Hook it up to the TV and use it for big screen web/media/gaming/retro-emulation. Steam and/or Sunshine/Moonlight can be used for low-latency streaming to play games from another PC (in either direction). You can use controllers and keyboard/mouse through either streaming method or bluetooth/wireless. Also handy for occasionally streaming things that don’t have smart-TV-apps, or for services where the only functional apps are service-locked, shitty and/or “Freemium” (most IPTV apps for example). Set it up for Wake-On-LAN (or Wake-On-WiLAN if it supports it). Lots of things you can do with a PC in the living room.

This is good thinking, and you may still want something like this anyway, as there’s always room for additional documentation, but let me propose an alternative that takes this good way of thinking a step further:

Infrastructure-as-code means my code is my documentation. How’s it configured? Look at the code. What’s it doing? Look at the code. Don’t understand why it’s doing that? Use more descriptive names for things and write more self-explanatory code. Is the code out of date with the current state? Stop implementing things manually and make the code run automatically instead so it’s never out of date anymore.

I have complete confidence in my setup and life is easy now. Except when the IAC breaks. But that’s rarely a panic situation, just mildly frustrating.

I wonder how this compares to Stoat. I found this comparison of many different options but I’m not sure how up to date it is

rsync, SyncThing, or Nextcloud. I use all three, often on the same machine at the same time, for various purposes.

rsync is great for scheduled syncs (but intentionally not TOO frequent – where blowing away one copy would almost instantly blow away the other copy could be a concern.) and outstanding for one-off syncs. With the right command line options it can even create a rough approximation of snapshots with copy-on-write rolling incremental backups. I believe this is the original documentation for that particular trick although it has spawned many genuine backup tools which operate very similarly using rsync under the hood, like rsnapshot.

SyncThing is great for large, intensive datasets that you want to keep perfectly synchronized across multiple computers at the same time. One example is my saved games, so without relying on Steam “cloud saves” or anything, I can just save my game and hop from gaming on one computer onto my laptop and pick up right where I left off.

Nextcloud is what I use for keeping separate copies of all my documents, photos from my phone, etc. It’s easier than SyncThing to setup and manage in my opinion, it’s simple and reliable and reasonably user-friendly in most use-cases, and seems to be more compatible with a lot of software due to its similar design to something like Dropbox. It isn’t ideal for handling huge numbers of files or very large folders in my personal opinion, but it does work if you want to try it.

I donated a server to my brother across the country to use as his media server, it also doubles as my own offsite backup. And vice versa for his, although he’s not really tech savvy enough to care.

No screenshots, but I had an old server with a pair of mirrored 8GB Seagates hosting a particularly specialized service on a very beefy and regularly maintained UPS and it had a server uptime of 21 years (had not been rebooted since somewhere around 1999) when I finally decommissioned it about 5 years ago, both disks would’ve been the same. It was on the public internet the whole time too, running Debian Slink with kernel 2.0.36, which had been awkwardly patched and rebuilt somehow to make the service (itself already obsolete at that time) actually work. I don’t know why I remember all this, but I do.

I do remember monitoring the SMART status at various points and the drive bearings must’ve been pretty cooked because those two drives were always running at 50-60C and I had a big old box fan pointed at the thing with the side panel off.

This example is also why I don’t always buy into the cult of “you must always regularly update all software immediately all the time”. Old software is not always bad software, same with old hardware. Sometimes it’s genuinely possible to have a bulletproof system. The problem is you never really know you do, until it either enters survivorship bias or becomes catastrophically proven otherwise. But you can make educated guesses, and if you’re going to naively assume that your old software must have exploitable security holes it seems equally naive to me to assume that updates must never have exploitable security holes. I think the risk calculus has to be done on a case-by-case basis.

Not what OP is using obviously, but AMD X3D CPUs and Mac systems can be quite competitive for AI if you’re lacking VRAM. Not all CPUs struggle with inference, and some GPUs aren’t so hot at it either. GPUs are generally better, especially the really high-end ones, but throwing in low- and mid-range cards and high-end CPUs stuff starts to look somewhat muddier.

Yes, I don’t hate the technology, I hate all the evil companies abusing this technology for profit, fascism and death, which is very close to all of them.

But they are not the only ones working on the technology, and even though they have stolen many of people’s entire lives worth of work for making these models and not only didn’t compensate them, but in many cases replaced them and terminated their employment, in many cases we are stealing it right the fuck back from them and making it open to everybody, because fuck them. It doesn’t belong to them in the first place, it belongs to all of us. We can’t put the genie back in the lamp or the toothpaste back in the tube, but we can make sure we are keeping our own data for ourselves once we take these monstrous, bloated, oligarchs down. We will not the libraries of Alexandria burn down again, and we won’t let them have the only copies.

I won’t pretend I don’t have various issues with open weight models using this technology, but they’re more like “I don’t like systemd’s philosophy or developers” level of issues, not “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.

With the evil companies, I absolutely DO have “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.

That’s fair, thanks for cleaning up the mess and sorry for being part of it.

Thanks for letting me and everyone else know you’re childish and stupid enough to be worth blocking.

Removed by mod

You do not need to rummage in about:config, there is literally a checkbox for it in settings. Maybe this was not the case when you tried it, I don’t know.

If you’re talking about Librewolf’s “resist fingerprinting”:

1. That is done for a very good reason (unfortunately, it’s not Librewolf’s fault that most websites are assholes and have found ways to uniquely identify every individual on every system)
2. You can very, very easily turn it off per-site, or browser-wide, or it has many configuration options in-between if it really bothers you that much.

Not personally. I prefer to run bare metal whenever possible. It helps me understand how everything connects, it’s the difference between being handed someone else’s completed Lego sculpture and building it yourself, it takes a lot longer but you’ll have way more appreciation for it after building it and a much more thorough understanding of how it’s all put together and what’s involved, and you’re a lot better equipped to fix it if a piece breaks off.

I self-host Nextcloud and use it extensively (if not primarily) for Calendar. All my calendars are hosted and synced with WebDav and I use a variety of clients but mainly Thunderbird desktop.

I use a single centralized database running directly on the host (postgres) and make it accessible to the docker clusters.

Pros: It’s all in one place to backup all important data for every service, I find this a much easier and more reliable way to backup all services, and I’m confident if you tried it you would too. The application data becomes a first-class citizen instead of hiding inside some nameless docker volume. Significantly less database overhead. Consistent database version and tools.

Cons: Lots. You need to manage and backup the database. You need to manage the database users and passwords too. Making the DB accessible to the docker clusters is nontrivial and can be fragile. You can no longer use the default “official” docker compose files, since they will almost never support an actual database service without several modifications, they’re always built for spinning up their own docker container database. So you’re going to be doing a bunch of work setting up users and passwords and performing extensive surgery on the docker-compose before you even start up the application, which adds a lot of friction, with lots of opportunity for error. All things considered, it’s actually quite painful. Technically if one application abuses your database hard enough and exhausts its memory to crash it or something it would affect other applications too, but that’s true of any services running on shared hardware abusing anything on that hardware, so it’s not a realistically concerning con.

I consider it worthwhile, but I might be wrong. Also I hate docker in general. I understand why people use it. It’s the same reason I use it. But I still hate it. I think system installations are so much easier to manage in the long run, but initially more work, and you need to invest that work at a time when you’re not even sure if you really want to run this application or if it’s going to be compatible with the rest of your environment. So docker is the easy solution. But then you’re basically trapped in dockerland. It’s not that bad, I just hate it in principle. I wish there were a better way.

If you have an option in the BIOS or drivers to set the battery charging threshhold to stop charging at 80% or possibly even lower (I believe Lithium Ion/Polymer cells are happiest at around 40-60% state of charge, which is why they are usually shipped that way). Sometimes this feature exists, but only vaguely described as “battery life optimization” or some similar wankery that they never properly explain.

You can also just remove the battery entirely if it will be always plugged in, but setting it to a low/modest maximum charge gives you a nice, reliable, built-in UPS in case of power interruptions.

This is FUD. Dell workstation class laptops are absolutely designed for running at full power with the lid closed (and for use with a docking station, in fact). That’s why it’s called a “workstation”. Business class laptops are a totally different beast than consumer-grade/“gaming” laptops. They are typically quite durable, quite tolerant, and quite repairable. Exceptions, obviously, exist, and we don’t know the exact model OP is talking about, but there’s no reason to assume they will have any issues running it as intended.

I run several old consumer grade laptops as light servers, permanently closed, and they’ve been perfectly fine for years.

i18n is definitely a real thing and it’s often even used as an abbreviation in repos, folder structures and filenames related to internationalization/translation, I don’t love it, but it is definitely in real world use. l10n is one I’ve seen before and is also a real thing, but much less common (and even less acceptable in my opinion). a11y is not one I’ve ever seen before.

If this is about the bot I think it is, I haven’t personally complained but I have noticed it’s weird and often wrong, it seems to detect HTTP/HTTPS in every post (perhaps seeing links and URLs?) and it seems to maybe possibly be detecting any words with those strings of letters somewhere in them and presumably also doesn’t care about case sensitivity? The short ones in particular like “AP”, “CA”, “CF”, “HA” and “IP” seem to come up frequently almost every time it posts, and “NAT” and “IoT” seems common, and none of things seem to be actually mentioned in any of the comments that I see.