I work night shift and use blackout curtains and earplugs to improve my sleep during the day. Rather than cranking the volume on my alarm so it’s loud enough to consistently wake me up, I use Home Assistant to turn on some smart bulbs as my alarm. When I started, and even now if I have to be up extra early, I also have an audible alarm set to go off a few minutes after the lights come on - just in case the light doesn’t wake me up, but at this point my brain has gotten used to waking up to the lights, and I usually wake up and turn off the other alarm before it goes off.

Another useful automation for me is I have a buggy Samsung PC monitor that has all sorts of annoying issues; like not consistently waking from deep sleep which requires a hard power cycle to correct, and when it is asleep there’s some weird high pitched whine that beeps when the standby light flashes. I use a couple of smart plugs with power monitoring and monitor my PCs power draw to turn the power to my monitor on and off at the wall depending on if the PC is on.

Not sure exactly how good this would work for your use case of all traffic, but I use autossh and ssh reverse tunneling to forward a few local ports/services from my local machine to my VPS, where I can then proxy those ports in nginx or apache on the VPS. It might take a bit of extra configuration to go this route, but it’s been reliable for years for me. Wireguard is probably the “newer, right way” to do what I’m doing, but personally I find using ssh tunnels a bit simpler to wrap my head around and manage.

Technically wireguard would have a touch less latency, but most of the latency will be due to the round trip distance between you and your VPS and the difference in protocols is comparatively negligible.

Putting how many games I have in each category in brackets since your screenshot included that info and I think it’s interesting data to include.

I have “Uninterested” [7] as a category for games I will probably never play. “Backlog” [33] for games I haven’t started, but do eventually want to play. “Story Started” [25] for games that I have started playing but haven’t finished the core story or made it to the credits of (some of these games have been in this category for years). A “Playing” [7] category for a few games from the “Story Started” collection that I consider as games I’m actively playing. And a “Story Complete” [91] category for games that I’ve at least reached a credits screen or otherwise finished the core game/story.

If I enjoy a game a lot, through multiple playthroughs (or at least expect to return for another playthrough at some point) it gets added to my Favorites [14].

And then there’s the 280 games in the Uncategorized list, I have played a bit of some of them, but for most of them I’d want to start over from the beginning rather than continue from where I left off.

Maybe I’ll try and give it another go soon to see if things have improved for what I need since I last tried. I do have a couple aging servers that will probably need upgraded soon anyway, and I’m sure my python scripts that I’ve used in the past to help automate server migration will need updated anyway since I last used them.

I think that my skepticism and desire to have docker get out of my way, has more to do with already knowing the underlying mechanics, being used to managing services before docker was a thing, and then docker coming along and saying “just learn docker instead.” Which is fine, if it didn’t mean not only an entire shift from what I already know, but a separation from it, with extra networking and docker configuration to fuss with. If I wasn’t already used to managing servers pre-docker, then yeah, I totally get it.

That’s a big reason I actively avoid docker on my servers, I don’t like running a dozen instances of my database software, and considering how much work it would take to go through and configure each docker container to use an external database, to me it’s just as easy to learn to configure each piece of software for yourself and know what’s going on under the hood, rather than relying on a bunch of defaults made by whoever made the docker image.

I hope a good amount of my issues with docker have been solved since I last seriously tried to use docker (which was back when they were literally giving away free tee shirts to get people to try it). But the times I’ve peeked at it since, to me it seems that docker gets in the way more often than it solves problems.

I don’t mean to yuck other people’s yum though, so if you like docker, and it works for you, don’t let me stop you from enjoying it. I just can’t justify the overhead for myself (both at the system resource level, and personal time level of inserting an additional layer of configuration between me and my software).

My vote would be NuTwo.

Source has been posted on Internet Archive (along with the latest builds for a bunch of platforms). Something will likely rise from the ashes of YuZu, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it takes a few years. Nintendo is probably gonna be extra litigious this year (even more than usual), due to them likely failing to have the Switch’s successor ready this year, and not really having a full slate of games ready, so with Switch sales projected to be down, best to lay low on anything that might get Nintendo’s attention for a while.

I think that’s actually what discord should be used for. It’s one of the better platforms for voice/video/text chat. It’s mostly just when people use discord for what should be a public forum or wiki that it becomes a problem.

And sure, it’s not a great place for open source developers to do all their communication in, because being able to reference things in the future if a project lead closes the server is important. But it’s probably fine for coding sprints and meetings here and there as long as someone is taking notes to be documented elsewhere. Discord is arguably better than zoom for that use case.

Based on the documentation on the GitHub, it looks like it does use Haier’s cloud. Which, doesn’t make Haier’s actions any less shitty, but I can understand a company not wanting a bunch of users using their undocumented API, especially if there’s potential to have automations hitting it more frequently than their own app does (not that I have any reason to believe this project was actually being inefficient with API calls).

I just use public trackers and search for “VR180” - more than half the results are usually porn. If you want non-porn 3D movies “HSBS” is a good term to use as it’s probably the most common format for 3D Blu-rays.

I have a similar setup. Even for hard drives and slower SSDs on a NAS, 10g has been beneficial. 2.5 gig would probably be sufficient for most of what I do, but even a few years ago when I bought my used mellanox sfp+ cards on eBay it was basically just as cheap to go full 10g (although 2.5 gig Ethernet ports are a bit more common to find built-in these days, so depending on your hardware, that might be a cheaper place to start). But even from a network congestion standpoint, having my own private link to my NAS is really nice.

I’ve dabbled with some monitoring tools in the past, but never really stuck with anything proper for very long. I usually notice issues myself. I self-host my own custom new-tab page that I use across all my devices and between that, Nextcloud clients, and my home-assistant reverse proxy on the same vps, when I do have unexpected downtime, I usually notice within a few minutes.

Other than that I run fail2ban, and have my vps configured to send me a text message/notification whenever someone successfully logs in to a shell via ssh, just in case.

Based on the logs over the years, most bots that try to login try with usernames like admin or root, I have root login disabled for ssh, and the one account that can be used over ssh has a non-obvious username that would also have to be guessed before an attacker could even try passwords, and fail2ban does a good job of blocking ips that fail after a few tries.

If I used containers, I would probably want a way to monitor them, but I personally dislike containers (for myself, I’m not here to “yuck” anyone’s “yum”) and deliberately avoid them.

Just doing a single pass all the same like zeroes, often still leaves the original data recoverable. Doing passes of random data and then zeroing it lowers the chance that the original data can be recovered.

Not saying there aren’t any benefits to docker, migration to a different host distro and dependency conflicts are the big two. But for me they are kinda the only two, I find for what I do it’s just as easy to write a shell script that downloads and unpacks software, and copies my own config files into place than it is to deal with basically doing the same thing, but with docker. I could use ansible or something similar for that, but for me, shell scripts are easier to manage.

Don’t get me wrong, docker has its place. I just find that it gets in my way with it’s own quirks almost as much as it helps in other areas, especially for web apps like Nextcloud that are already just a single folder under the web root and a database.

One additional benefit I get from not using docker, is that I can do more with a lower-powered server, since I’m not running multiple instances of PHP and nginx across multiple containers.

I’ve been self-hosting since before docker and containers were a thing, and even though Nextcloud kinda pushes their container images these days, I still refuse to use them, and use the community archive releases or web installer when reconfiguring my system or setting up a new system to migrate to. Maybe it’s just Nextcloud and the other software I use, or maybe it’s just that I’m not really trying to build scalable server infrastructure with a lot of users, but I generally find that docker causes more problems than it solves, and it does my head in when I see projects that recommend containers as the primary suggested install method.

Totally agree with your assessment of the plugins/apps systems. Feels like you need to stick to official “apps” and hope they don’t get abandoned to have anything close to a good experience because even minor updates can break all the 3rd party apps because of a compatibility check, where you end up waiting for the app developer to release an “update” that only changes the version compatibility number.

Yeah, unless you need the GPIO or the lower power consumption of a Pi, mini PCs are better for 90% of the projects people use single board computers for. Plus you usually get upgradable ram, and more-resilient storage.

I’ve never heard any confirmation of GoDaddy falsely charging a premium for domains, but I definitely experienced that kind of thing with them years ago. Wasn’t really a “few-minutes” thing, but if you left a domain in your cart, within a day or so, it would be sold and available at a premium. Not sure if it was a GoDaddy tactic, or if their data was being sold and used by resellers.

So, my solution to this is probably a bit more jank than you’d like, but I use one of those portable USB-C monitors that also has an HDMI input (mine is mini HDMI, but I just leave the adapter plugged into it) then I have HDMI cables run from the back of my systems, that I can plug into the portable monitor when I need local access.

When not in use, I can easily just store the portable monitor nearby, and it doesn’t take up much space.

I’m running full desktops on my machines though, and also have those dummy HDMI plugs that emulate a monitor so the systems load the desktop properly, so I can use vnc or other remote desktop to access the systems when I’m not home. I plug the dummy HDMI plugs into same HDMI cables I use for my display, using couplers, so I don’t run into any weird “dual monitor” weirdness from using both a real display and a dummy plug at the same time.

As far as input, I have a couple of super cheap wireless keyboards with trackpads built in. They don’t provide the best typing experience, but they do the job for what I need.

Moved my personal site off of WordPress around 5 years ago because, for my single-user purposes it was resource heavy compared to a static site generator like Hugo or Pelican. I also had quite a lot of spam traffic, even with anti-spam plugins, and eventually I just disabled comments outright and the new user registration page. Admittedly, I was never that active with it, so I'm fully willing to accept that it could have been a me problem.

I also recall the general security of WordPress being a concern around that time, mostly because it was a popular target, so a big part of me moving to a static site generator was just to avoid having to constantly get on and update WordPress for security patches, when I only posted on the blog a few times a year at most.

Fediverse support has me considering returning to WordPress, but I'm curious how much upkeep running your own instance is these days.