I don’t really engage with the online mechanics in Elden Ring… Maybe I should? I’ve put hundreds of hours into the game otherwise. I rate and leave messages but I’ve never summoned help for co-op or invaded people except for Varre’s quest where I always just get obliterated by people who are way better prepared than me.

Backups need to be reliable and I just can’t rely on a community of volunteers or the availability of family to help.

So yeah I pay for S3 and/or a VPS. I consider it one of the few things worth it to pay a larger hosting company for.

I’m from the Midwest US and I know there are words and sounds I pronounce with a Midwestern accent but I can still type and spell them correctly.

If’n I typ lik dis den o’course people gonna think I hev the big dumb or that I’m a mole from a Redwall book.

Look upon what thou has twat and ponder it.

Yeah the golden age of streaming has long passed. Now it’s an expensive, ad-ridden fragmented mess of data harvesting.

I intentionally do not host my own git repos mostly because I need them to be available when my environment is having problems.

I make use of local runners for CI/CD though which is nice but git is one of the few things I need to not have to worry about.

Alternatively what you’re describing sounds like SponsorBlock but for podcasts. You probably wouldn’t have to rehost the actual audio files to accomplish this, just have a podcast client/addon that allows user submissions for ad segments and a database somewhere that can host the metadata for ad breaks.

Biggest issue is probably that you’re probably building or forking an existing podcast app to do it, and some podcasts dynamically insert ads so it’s possible that peoples downloaded files could have different ad segments/times.

Do you have any links or guides that you found helpful? A friend wanted to try this out but basically gave up when he realized he’d need an Nvidia GPU.

I’ve been testing Ollama in Docker/WSL with the idea that if I like it I’ll eventually move my GPU into my home server and get an upgrade for my gaming pc. When you run a model it has to load the whole thing into VRAM. I use the 8gb models so it takes 20-40 seconds to load the model and then each response is really fast after that and the GPU hit is pretty small. After I think five minutes by default it will unload the model to free up VRAM.

Basically this means that you either need to wait a bit for the model to warm up or you need to extend that timeout so that it stays warm longer. That means that I cannot really use my GPU for anything else while the LLM is loaded.

I haven’t tracked power usage, but besides the VRAM requirements it doesn’t seem too intensive on resources, but maybe I just haven’t done anything complex enough yet.

DuckDNS is great… but they have had some pretty major outages recently. No complaints, I know it’s an extremely valuable free service but it’s worth mentioning.

Cloudflare has an api for easy dynamic dns. I use oznu/docker-cloudflare-ddns to manage this, it’s super easy:

docker run \
  -e API_KEY=xxxxxxx \
  -e ZONE=example.com \
  -e SUBDOMAIN=subdomain \
  oznu/cloudflare-ddns

Then I just make a CNAME for each of my public facing services to point to ‘subdomain.example.com’ and use a reverse proxy to get incoming traffic to the right service.

765 movies (~4.5 TB)

161 tv series (~7.2 TB)

About a year ago 6TB storage was no longer cutting it since I was constantly having to hunt for media to delete or downgrade quality in order to make more room. I bought five 14TB drives and put them in a big zfs pool so I don’t have to do that anymore.

Google is stuck because they can’t actually improve user experience without threatening their revenue model.

Yes, resolution is not the only factor. Bitrate is equally if not more important.

It’s kind of crazy how off the rails this series got later down the line.

I use Ansible on WSL to run Powershell scripts on Windows using VSCode. I’m surprised it works as well as it does.

That would require Congress to act and Congress is barely capable of accomplishing the bare minimum to keep the budget running so the entire world isn’t thrown into chaos. Asking them to do anything that actually protects consumer rights is going to take either an emergency or an extreme electoral shift.

They want to make VPNs illegal too.

For 99% of people an online password manager like Bitwarden or LastPass is going to significantly help them manage passwords securely despite the risks associated with cloud services. Most people can’t handle self hosting Bitwarden or syncing a Keepass database by themselves. Without an easy to access and easy to use online option people will revert to significantly riskier methods like password reuse or using some sort of repeatable/guessable pattern.

For the 1% of people who want more security there are options like Vaultwarden or Keepass. Even then it’s not uncommon to make mistakes and lose data/access or leave some sort of vulnerability exposed. The attack surface is a lot smaller than a public service though which is beneficial.

You could, but that information gets stale pretty quickly and is tricky to do with the ACLs.

I want to criticize this but I have multiple production environments with no DHCP and the process for provisioning new servers is basically “Guess an ipv4 address and if you pick one that’s already in use the build will fail and you can guess again.”

This is arguably better which is a little embarrassing.

Don’t even bother rebuilding the bridge, my imaginary hover train will be even cheaper and faster.

That’s been my problem. It’s overpriced for just a single camera considering I already manage a big storage pool that my other services can use. But do I want to lock myself into buying other Ubiquity IP cams down the road?

Don’t the Ubiquity doorbells require a ‘dream machine’ storage appliance for recording video? I didn’t think there was a way to use your own storage anymore which has been my main hesitation in getting one.

His friend? Albert Einstein.

You’re likely thinking of Empress who has a number of personality issues… transphobia definitely being one of them.

Burnout and that free off-road ATV game that came along with the later PS2s are both responsible for my taste in music.

It’s utterly ridiculous how copyright law has been twisted to erode the very idea of ownership. Does it have software on it? Well then it’s not just against the terms of service… It’s illegal!

Are you using s3 for storage or block storage? S3 is pretty cheap but I’m wondering if Cloudfront would still help me with the load on the ec2 instance when federation traffic is slamming it.

Are you using cloudfront?

I don’t think Steam’s business model works well for Movies/TV. Besides delivering the game files after your initial purchase Steam also continues to host and deliver update files for games over time, as well as lots of extras like syncing game saves, the workshop for mods, etc. I like having a centralized service that offers these features and acts a launcher for games because it’s very convenient. These features are a huge value add that makes the service very attractive over piracy.

But for Movies/TV the main thing I want is the ability to watch the content, at a high quality, on whatever device I want, whenever I want to watch it. Theoretically this shouldn’t be to hard, but with the way all the rights work it’s effectively impossible for any streaming service to offer this. Content gets removed all the time, it’s spread across a ton of different services that all offer a different experience. In a vain attempt to thwart pirates it’s a pain in the ass to watch content offline so it’s unreliable at best.

The only way to get the experience I want with Movies/TV is to pirate the content.

Google Play Music hooked me by letting me upload my entire library. I used Songza to discover new music (playlists curated by real humans).

Google bought Songza and shut it down. Raised the price of Google Music multiple times, forced me over to YouTube Premium, raised the price again multiple times and got rid of everything that made the service appealing.

I’ve been in music limbo since I dropped it entirely and yeah it’s kind of sad.

There was a golden age of Netflix where I basically stopped pirating movies and TV too.

Now streaming is a fragmented ad-ridden nightmare and I pirate more than ever before. It’s not like it’s free either, I pay for a VPN, disk storage, let alone the time and maintenance.

If I could buy (and actually own) high quality digital copies of movies/tv with no bullshit at a reasonable price that would be a serious value proposition that would beat out the hassles that come along with piracy.

I switched from docker compose to pure Ansible for deploying my containers. Makes managing config and starting containers across multiple hosts super easy. I considered virtualizing too but decided it didn’t offer me enough advantages. If I ever have an issue with the host OS I just reinstall using a preseed file and then rerun my playbooks and it’s ready to go.

I started using Checkmk recently after it was mentioned here and I really like it. I’d used Zabbix a bit but was annoyed at how much work it took to get it to do what I want. Checkmk was a lot better right out of the box.

Exactly. Explaining to a computer what a photo of a dog looks like is super hard. Every rule you can come up with has exceptions or edge cases. But if you show it millions of dog pictures and millions of not-dog pictures it can do a pretty decent job of figuring it out when given a new image it hasn’t seen before.

I sort of feel like it’s correctly-rated. It’s a serviceable third person cover shooter with an interesting setting and some great visuals. The reveal of “you’re the real monster here” has a good amount of impact but it’s hard to totally land that message when the game offers no alternative.

The main problem was that all that was a bit of a pleasant surprise. The good parts of the game were sort of hidden behind the disguise of a generic military shooter. The box art couldn’t possibly be more boring. It sold very poorly and gained momentum later for being actually good.

It’s a bummer to see it leave Steam knowing that less access to it will mean less people get to check it out.

The narrative is something that can really only be experienced once. It’s a game I really enjoyed but I haven’t had an urge to play it again.

This is the right answer. A better backup strategy is an actual backup strategy. Snapshots, drive mirroring, rsync copies, etc aren’t really backups.

Real life sucks so that’s a low bar for VR to surpass.