I like the choice of SIlverstone for the case. I got one of those for my proxmox server. It was compact, but not so compact that I left a lot of skin and blood behind after mounting components. I will say that other manufacturers (like Fractal Design just seem to understand how to design an interior a lot better, though.

I’ve just spent a few weeks continually enhancing a script in a language I’m not all that familiar with, exclusively using ChatGPT 4. The experience leaves a LOT to be desired.

The first few prompts are nothing short of amazing. You go from blank page to something that mostly works in a few seconds. Inevitably, though, something needs to change. That’s where things start to go awry.

You’ll get a few changes in, and things will be going well. Then you’ll ask for another change, and the resulting code will eliminate one of your earlier changes. For example, I asked ChatGPT to write a quick python script that does fuzzy matching. I wanted to feed it a list of filenames from a file and have it find the closest match on my hard drive. I asked for a progress bar, which it added. By the time I was done having it generate code, the progress bar had been removed a couple of times, and changed out for a different progress bar at least three times. (On the bright side, I now know of multiple progress bar solutions in Python!)

If you continue on long enough, the “memory” of ChatGPT isn’t sufficient to remember everything you’ve been doing. You get to a point where you need to feed it your script very frequently to give it the context it needs to answer a question or implement a change.

And on top of all that, it doesn’t often implement the best change. In one instance, I wanted it to write a function that would parse a CSV, count up duplicate values in a particular field, and add that value to each row of the CSV. I could tell right away that the first solution was not an efficient way to accomplish the task. I had to question ChatGPT in another prompt about whether it was efficient. (I was soundly impressed that it recognized the problem after I brought it up and gave me something that ended up being quite fast and efficient.)

Moral of the story: you can’t do this effectively without an understanding of computer science.

Have we figured out if this solves the Netflix password sharing limitation yet?

Why are you upgrading? Is it to take advantage of the 10g network speeds?

Regardless of whether or not any of the titles do or do not contain said content, ChatGPT’s varying responses highlight troubling deficiencies of accuracy, analysis, and consistency. A repeat inquiry regarding The Kite Runner, for example, gives contradictory answers. In one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseini’s novel to contain “little to no explicit sexual content.” Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book “does contain a description of a sexual assault.”

On the one hand, the possibility that ChatGPT will hallucinate that an appropriate book is inappropriate is a big problem. But on the other hand, making high-profile mistakes like this keeps the practice in the news and keeps showing how bad it is to ban books, so maybe it has a silver lining.

TIL! Are there good GUI front-ends for Rsync for when you want to browse the file versions?

My friend’s requirements were that the transfers be encrypted (which ssh does) and that his family have a server that was easy for them to use to upload and download files. The file server also had to be private – meaning not stored in the cloud. They aren’t technically savvy, so we needed an option where they could literally drag and drop a file from their desktop onto a web browser window. It worked well for them. My only regret is that the VPN was so complicated to set up. But on the bright side, Synology unifies the username and password between the VPN server and DSM, which makes it a little easier for my friend (and his family) to maintain.

Offsite backups are hard

If you build a NAS instead of using Synology stuff it will be as easy as setup SSH between the machines and rsync.

To be fair, you can do this with Synology as well. Rsync is built-in and even integrated into DSM. The advantage to using Hyperbackup is that you get block-level incremental backups.

I love that Verizon mounting solution! Velcro is the civilized man’s duct tape!

Just a quick follow-up on how we set up self-hosted cloud storage for my friend:

Synology has an OpenVPN server built-in. We configured that to grant his offsite family members access to his network, and then set up DSM to have a custom URL specifically for Synology Drive. (It’s in the Remote Access section of the control panel.) This way users could just visit /drive and get access to a google drive-like interface that was easy for them to use. Setting up the OpenVPN client on their computer was a pain in the butt (as per usual for OpenVPN), but after that was properly configured, they just have a little toggle switch that enables them to access his NAS, which is easy for them to use.

When you share files with someone on Synology Drive, it even sends them an email telling them that you made a file available. Very convenient! They just have to remember how they access the NAS.

I just got through helping a friend set up a NAS. Even today I recommend people stick with Synology because you get so much with it. Security updates and software upgrades are easy, you get good software packages for free, and the Synology platform is just easier to manage unless you want to be a real power user. Honestly, I would replace your current Synology device with an updated one. The DS423+ I set my friend up with had a reasonable processor that could even do hardware transcoding for Plex. Not a lot, mind you, but plenty for his 1080p and DVD library.

I use my Synology NAS for computer backups, photo storage and display, and occasionally I use Synology Drive (Synology’s NextCloud clone – or possibly a fork of NextCloud) to host files for people to access from my network. I wouldn’t say that any self-hosted solution would be extremely easy to use, but Synology Drive was really excellent for moderately techy people.

Offsite backups are hard. I just use Synology’s HyperBackup to create an archive of the files I can’t afford to lose and physically carry those drives to an offsite location. I’ve had to restore from it from time to time, and it has been a nice experience. I especially like that I can restore only specific files and that it handles versioning. It gets hard when you need an immense amount of space for your backup. But these days you can get drives that are positively huge.

Maybe it’s just that I’m not as familiar with history as I need to be, but Reich’s points seemed to be a pretty good subset of Ecos. Where is he deviating?

I prefer porkbun for my domain provider. They’re kind of the darling of the self-hosting community, it seems. But I picked them because they were pretty inexpensive.

I’ve actually used Plex for this before, but I was looking for something simpler. Good call, though!

Sadly, this doesn’t appear to have a slide show feature.

The Plex Pass unlocks hardware transcoding, which is a huge benefit alone. As others have said, it unlocks things like skip intro, credits detection, playing trailers before movies. It also unlocks the DVR feature, allowing you to attach an inexpensive antenna to your network and start recording over-the-air channels. It is very worth it.

Gotta love that prominent pin-up girl pasted to the front of the terminal in the training video. Sideburns knows his priorities!

I can do better than that: here are a couple of videos from LearnLinuxTV’s Proxmox Course.

• Episode 15: Clustering
• Episode 16: High Availability

You should be able to watch them and get the overview you’re looking for. But really, this whole course is excellent from start to finish. I watched it before I ever touched Proxmox, and I’m glad I did. It was instrumental in helping me choose Proxmox as my hypervisor and gave me a great idea of what hardware I wanted to use and how I wanted to use it.

I run a lot of these services in my homelab. I didn’t really feel like I had something with real potential until I started using Proxmox as my hypervisor. That’s when things exploded. You can create VMs and containers on it with ease, and all the features I would normally have to rely on command line for were also available on the Proxmox web interface. That is so convenient! Need to do a snapshot because you think you might screw up your install on step 37? No problem, just take care of it in the GUI.

Proxmox also handles clustering really well, which will probably benefit you. You can add a Raspberry Pi or two, or a PC, and Proxmox will just manage them all. It will even move services from one device to another if one device gets turned off. It’s really incredible!

The one thing I wouldn’t build yourself is a NAS. I went with a Synology, and I’m glad I did. Building (and maintaining) one from scratch is just more work than I really have time for. With a NAS, you want things to go perfectly all the time, including updates and security updates, so I’m happy to leave most of the testing and configuration to Synology’s team. I just have to remember to update things periodically, which I’m willing to do.

The first thing you should do is get a dedicated server for your plex server software. I recommend the NVidia Shield Pro as your first Plex server host because it has excellent hardware transcoding capabilities. If you don’t want to buy the shield, you could get a larger server with a processor that has integrated graphics capabilities. Installing plex on that will actually give you a few more features and probably better transcoding capabilities, but it would be significantly more expensive.

After that, I’d get a Plex pass to unlock a lot of the good Plex features.

Please give Proxmox a try! It was such a huge quality of life improvement when I migrated to it. I can’t speak to your backup needs or to the performance of ZFS, since I don’t use either of those. I just think that Proxmox took a lot of the pain out of my homelab management experience without taking away my capabilities to customize it. Highly recommend!

I think it’s important with a piece like this to take a step back and figure out why the editor put it in the publication to begin with. Let’s take a look at its components.

• Clickbait title driving clicks? Check.
• Topic that seems to violate long-held conventional wisdom (and therefore drive clicks)? Check.
• Grain of truth to drive controversy (and thus distribution on social media? Check.

This isn’t propaganda. Some editor saw this, knew how people would respond, and published it for the clicks.

I read the article a couple of times. Nowhere in it is Ravitz advocating this model. He’s talking about how he is using this model and thinks that it can be a wealth generator. He hasn’t even sold his first renovated house yet; he just thinks he will sell it in August or September.

Strip away all the dressing up of the article and you could title it, “Guy who sells houses improves his house and plans to sell it for a profit, and if it works he will keep doing it.”

First, you don’t really need a VPN to view Plex content. Plex can be configured to require a secure connection. That ought to be enough. But if you want the VPN tunnel for some reason, the answer is simple: self-host your own VPN server. I recommend OpenVPN or Wireguard.

OP, I just wanted to say thank you for writing such a good title. It’s rare to get such an informative, clickbait-free title these days.

Ugh, this happened to me during a minor release. For whatever reason I had to lug the PC into my office, connect keyboard and mouse, boot it up, and press a key. Then it would boot normally again. I get jealous of those of you with servers that have those remote KVM capabilities.

That looks really good. Which dashboard software is it?

I’m not familiar with how firewalls for a network interface card work. Unless you mean the firewall in the virtualized operating system?

Sounds like you may have already settled on audiobookshelf, but Plex can easily be used to host all of your audiobooks. You just use a music library.

Someone wrote a great walkthrough here.

I do a few things to keep track of my installed services.

1. I run an instance of Heimdall, which is an utterly simple launcher. All of my services with administration panels get added here.
2. I maintain an excel sheet with all of my assigned IPs. It doesn’t matter if it’s a VM, a container, an iPhone, or some other hardware device. Everything is assigned a static IP and added to the excel list.
3. When I’m creating containers and VMs in Proxmox, I make sure that the proxmox ID of the container or VM is the same as the final octet of the IPV4 IP address. So if my Heimdall service is set up on 192.168.1.155, then the Heimdall LXC gets ID 155. I do this so that I can quickly look up the IP of any service in Proxmox without having to open my spreadsheet.

If you follow this convention, then you could easily export the IDs of all of your proxmox containers and VMs by following the instructions here. Make a few transformations to turn the IDs into IP addresses, and you have a .csv you could import elsewhere.

I’m sure someone has made a tool to do this already somewhere. On Github, xezpeleta made an inventory script “to grab proxmox nodes. This will also try to grab the IP if you have the guest agent installed.” I bet there are others out there.

I got to Rule 16 here. I had problems because the captcha contained chess notation, so for me to get past it I had to also regenerate the captcha to one that didn’t violate any of the other rules. After five attempts I gave up.

I feel like I play this game every 12 weeks.

One sec. The URL got replaced when I tried to also include an image.

Forums may be in the “long tail” of the internet experience, I guess, but we are definitely not past them.

Water and an X-Box controller. What could possibly go wrong?

There’s no end in sight.

You just know that John Oliver is sitting at home right now laughing his ass off at the memes, and then screaming into a pillow because he can’t talk about it anywhere due to the writer’s strike.

Obviously I can’t be sure without knowing exactly which restaurant it is, but it is probably a message in response to how the delivery apps were capturing customer tips and delivery fees for themselves and sharing nothing with the restaurant. There was a period of time where restaurants were getting added to delivery apps without the restaurant’s consent. They’re probably trying to make you feel like you’re supporting them by paying the tips and fees directly to them.

Over at Lemmy.ninja we maintain a community for finding communities called Community Search Tips. We started this because it was surprisingly hard to figure out what to subscribe to when you’re brand new. Probably the best resource for finding communities is the feddit.de Community browser. I like it because the results are sorted by post count, which is helpful for finding active communities.

Here’s my subscribed list as of right now. (Keep in mind my cake day is June 13.)

• News@beehaw.org
• Selfhosted@lemmy.world
• You Should Know@lemmy.world
• Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world
• Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org
• World News@lemmy.ml
• Entertainment@beehaw.org
• Politics@beehaw.org
• homeassistant@lemmy.world
• Apple@lemmy.ml
• Television@lemmy.world
• Plex@lemmy.ml
• Best of Lemmy@lemmy.world
• Community Search Tips@lemmy.ninja

Actually, “autotune of art” is about the best description of AI Art I’ve heard in a long time.

Well, you can just feed AI a prompt and take the image that comes out, but that’s not how people do things anymore. AI art generation is now a complex set of image generation, in-/outpainting, tweaking, etc. I spent a couple of hours last night updating myself on how it is done, and I was shocked at all the changes that have taken place in the last six months. Now people are even passing their art through AI model subsets that they have trained themselves in order to get specific results, like specific backgrounds, vehicles, buildings… it’s incredible.