I’m only concerned about my Immich library right now. It’s hosted on a local Unraid server. Nightly I have a flat file backup rcloned to another local server and a micro PC at my parent’s house. Once a week Duplicacy does a chunked encrypted backup to Backblaze B2.

I’m messing around with some other backup software though. Not super happy with Duplicacy but it’s working for now.

I can see some value using AI. I treat it like a search engine, since Google, DDG, Bing, etc all seem to suck now favoring ads and purchased result slots rather than finding what you’re looking for. Using AI helps since it’s doing several searches for you. But as others have said, the results can be flawed, particularly when searching for niche topics.

I have zero coding experience and used ChatGPT (I think) to vibe code a simple battery GUI for my Thinkpad running linux since the OS version I had would not display the internal and external batteries separately. Technically it worked, but it looked and ran like ass.

Ultimately I think it falls apart when things go wrong and trying to coax the robot to help you get your way out of trouble, which can be very problematic.

It has a significantly better UI than Calibre, no question. I only use it to manage my ebook library and send them to my various Kindle email addresses. I can’t compare any more advanced features because I didn’t use them in Calibre and I still don’t in CW.

I gave up on FOSS alternatives and journal exclusively in Obsidian. it’s not open source, but the file format is simple text files. Which for me, was a must.

Would Papra work for you? I like it better than Paperless-NGX personally, which others have mentioned. But I’ll admit I’m not sure it’ll fit in your use case as I’m feeding it newly scanned documents for mine rather than existing file/folder hierarchy.

Yep, same here. Works well.

That’s a great idea. Do you have it persist between sessions? Like one server #1 it’s always green?

Hey that’s super helpful, thank you. Definitely going to try this out.

I’m still a beginner myself, but from my experience I’d say skip Nextcloud at least to start with. I found even the AIO version confusing to set up. Hell, I still do. I have the NextcloudPi image running on a Pi4 but am actively looking for a replacement because it runs like crap on that hardware and I don’t need all of the features it offers/tries to cram into one service.

I’m leaning towards FileRun. Yeah, you have to pay for it once. But so far it seems to be the best alternative that doesn’t try to do too much. And yes, I tried Owncloud Infinite Scale, before everyone jumps on me :)

Oh nice! I’ll check it out.

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll try them out. One thing that I hate is critical for me is integration with Android auto. It’s the last Google service I can’t seem to quit. Might have to give up and just roll with Bluetooth instead.

I want to leave too, but I really like PlexAmp for my music streaming. And no, Finamp doesn’t work nearly as well or look as nice.

Wai Wai World 2 on Famicom emulator. Don’t need to know any Japanese to play and it has great cartoony sprites.

Bubble Bobble (NES) is great two player, though you’re competing

Buster Bros (PsOne, and probably others) probably one of my top 5 co-op games of all time

Micro Mages (retro despite being released in 2019 because it plays on original NES hardware) probably top co-op of all time for me

There’s quite a bit more but have various degrees of violence so won’t recommend those (Contra, Heavy Barrel, Silk Worm, Jackal, Life Force, etc)

Notesnook might work for you.

I dumped Proton because the apps are awful on Android. Particularly the Mail app (even the new one. Prepaid for 3 years, didn’t cancel fast enough, now I have store credit for a company I don’t want to support. Neat!

Awful app

I was poking around the Raspberry imager utility and they had RISC OS, which is and old operating system that was apparently fairly popular in the UK, but I’d never heard of it in the US. I loaded it up on my Pi 1 and had fun exploring it. Not exactly useful, but cool to mess with: RISC OS

Seafile. It’s super fast and lightweight. There are some caveats though:

• Data is stored in git-like chunks on the server side. There is Seafuse and Sea drive functions that you can leverage to “assemble” the data on server side for backups. I personally use rclone mount, then backup.

• Paywall hiding some features. The community edition is free but is missing some features that pro has. Pro edition is free for 3 or less users.

• Documentation isn’t great. The forum is active so that’s helpful, but some of the docs take some time to understand

• Chinese owned. As far as I can tell, there is no call home for a self hosted server, so I don’t think it’s a worry in that case.

All that said, I like it much better than Syncthing for it’s selective sync. All files on each client are synced to the server. But unlike Syncthing, it doesn’t sync all data with each client. This is vital for me with some devices with small storage drives, so I would t want all files to sync. Yet I can still reach to the server from any client and pull data from any other client. Syncthing has an ignore flag, but that seemed way more trouble to setup than just sticking with Seafile.

I work from home, so the last thing I want to do on my leisure time is sit at the same desk I’ve sat at for the last 8 hrs. So I lounge on the couch and play through my huge steam deck library. It is not a cheap device, to be sure. But I felt it was absolutely worth it for me.

Portables are the best for this, imo. Steam Deck or a used 3DS are my choices. The latter is easy to mod and play all sorts of games including the gigantic DS/3DS library.

I find both systems clutch for the suspend function. Lets you pick right back up where you were. I will say the 3ds is much better at this with clamshell design that suspends on closing the lid and it’s battery life in suspend is fantastic!

I also find stress relief games. Mindless 3rd person action games for me. Mad Max was great because I could drive around picking fights or crashing stuff. The Batman Arkham games and the Shadow of Mordor games are other great examples for me. I have not found any relaxing “cozy” games that work for me. Nothing has really grabbed my attention enough to stick with.