I’ve been self-hosting for years, but with a recent move comes a recent opportunity to do my network a bit differently. I’m now running a capable OpenWRT router, and support for AdGuard Home is practically built into OpenWRT. I just needed to configure it right and set it up, but the documentation was comprehensive enough.

For years I had kept a Debian VM for Pi-Hole running. I kept it ultra lean with a cloud kernel and 3 gb of disk space and 160MB of RAM, just so it could control its own network stack. And I’d set devices to manually use its IP address to be covered. AGH seems to be about the same exact thing as Pi-Hole. With my new setup the entire network is covered automatically without having to configure any device. And yes, I know I could’ve done the same before by forwarding the DNS lookups to the Pi-Hole, but I was always afraid it would cause a problem for me and I’d need an easy way to back out of the adblocking. Subjectively, over about 6 years, I only had a couple worthless websites that blocked me out.

I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I’m trying to also to intercept hardcoded DNS lookups, but soon… It’s not urgent for me because I don’t have sinister devices that do that.

It even has RSS! Hell yeah let’s go

Wow how have I not seen these weekly roundups before? Cool little news digest

Absolutely correct. I used to maintain vigorous whole disk backups, and made sure my MacBook also had regular Time Machine backups and that kind of thing.

Then I realized there are actually tiers of important data. The most important stuff would be on the order of megabytes (tax documents, my lease, historical records of that stuff, and config files that I’ve built up over time).

Then I have my vacation photos and videos. Family photos. A few gigabytes. That’s not that much in the grand scheme and it’s still easy to back these up to a cloud service for minimal to no cost.

The rest of the data on my computer is easily recoverable or can be reconstructed with minimal effort. The OS install. The games. Media from online. I would not bother backing up this stuff.

Once this stuff is in perspective it’s very easy to devise a backup solution that fits your needs at an appropriate price. Not everyone has usage like mine and maybe their important data is much larger than mine is, but the point is we should think about which of the data is actually important, and not blindly duplicate pointless data.

A virtual machine on my LAN that runs Fedora Server

If in the future you think you might bring family/relations onboard to the password manager, it may be worthwhile to pay for a BitWarden family plan. BitWarden is really low-cost and they publish their stuff as FOSS (and therefore are worth supporting), but crucially you don’t want to be the point of technical support for when something doesn’t work for someone else. Self-hosting a password manager is an easier thing to do if you’re only doing it for yourself.

That said, I use a self-hosted Vaultwarden server as backup (i.e. I manually bring the server online and sync to my phone now and again), and my primary password manager is through Keepassxc, which is a completely separate and offline password manager program.

Edit: Forgot to mention, you can always start with free BitWarden and then export your data and delete your account if you decide to self-host.

You might notice that your Windows installation is like 30 gigabytes and there is a huge folder somewhere in the system path called WinSXS. Microsoft bends over backwards to provide you with basically all the versions of all the shared libs ever, resulting in a system that can run programs compiled from decades ago just fine.

In Linux-land usually we just recompile all of the software from source. Sometimes it breaks because Glibc changed something. Or sometimes it breaks because (extremely rare) the kernel broke something. Linus considers breaking the userspace API one of the biggest no-nos in kernel development.

Even so, depending on what you’re doing you can have a really old binary run on your Linux computer if the conditions are right. Windows just makes that surface area of “conditions being right” much larger.

As for your phone, all the apps that get built and run for it must target some kind of specific API version (the amount of stuff you’re allowed to do is much more constrained). Android and iOS both basically provide compatibility for that stuff in a similar way that Windows does, but the story is much less chaotic than on Linux and Windows (and even macOS) where your phone app is not allowed to do that much, by comparison.

You should just maintain awareness of how much you’re using. I think 32gb ram + 32gb swap is ridiculous, frankly. Fedora by default sets zram up to 8gb, with no other swap space configured. Works very well that way.

Personally I’d also probably not ever set up more than 16gb of swap space. If I’m somehow hitting that limit it’s because I actually just need to buy more RAM.

At this rate it seems like I will also never be upgrading from the 1070. Miners, NFTs, supply chain, AI, tariffs… how is an honest guy supposed to just buy a decent GPU when squeezed between all that bs?

Does Incus allow you to use a VM with a GUI? One thing that’s nice about Proxmox is I have one VM with a very basic lxqt setup for when I need that, and I can either use remote-viewer + the spice protocol to access it or access it through the Proxmox web ui. That’s been very handy.

Pi-hole is one of my favorite pieces of software. It is the reason I began self-hosting six years ago.

Unfortunately I can’t play around with it anymore because I live a thousand miles away from everyone I support who actually uses Jellyfin. My experience with the Android TV app was embedded SRT subtitle support is now 100% good as of late last year, but embedded PGS trips things up so much that I cannot use them.

Sublime never offered lifetime subscriptions. https://web.archive.org/web/20150928064400/http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq You can even see as far back as 2014 that if you purchased Sublime Text 2 when Sublime 3 was still in beta:

• Upgrade Policy
  A license is valid for Sublime Text 3, and includes all point updates, as well as access to prior versions (e.g., Sublime Text 2). Future major versions, such as Sublime Text 4, will be a paid upgrade.
• Expiration Date
  Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4.

You can find that disagreeable, but it was not something they hid from us customers.

I don’t use it for myself but my experience with Jellyfin is the subtitles UX kind of sucks. It got a lot better on the Android TV app recently (ty to the maintainer!), particularly with improved subtitle support, but because of ExoPlayer it still can’t play bitmapped embedded subtitles easily, only .srt subtitles.

The experience on iOS/appletv with Jellyfin/Swiftfin was so bad that I ended up recommending Infuse. Infuse is a great app, but it’s not a libre app, which kind of clashes with the rest of Jellyfin in that regard. And, once again, it needs massaging: unless you want to be popped up with a buy Infuse Pro pop-up your video and audio has to be in certain codecs.

As I said, I don’t use these things, myself. I don’t even have a TV. But every now and again, I will put a file up for some relatives, and I want it to be totally directly playable, because my server is just an old laptop. So I have to spend a lot of manual time making sure the files are juuuuust right. If there comes a day where there’s direct playback with embedded PGS or SRT subtitles on all platforms that will be the day the Jellyfin suite of software becomes 10/10 software for me.

It’s not absolutely shit, it’s a Thinkpad t440s with an i7 and 8gigs of RAM and a completely broken trackpad that I ordered to use as a PC when my desktop wasn’t working in 2018. Started with a bare server OS then quickly realized the value of virtualization and deployed Proxmox on it in 2019. Have been using it as a modest little server ever since. But I realize it’s now 10 years old. And it might be my server for another 5 years, or more if it can manage it.

In the host OS I tweaked some value to ensure the battery never charges over 80%. And while I don’t know exactly how much electricity it consumes on idle, I believe it’s not too much. Works great for what I want. The most significant issue is some error message that I can’t remember the text of that would pop up, I think related to the NIC. I guess Linux and the NIC in this laptop have/had some kind of mutual misunderstanding.

Your tochd script was a big time saver for me in the past. Thanks for making and sharing it!

To anyone swinging by and wondering what the deal is, use tochd to convert your ISOs to CHDs. It can easily batch the work for you. It will be smarter, better, and definitely more convenient than a quick bash script you hack together.

The armchair lawyer phenomenon was really something to behold.

Proxmox host. Fedora server vm.

• openvpn as a backup (and because i went through the highly laborious process of setting it up)
• wireguard
• nitter (twitter alternative frontend. makes twitter usable)
• audiobookshelf (podcast manager)
• pihole (block ads by dns)
• nginx for my website and some related website stuff
• Vaultwarden (sometimes. I usually keep it off because I prefer KeepassXC anyway)

The hardware is a 10 year old Thinkpad. I think it’s pretty clear by my software list that I don’t ask it to do much, but it does so much for me. Like, I wouldn’t run Jellyfin off of this thing. In fact my NAS is 4x8TB drives but I keep it mostly shut off. It’s powered on maybe about once or twice a week for a few hours at a time. I try to batch my activity with it. Like “oh, yeah, I want file X but it’s on my NAS. Maybe later, when I have a need for file Y I will turn it on and retrieve both.”

I can achieve everything I want with even lower spec hardware, but this Thinkpad has a faulty trackpad anyway, which is also how I got it for cheap. I have never measured it, but supposedly it consumes around 6W at idle which is low enough for me.

I do this exact same setup but one thing to add to your answer and be aware of is that syncthing is not a backup solution. If you delete the files on one computer, those files will be deleted on the other synced devices. And accidents can happen.

So, as always, take backups.

The degree to which this emulator has improved in the two years since I started using it is quite astounding. Very noticeable accuracy and performance increases over time.