Burned, was probably a Linux ISO about 15 years ago. I still prefer to buy physical media (CDs and DVDs), just haven’t had a need to burn any in a while.

I have almost no physical photos. I have maybe 10 physical photos, total. I was pretty early on the whole digitize everything bandwagon. And have lost most of them before I got the hang of how to protect them from accidental loss.

Every now and then I want to take a look at one of the photos I’ve taken. I’ll wind up spending a few hours going down memory lane.

Photos are a moment sealed in time. Young folks may not value them right now, but eventually they’ll value them more.

I’m an untrusting old curmudgeon, so I store my files locally, for the most part. Folks storing them online? Either they’ll get burned and lose them, or not.

I use FinAmp client with Jellyfin for music.

I agree the Jellyfin interface is not well optimized for music, but FinAmp negates most of that and my phone is how I mostly listen to music anyway.

I like Navidrone, but it’s a duplicate service that doesn’t really have a big value add over Jellyfin beyond the ability to share tracks with friends. A major feature upgrade, but not something I use terribly often.

And iOS app as well, though, it is in test flight

Off the top of my head:

• Paperless ( Digital filing cabinet, tagging is local LLM backed
• Immich (Google Photos replacement)
• Nextcloud (Replaces the rest of Google Cloud functionality)
• LubeLogger (Vehicle maintenance logger)
• Home Assistant (Home and other things automation)
• Jellyfin (Primary media server)
• Hoarder (Online bookmarking, tagging and summarizing service, Local LLM backed. I think this project has changed names)
• Audiobookshelf ( Does what it says on the tin. Audiobook server, kinda like audible but I can actually find the books I already own. )
• Navidrome (Not sure if I’m keeping this one. Like the features but it largely duplicates the music side of Jellyfin)
• Minecraft Server (Again, does what it says on the tin)

There are other services I run but those are the ones I use most often and can rattle off when I’m as tired as I am right now.

Like everyone else is saying, make sure to check the battery health, but otherwise just treat it like any other used car. Take it to a shop you trust, tell them you might be buying the car and to tell you everything they can about it. If your country has something similar to a CarFax (basically a background check on a car), it would also be helpful to pull that as well.

I needed that chuckle! Thank you.

Living in the US South for the last 30 years, my experience has been that most of the "Don’t tread on me " crowd are very much only interested in protecting themselves and their families. That often means keeping your head low when trouble is about.

Additionally, ICE seems to have been keeping a low profile in areas where that mindset is most prevalent. Still active, but keeping their wits about them.

Sooner or later, though, ICE will fuck up, knock down the wrong door, and multiple people (both ICE and citizens) will catch a bad case of lead poisoning. And then things will get bad.

Might want to take another look at Jellyfin. My experience has been that as long as the video file s are at least somewhat reasonably named and organized, Jellyfin has no problems identifying a file and looking up its metadata.

I’ve been using Private Email as my email provider. I think it’s owned by NameCheap, my domain registrar. While I’m interested in a decent spam solution for my particular setup, I was just as interested in hearing how everyone else handles their spam. And their choices for getting email, as it turns out.

I’ve gotten a lot more responses from people running their own email servers than I really expected. Back in the day it was considered a herculean challenge, almost impossible for your mail to be accepted by the big 3 email providers.

From the other responses I’ve gotten so far, it sounds like most email providers, including mine, might have decent built- in spam filtering. Others are saying to look into aliases. both are sounding like good plays going forward.

Gmail’s excellent spam filtering was the main reason I had switched to them way back when. When I moved away from them, I just never looked at it, assuming spam filtering at the provider level to be non existent, and used Thunderbird’s junk mail filtering as it was a known way to solve the issue.

One of the problems with getting old is that you wind up getting blind to advances that have happened while you weren’t looking.

I’m a geek who drives a truck and I learned a good chunk of what I know, tech-wise, almost 25 years ago. I try to keep up, but falling behind on tech just kinda goes with the territory.

Much as I like this idea, it feels like this may backfire badly. They’d be better off doing things that would reduce the cost of housing, like building more housing.

I’ll believe it when it gets released.

You can’t post a video directly, but you can link to a video hosted elsewhere.

haha. And their current website is improved over the one I opened 20 some years ago! I think it took me a few weeks of poking around in the shell they provided to fully figure out what they were about.

The SDF started back in the late 80’s as a anime dial up BBS. SDF is a reference to the anime Robotech, A show released in the 80’s but that I grew up watching as a kid in the 90’s.

In the early 2000’s, I was trying to figure out this thing called Linux, I found a site that would give me access to a unix machine for free and it had a name and logo that reminded me of the anime I loved as a kid. While poking around I found that they had a fairly active message board, were willing to give me an email address, usenet access (albeit, limited), and would host small personal web site for me if I wanted. They were my primary email address through most of the 00’s before I, regrettably now, switched to gmail like everyone else.

Fast forward to 2022, and I find out that there is this thing called Lemmy and it’s supposed to be like Reddit but better. So I put up my own server… and it crashed and burned. Mainly due to my own stupidity. I failed to make backups and borked an update.

While I was playing with my own server, I found something interesting. Not only was the SDF still kicking, but they had decided to host Lemmy and Mastodon servers as well. So I signed up for both and started donating to the SDF again. Been here ever since. Good place, decent folks. I don’t see myself going anywhere else for a while.

How does one company have that much impact?

Because they are a very good CDN and provide excellent DDos protection. They then expanded to do a whole host of other things, to the point where they do pretty much everything. Basically, they have become the first name most folks think of when they want to put something on the internet. A one stop shop for your web hosting needs. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn they rent servers and VPS’s as well.

Been seeing it in the selfhosting communities and subreddits for a while now. “Oh I want to put this selfhosted service on the internet. I should put it behind Cloudflare!” Most of the time it’s not needed in that context.

Do you think that’s concerning?

Well, they did just take out “half” of the internet today so… In general, if it seems like “everyone” is using a single service, it’s probably a good idea to see if an alternative exists and will suit your needs. Which reminds me, I should probably start looking for a replacement for Tailscale. They’re starting to look a bit like Cloudflare to me, in the sense that “everyone”, including myself tends to recommend them as a VPN.

Avoiding the usual toilet paper and paper towel answers, Bluetooth speakers.

Decent sounding ones can be had dirt cheap, but I’ve found that ones made by power tool brands tend to last longer and be more reliable when abused. I’m more than happy to pay double price if it will last me 4 times as long before it fails on me. I haven’t had my current one very long, but the last one lasted almost 6 years of genuine abuse before it died after falling into a vat of used motor oil. The usual life span for bluetooth speakers is about 6 months (general abuse) to a year or two (battery failure). I’m a bit rough on my kit.

I don’t want to see a single server grow to the size of Reddit. I wouldn’t mind the network as a whole growing to that size, though.

I suspect that if the lemmy side of the fediverse did grow to the size of Reddit we would probably see a lot more fragmentation than we currently have.There’d be upsides and downsides to that.

Matrix would probably be one of the better options, but xmpp is a pretty good choice as well.

Listen to them, and go “okay”. Then if it was helpful, follow the suggestion. More often than not, though, the advice is not helpful. I’ll still listen and go “okay”, and then go and do whatever it is that I thought was best.

Painful truth is that I am not an expert in everything. I don’t know everything. Even having reached middle age, I’ve not experienced everything. But by listening to those around me, I can often learn something. That thing may not always be what the advice giver intended, (often it’s “This person is an idiot”) but learning is good.

The most important piece of information you can ever learn is “Where can I find more information?” Occasionally it’s the annoying asshole that keeps giving unsolicited advice.