Some drives are worse than others and higher capacities get worse and worse, in my experience, Seagate drives are extremely loud.

If you get helium drives (like wd red plus > 8TB i think),or 2nd hand hgst/ WD enterprise drives) they are significantly quieter.

But, having an ssd is cheaper probably. I have an SSD for the boot drive and all databases, configuration folders, etc… In docker so general IO is fast, then media, documents, pictures, etc… On the big HDDs.

KNX.

Everything is decentrally programmed, and you can do extra automations and stuff from home assistant, but KNX devices are wired (generally) and will always Just Work™. More expensive that the cheaper retrofit options, but if you factor in manual overrides or getting the “better” wireless smart devices it is comparable. They generally also have a manual override at the panel. For core functions like lights, HVAC, roll shutters or blinds, etc… That is honestly the best option (unless you want every light to be an RGB light for some reason, then you still need smart bulbs)

If you ever need a language buddy, let me know.

There is also a Learn Dutch discord that is fairly active.

Duolingo sucks ass for learning languages. Dutchpod101 is pretty good, but the best is a combination of dutch books + listening like dhtchpod101 or some simple news podcasts or so.

This is similar to what I do.

I have a USB drive with the whole bootloader + decryption keyfiles on it. I remove it while it is running as everything is stored in RAM and already booted.

Downside being it has to be plugged in to update the boot partition during an upgrade.

London population: 8.8 million

Twin cities combined population: 3.6 million

London public transport: pretty damn good, connections everywhere, not an insane price

Twin cities public transport: almost non-existant, insane parking prices

London police: sometimes reasonable and lightly armed

Twin cities police: notoriously corrupt, heavily armed, use constant excessive force on civilians

Mystery solved.

Bitwarden

There is also leantime.io that I have been hosting for 5 years or so. It is a bit more than planka or tarallo as far as scope I think, but it has integrated kanban, gannt charts, and hour logging which is all I need for my personal projects.

Your cloud example is exactly right and exactly what we want to NOT HAPPEN.

They shoved the cloud so much down our throats so that they can force you into monthly income-sucking unneeded subscriptions. That is it. That is the single reason everyone did it.

The result is now the average user has a much worse experience overall. One literally has to fight with Microsoft products to save things on their own computer. IoT and smart products literally won’t function without connections to their “cloud”. Phones come without SD card compatibility and with low flash memory to force you into cloud subscriptions. Now every damn piece of software is a way overpriced subscription that almost all originally started as “switching to cloud infrastructure” (fucking adobe creative cloud).

The “cloud” has had so many data breaches and people data have been stolen, siphoned off, lost due to bugs, and sold to earn even more cash on the side.

A huge portion of the general corporatization and bad enshittification of digital services and software in general can be attributed to “the cloud shoving down our throats” that you describe.

AI is looking to do the same thing except castrate peoples’ digital skills, critical thinking skills, transcription skills, and writing skills in order to siphon more and more of your income off in the form of AI subscriptions while they double dip and sell everything you ever say to it and triple dip in mining everything you say to it as R&D that you pay to do

Companies need to do the fucking R&D themselves with their revenue of a small country and stop forcing regular people to pay to be their alpha and beta testers and focus groups, and people gobble that boot up so hard because LLMs have a few small areas where they are slightly useful and can save 10 minutes per day and make them not have to critically think, so people will literally sell their data, their already small income, and their soul to save 10 minutes, and in 10 years the digital experience will be even more shitty and degraded than it got after “the cloud.”

Your usecase is the exact definition as using LLMs as accessibility and to actually better the user experience for certain people which is not the goal of any AI company or 99% of LLM integrations

TD;DR

Non-consentual cloud shoving has caused newer generations to think that paying corporations every month to save files is normal and that your data is not yours and always corporate property ™®©, along with the decimation of understanding simple file structures. You can actually talk to teachers and professors and they unanimously say that tech literacy has nosedived.

Now with the LLM shoving, they are trying to force the new generation to have to pay subscriptions to think, write, compose, draw, and get information by stripping them of those skills.

Also the Node 804 is worth looking into with an entire separate chamber for HDDs in order to keep them cool without exposing them to GPU and cpu heat, plus it is a lot shorter instead, sometimes easier to fit places (mATX motherboard only)

Obsidian ticks all of these boxes and syncthing to sync notes is a 5 minute setup.

Plus it stores things in plaintext instead of a database format that vendor locks you in (despite the claim of “no vendor lock in”)

Ooooo yay another half-baked AI shoved into everything whatever possible.

Not really self-hosted, but I set up obsidian with syncthing and am going to transfer all of my notes from book stack to it and let bookstack be more organized documentation and obsidian to be a big scattering of notes and tags and such. I tried it with bookstack, but the flow was too much of a barrier for me to use it consistantly

I am doing something similar. I use OIDC for everything possible.

Authelia is quite picky about everything being correctly populated, but if I remember right, the documentation doesn’t do a great job of explaining different variables for someone outside of the security industry (similar with traefik). I found a good tutorial via search that got all of the defaults set up, then playing with the options to my liking and now it is just copy pasting the condiguration per app that I want to enable, generating an key and hashing it.

If you want, I can sanitize my config and share it?

Also code development programs.

Code OSS (VSCode) in distrobox with clangd language server and NCS for embedded development sucks up like 8GB of my 32 just having 6 or so files open once you start building because it keeps builds in RAM or something. It balloons fast at least lol

Especially for jazz albums. Very difficult to find

Rip bismuth. It worked almost perfectly in plasma5 and with rewrites in plasma6 it broke and the dev didn’t want to rewrite it.

Mealie is so underrated. They have meal planning, recipes, recipe parsing from the internet, grocery lists based on recipes and meal plans, like 4 different ways to organize recipes, and OIDC/SSO on top of it all!

Though as a kind of “exception”, I think that charging poles for electric cars should have modbus or Ethernet and a local protocol (matter maybe?) to use with smart home systems for automation and cars should have a standard affordable way to check errors and status of sensors.

The shed as an of site backup is a good idea.

We live in the shed (it is really its own entire stone building) during our full house renovation, so I have already run electrical and cat6a to the shed and have an old router in AP mode there.

Hooking up one of those NAS boards or a 2nd hand old PC there would be a good backup option.

That is true, but for embedded development it sucks because of specialty drivers, access to dbus, udev rules, etc… And distrobox with vscodium or code oss has some big big slowdowns that I can’t figure out.

Saleae software simply won’t work consistently in distrobox, for example. Luckily they have an app image so I could just install it there and set a few settings and now it works well. Sigrok Pulseview is better but needs a few not-dependency packages to work around it.

There is some weirdness to atomic distros and bazzite, but I am pretty happy with it!

I use bazzite on my desktop.

The problem with the set it and forget it nature is that when updates stop working, it “forgets” to tell you.

If you layer any packages, you will run into this, but even without package layering, there have been a number of bugs reported recently about this.

I have auto updates and notifications on (and I switched them off and on again and verified the settings) and haven’t gotten a single update notification for months even though I can update manually successfully.