I’m happy with 90 day certs for homelab stuff: I’m not worried about anyone MITMing my network. I figure the short lived certs are more important for people who provide services with a significant external user-base, or who process sensitive transactions.

I have my certbot set to check every 12 hours and renew at 60 days. Renewing every 3 days would be 20x more load on Let’s Encrypt systems, and that feels like abuse of a free service for my use case.

I really wonder who these retailers are. Like, my grocer typically has 2 human and 12 self checkout open, and it’s no question which of those is going to be faster for someone pushing less than a full cart. They don’t even have the floor space to build twelve more full service checkouts. Reminds me of the bad old days when I’d go to the store and they’d have every human checkout line open, every one of them with 5+ people in line, and it’d take 30 minutes just to check out. If you’re a retailer that only processes a couple dozen patrons an hour, then yeah, I can see where a few self-checks wouldn’t be any benefit.

Feels like we’ve reached the enshittification phase of self-checks: big stores are now so beholden to the technology that the vendors can jack up their prices to where self checks cost the store more than a full-service checkout, but they can’t go back because there’s no staff and no space.

Tandoor definitely has a self-hosted path, including SSO integrations. It has a fair API that I’ve used to link it to nutrition data at USDA and my grocery store for prices. I suspect I could use the API to transfer a shopping list to the grocery store’s ordering system, but I don’t like the pickup or delivery systems. I’ve been pretty happy with tandoor’s import-from-web results, although the ingredient amounts often need some editing.

Also love the pi-0-2w, but I’ve started to use ESP32 for those edge sensors. You can get those for like $1-2 each on aliexpress, where real world prices on Pi zero is upwards of $20 now. Truly embedded systems like arduino were always intimidating to me, but esphome reduces ‘programming’ to a YAML for any of the many supported devices. The Pis that are working now aren’t likely to change any time soon, but I bought a handful of ESP32s for $10, and I’ll probably buy another handful before I buy another zero. Maybe convert a zero to ESP32 if I really need a whole OS for something new.

I feel like (mostly because of my own path) Pi is a great platform to get started with self hosting because of projects like pihole, homeassistant, and osmc. Projects where someone has put together simple, all-in-one solutions where you can just download an image and go. That same approach, and the Pi’s hardware limitations, make it harder to co-host multiple services, while the price point of Pi’s, at least pre-2023, made it reasonable just to run a handful of them. Only once you start wanting larger or more compute intensive stacks does the pressure to use containers/VMs on ‘real’ hardware appear. If you’ve already got pihole and ha running on Pis, there’s no pressure to move them to the big server.

If it’s the path I followed, it must be the path everyone follows :)

Calibre-web and calibre can share a library directory. You can edit the .kobo/kobo/Kobo ereader.conf file to wirelessly sync to calibre-web instead of kobo.com (while still using kobo.com to buy new ebooks)

nginx, “ing - inks” I’m terrible at license plate puns, too.

The 1U system I had, the heatsinks have been fanless and not the extruded aluminum block one usually thinks of, but an assembled stack of much thinner, more rigid fins. It relied on airflow from fans mounted in the middle of the case, between the mobo and disks, shrouded to focus that airflow. I want to say 2x40mm fans per processor.

You should expect a 1U system to run hotter than a desktop, and definitely hotter than cooler advertisers want. CPUs are designed to operate up to 100°C or so, and the constraints that lead people to use 1U form factors generally include replacing those systems regularly, basically because of burnout.

People pay fake tickets because it’s too expensive to fight them.

Any true death cultist will tell you: all the other death cults are fucking lunatics.

There’s https://www.mythtv.org/ It’s heavier-weight than kodi, but includes its own OTA/cable setup for actual TV. Does not integrate as well with streaming services as kodi, but it seems like a lot of my kodi plugins have stopped working in the last couple years. Mythtv used to be bundled in a “Mythbuntu” distribution, but they seem to have collapsed.

Kodi frontend with a mythtv backend has been a pretty workable solution for me, but it won’t stream from Prime, Apple, Netflix, Disney, etc

I’ve got no cell reception inside, thanks to aluminum siding, but it’s going to be annoying as fuck if I have to open up my next TV and figure out which circuit board traces are antennae or which chips are wireless.

Not nextcloud, but I have several containers set up to use ‘third party’ database - ie, not running inside the container or compose group, sometimes on a second machine. It definitely complicates the setup. I haven’t noticed any performance issues, but my services are low load.

I would think that the db running on the Pi with storage on the Pi could be faster than the db running on the laptop with storage on the Pi. The Pi db would presumably have higher bandwidth to the Pi storage and only have to transfer the selected data over network, where the laptop db has to do all the db sorting, filter, and processing over the network, although I suppose the db would try to keep all the data in RAM. I know there’s limitations to Pi’s internal bus bandwidth, Maybe you can compare the hdparm performance of the NAS RAID vs the NFS mount.

My homelab has been running for 20 years, during which I’ve gone through something like a dozen desktop and laptop PCs. Copying a terabyte of media to each of those computers seems like a terrible waste. My TVs, either through Raspberry Pi or their own software, can also play all of that media.

The homelab also runs a few 24/7 services that do stuff overnight (most notably sensor data logging), pihole, routing, media management. It’s lower power than the desktop/gaminng computer, and it’s not practical to have those 24/7 services on a laptop that leaves the house periodically.

So, homelab to minimize the amount of storage replication, minimize power consumption, and provide always-on processing.

Of course, having that platform, it’s also an opportunity to play. Implement services that totally wouldn’t be practical in and of themselves, but setup makes a fun diversion for an afternoon or a weekend. Remote access for the rare occasion when I’m traveling. Monitoring the otherwise invisible, headless computers. (like NUT to keep track of 3 different UPSes)

In my brother’s neighborhood, more than half the houses have gas fueled porch lights. They burn 24/7, because no one wants to remember to turn the gas on/off with the sun or to light them every night. These are homes built in the last 40 years: the gas lights were a ‘quaint’ fad.

None of them had a 14-year propaganda campaign to convince Americans that they’re “good at business.”

In the spirit of calling cops pigs, I’m thinking we should start calling DOJ lawyers joey: little kangaroos, with their little kangaroo courts.

50 TB isn’t even that much space, certainly not for a broadcaster. No reason not to have a local copy. 50 PB, I could see a small PBS affiliate not having the resources to manage locally, but you can put 50 TB in consumer-grade NAS.

Somewhere around 35% of the people who voted in 2024 were GenX. GenX are taking over corporate leadership, where mandatory retirement is forcing Boomers out. Millenials may still be too young to vote in large enough numbers to dominate 2028. If you insist on seeing reality as generational warfare, Gen X is definitely ascendant, and definitely the culpable in Trump’s re-elected.

Near as I remember, “we need every seat to gain/maintain a majority and resist MAGA” has been the sole argument of the DNC in every race since 2016.