I didn’t know raspberry supports that. Searching for ‘atv remote’ just brings up androind apps, so maybe I misunderstood. Neat thing, but the hardware I have doesn’t support it and seems like usb-cec adapters are more expensive than usb-hid remotes.

I’d rather have a physical remote which acts as a keyboard so it’ll support waking the system up from suspend. Plus I prefer a dedicated device for that instead of a phone as I’m not a only user for the thing. There’s plenty of those around, only problem is to find one that works reliably and local stores don’t seem to have a lot of options so I might need to dig one up on ebay even if it’s a bit of a PITA to order from China to EU today with customs.

I installed Jellyfin on my server and threw kodi on a minipc I dug out of dumpster pile at work. Works pretty well, but my server needs more RAM and the minipc needs either a wireless keyboard or a USB-HID remote controller to finalize the setup. Also ran some wiring in the house and added two network sockets to a room where the whole kodi-tv-gamingpc-whatever-pile is going to live.

On the server RAM I found some on ebay, but if anyone is interested on 64G DDR4 ECC DIMMs I have a few. I thought they were supported on my server motherboard when I took them out from a old server at work but it supports only up to 32G ECC dimms.

It’s kinda-sorta social problem, but originally not the way you intend. It used to be possible to self host XMPP and chat with people regardless of the platform since both Google and Facebook (it wasn’t Meta at the time) adopted the protocol. But then they changed their policy and created the walled gardens they have now and thus it’s a social and/or political problem.

They fully followed the playbook of Embrace-Extend-Extinguish which [email protected] mentioned few messages up the thread and pretty much devastated XMPP out of existence. Sure, there’s still handful of users and project itself isn’t dead, but before their policy change I saw quite a lot of servers around which are now either dead or forgotten.

On a previous comment I didn’t mean to describe that as a technological problem but a problem related to big corporations embracing FOSS projects/protocols and killing them by introducing their own walled garden variant of it.

It’s not really a same thing. I can’t reach my mother or neighbor over fediverse since they don’t know nor care what that is. But they use whatsapp, facebook and other stuff which are in their own walled gardens and there’s no option to communicate to those gardens with anything I self host.

And trying to convince everyone to switch is not a battle I’m actively fighting for multiple reasons. Of course I mention signal, fediverse and everything to anyone who’s willing to listen, but those encounters are pretty rare.

See Jabber/XMPP for an example.

There was a (short) time when I could chat with my friends on google hangouts (or whatever that was called back then) and facebook messaging via my own xmpp server. It was pretty cool and somehow felt like that’s the way things should be. Like email today (even if every big player is trying to destroy that too).

Maybe in some version of the future we’ll get that back.

How you imagine things send messages to reset your passwords, sending notifications and whatever is currently managed via email than some piece of code creating and sending messages, managing possible errors with them and potentially also monitoring/logging the message traffic for statistics or debugging?

User adoption matters if you want your thing to be actually useful for the actual users. And supporting any messaging system requires effort, so it makes sense to spend limited resources on a thing which has the biggest userspace. If you want to run matrix server which has you and your dog using it, go ahead, but don’t be surprised if you want to contact your neighbor and he’ll look like you have two heads when you start to explain how to reach you.

It’s a crapload more work to support XMPP/Matrix/whatever messaging on any platform than…SMTP

It’s absolutely not.

And you know this since you’ve written code to manage both on different environments, right?

Also, whatsapp supports all kinds of “bots” and it has absolutely massive userspace compared to pretty much any other instant message application. It doesn’t matter if you create the perfect protocol and platform for this kind of thing if there’s 7 people globally using it.

It’s a whole lot less work than configuring email.

It’s a crapload more work to support XMPP/Matrix/whatever messaging on any platform than just using a robust, reliable, resilient, widely supported good old SMTP. For you it might be easier to input your account (which at least on XMPP resemble quite a bit of email address) but for the developer it’s totally different thing. Also practically everyone accessing a website has an email address and if they’d decide to support some mesaging platform it’d make more sense to use whatsapp than XMPP since it’s vastly more popular.

Self hosting is not just one thing. You are system adminstrator, network engineer, security specialist, service architect and many other things, specially if you expose anything to anyone outside your very private network. And to get anything even running on that complex mess requires some knowledge on a lot of things. Making them run securely with proper backups requires even more knowledge on things.

Sure, you can just throw some docker images on your old desktop and be happy, even forward ports from the public internet to your things if you like. But that exposes your stuff to quite a lot of dangers and if you just click buttons without any understanding you’ll soon be a part of a botnet or lose your data or lose money if someone decides to mess around with your home automation or something else.

I get what you’re saying, not all of us are very polite and answers can be pretty harsh, but more often than not the generic idea behind those answers is not trying to be an asshole or gatekeep anything. It’s just that there’s a skillset you need to build things safely and if it’s clear from the start that someone looking for answers is way over their head it’s better for everyone to get them take a step back and learn instead of trying to create a meaningful answer since there’s too many variables or it’d just take immense effort to write down comprehensive guide on what to do, why and how for everything from the ground up.

I know for a fact that in my area there’s a bunch of surveillance cameras, home automation stuff and even some farm equipment directly open to the public network just because someone just plugged things in without any idea on the whole picture. Sometimes the correct answer is ‘stop shooting yourself on the foot and learn the basics first, then come back’.

Just for the sake of conversation, I recently did some crude math on this. I have few friends around who are well capable of running a backup server for me (hardware maintenance and stuff is always needed anyways) and at first it seemed like a good plan. Just get a 4TB SSD/NVME and throw that on a Raspberry Pi (or something small to keep electricity consumption low and setup silent), set up encryption, connect that to my network with wireguard or some other VPN and let it do it’s thing.

But I’d need to purchase everything as setting up a remote location with old hardware is just asking for trouble. The drive alone is 300€ (give or take) and the rest is easily another 100€. Currently my storagebox costs ~10€/month for 5TB. Even if I scored a fantastic black week offer and got everything for -50% discount that hardware with multiple single point of failures would cost nearly 2 years worth of cloud backups. And I’d still owe at least few beers to the friend for the trouble.

Your mileage may obviously vary, there’s a million different scenarios, but for me with my current setup it just makes sense to pick couple cloud providers and let them store my bits instead of getting more hardware to maintain and upgrade.

With backups two is one and one is none, so you are very much in a right track. Personally I have my stuff running on proxmox VMs with a proxmox backup server (VM as well) storing backups to Hetzner Storagebox. I’m planning to set up a another host in garage to have “local” backups too, as mine is detached as well the risk of both going up in flames in event of fire is pretty low. However, a voltage spike due to lightning on the grid or something else might blow up both hosts so that’s a threat model to be aware of. Also if your connection to garage is over copper it can cause other problems, fibre or wireless is highly recommended.

With backups it’s largely about the bandwidth available. I personally have enough so uploading to cloud is not an issue, but backing up a terabyte of data over 10Mbps connection might not work out at all.

For more info search for 3-2-1 strategy, that should give you plenty of ideas what you need to think about and what are industry best practises about making sure backups are in order.

But it’s not ‘gaming’, it’s ‘learning’. And for all of those there’s plenty of walktroughs around if you get stuck. I’m currently playing the newest Monkey island and it has the spirit of old titles, but it has a ‘hint book’ where you can just practically skip puzzles you can’t figure answer for. That one relies heavily on the old games at the story tho, so it may not be the best one to start with.

But yeah, that might be a concern. You can try a lot of those out at Internet Archive before setting up a dosbox, so it’s atleast cheap to try and see how it goes.

Get old LucasArts SCUMM games for them. Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle and so on. With those you need to understand English for both understanding the story and to actually progress the game.

Scratch is good, but if you want something with a bit of syntax search for Basic256 (or any other basic interpreter). There’s also games like Autonauts which have basic programming in them (altough Autonauts gets pretty complex on higher levels).

If I browse a piece of software from play store and click ‘install’ it’s “installing” and if I do the very same with F-droid it’s suddenly “sideloading”. Fundamentally every language is just made up, but on this occasion the newly coined term is used to obfuscate things and attempting to paint things something they are not.

I can claim all day that grass is blue and sky is green, but no one will take me seriously. Same thing should happen with ‘sideloading’ vs 'installing. Or if you really insist, sideloading might be something like injecting code to a system in a way which is not normally possible, like how some rootkits for devices work. But ‘sideloading’ is very different from ‘installing’ and installing anything on a general purpose computer doesn’t include any particular tool (like play store). I can install things on my workstation with ‘apt-get install’ or from source via ‘make install’, but the end result is still that a piece of software was installed.

I always killed processes with ps -ef | grep <process-name>

From top man-page global commands:

• k :Kill-a-task

       You will be prompted for a PID and then the signal to send.
  

Give users that choice

That’s the one thing they want to get rid of. Security and other bullshit is just a theater around it to get validation for even bigger walls for their garden.

Whole thing is well worth a read, but just from the title alone I was ready to write a long rant about the term ‘sideloading’. Gladly that’s covered on the text too:

It bears reminding that “sideload” is a made-up term. Putting software on your computer is simply called “installing”, regardless of whether that computer is in your pocket or on your desk.

Where in the FUCK in Outlook currently is an option to use preformatted text? It’s not a style I could pick nor I could find an option to make my own. I send copy-paste from terminal every now and then and if it’s formatted like normal text it’s nearly useless. It used to be a text style I could pick, but this new-new-new-classic-new outlook doesn’t have it anymore.