicts with your operating system, you can upgrade/downgrade any time you want, no state gets stored on your main system which makes resetting the application when it misbehaves as easy as deleting and recreating the container.
Before containers, changing my host OS (e.g. because ZFS wasn’t properly supported on the distro I was using) meant reinstalling and configuring a lot of shit, which could take days. With docker, I can migrate in 1-2 hours… Just install docker on the new OS, copy over the files, docker compose up a few times and done. The only things left to setup are samba, ssh and a few cron jobs.
My experience wasn’t as bad, but after the third time the database got corrupted during an upgrade I stopped using it.
DDG is just a front-end for Bing. There are very few search engines that actually do their own indexing.
It’s not just Google. The Internet has been getting worse over the last years. People don’t make sites any more. Blogs have moved to closed and centralized social media platforms. Forums are rarely used, most communities moved to platforms like reddit and Discord.
Most of these platforms make finding content very difficult. You won’t find articles posted on Facebook, Twitter threads and Discord discussions in search engines. You have to create an account on their platform, then use their shitty search (or be subscribed to the right people) to see it.
So let me get this straight. You buy Phillips Hue devices because they work offline. Then they change how the devices you bought function making them only work online forcing you to create an account and allow them to collect data.
This should not be legal. This is a breach of contract, they modified the contract after you already signed it (by buying the device). If they want to do this, they should offer full refunds to anyone that wants to exit the contract, or only apply the changed to new devices.
In terms of performance and flexibility, building your own is better. Depends on what you want out of it.
If all you want is an easy to setup NAS with no bells and whistles, get a synology. If you want to build a server that also has a NAS, if you want to be in control of the software, build your own.
You don’t even need server hardware. I used an older desktop computer with an HBA card. It’s also less noisy and much smaller.
Self hosting basically means you are running the server application yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s at home, on a cloud service or anywhere else.
I wouldn’t recommend hosting a social network like lemmy, because you would be legally responsible for all the content served from your servers. That means a lot of moderation work. Also, these types of applications are very demanding in terms of data storage, you end up with an ever growing dataset of posts, pictures etc.
But self hosting is very interesting and empowering. There are a lot of applications you can self host, from media servers (Plex, Jellyfin), personal cloud (like Google Drive) with NextCloud, blocking ads with pihole, sync servers for various apps like Obsidian, password manager BitWarden etc. You can even make your own website by coding it, or using a CMS platform like WordPress.
Check the Awesome Self-hosted list on GitHub, has a ton of great stuff.
And in terms of hardware, any old computer or laptop can be used, just install your favorite server OS (Linux, FreeBSD/OpenBSD, even Windows Server). You can play with virtualization too if you have enough horsepower and memory with ESXI or Proxmox, so you can run multiple severs at once on the same computer.
If you only need nextcloud on your local network, a quick and dirty way of assigning hostnames to machines is the hosts file. Obviously, this has to be done on every computer from which you wish to access nextcloud. Also, nonrooted mobile OSs don’t let you edit the hosts file.
Alternatively, you can set up a local DNS server. Pihole also has that capability (I personally had mixed results with Pihole, not sure if I did something wrong). Some routers may have that too.
If you need it public on the internet, yes, you need a domain name. Some providers offer free domains (but it will be a subdomain of the provider). Something to keep in mind is that your IP is probably dynamic. When you connect to the Internet, the ISP assigns you a random IP address from their pool of IPs. To keep the domain up to date, you will need to setup a dynamic DNS solution. This is a simple script/program that periodically checks your IP, and if it changes, updates that domain automatically.
One of those tiny low power PCs with OpenSense is a good alternative, but a bit more work. The only downside is that you need a separate switch and wifi access point.