I would absolutely look into it. Many years ago when Docker emerged, I did not understand it and called it "Hipster shit". But also a lot of people around me who used Docker at that time did not understand it either. Some lost data, some had servicec that stopped working and they had no idea how to fix it.

Years passed and Containers stayed, so I started to have a closer look at it, tried to understand it. Understand what you can do with it and what you can not. As others here said, I also had to learn how to troubleshoot, because stuff now runs inside a container and you don´t just copy a new binary or library into a container to try to fix something.

Today, my homelab runs 50 Containers and I am not looking back. When I rebuild my Homelab this year, I went full Docker. The most important reason for me was: Every application I run dockerized is predictable and isolated from the others (from the binary side, network side is another story). The issues I had earlier with my Homelab when running everything directly in the Box in Linux is having problems when let´s say one application needs PHP 8.x and another, older one still only runs with PHP 7.x. Or multiple applications have a dependency of a specific library when after updating it, one app works, the other doesn´t anymore because it would need an update too. Running an apt upgrade was always a very exciting moment... and not in a good way. With Docker I do not have these problems. I can update each container on its own. If something breaks in one Container, it does not affect the others.

Another big plus is the Backups you can do. I back up every docker-compose + data for each container with Kopia. Since barely anything is installed in Linux directly, I can spin up a VM, restore my Backups withi Kopia and start all containers again to test my Backup strategy. Stuff just works. No fiddling with the Linux system itself adjusting tons of Config files, installing hundreds of packages to get all my services up and running again when I have a hardware failure.

I really started to love Docker, especially in my Homelab.

Oh, and you would think you have a big resource usage when everything is containerized? My 50 Containers right now consume less than 6 GB of RAM and I run stuff like Jellyfin, Pi-Hole, Homeassistant, Mosquitto, multiple Kopia instances, multiple Traefik Instances with Crowdsec, Logitech Mediaserver, Tandoor, Zabbix and a lot of other things.

One reason is because I can. And because of that, I tend to host things myself which I can. This generates cost and work to maintain it on my side and not for others. A few less users from our household on a public instance means more room for others who are just not as tech-savvy and have no other choice as to rely on public instances. So it is a mix of respecting other peoples time, effort and money and a part is just the nerd that wants to find out how it works and how it´s done :-)

Yeah, they had the better technology (Google Video was very bad) and Google had the money.

Oh yes! That one was fantastic. It´s been a long time. Wasn´t it part of the very first Humble bundle?

I am on Mobile (aka lazy), so no link. Simutrans for me, beats every other transport sim. The organic growth of cities and industries that happens while you build and optimize your transport systems is one of the many features I like so much.

Diablo 4 allows that. Let's you choose to get the 4K Textures or not and which languages for Voiceover / Cutscenes. The textures alone decide if you game is 40 or 80 GB.

I was just looking for cheap backup space recently and Hetzners Storage Box BX21 is 13€ per month for 5 TB, 20 Snapshots and unlimited traffic. I did not compare the service with backblaze yet, though.

Oh yes, Dorfromantik! I have this on my radar for a while. It looks so lovely. I did not know about Townscaper, but that looks very chill too.

I have Stardew Valley already, never thought about trying it on the tablet, but that´s something I will do. I love this game, but only played it with Mouse & Keyboard so far.

Thank you very much for your suggestions :-)

Key Performance Indicator

What in Spaghettis name!

Maybe Tandoor for recipes and Groceries from David Shay for shopping lists of all kind. So far the best multi User shopping list / app I ever had.

I had a good laugh looking at the Video on Steam. I am not sure if this will help me to wind-down, more something I might rage-quit in the middle of the night and then need a coffee to calm down again :-> But it does look pretty fun. Thanks for the suggestion :-)

I love Traefik! When I started, I tried NGinx, but could not wrap my head around it. So I tried Caddy. Pretty easy to understand andI used it for a while. Then I had demands Caddy could not do ant stumbled uponTraefik. As you said, a learning curve, butfor me much easier than NGinx. I like that you can put the Traefik config inside the Compose files and that the service only is active in Traefik when the actual Containers are up and running. I added Crowdsec to my external facing Traefik instance and even use a plain Traefik instance for all my internal services also. And it can forward http, https, TCP and UDP.

I run Nextcloud for many, many years. I hosted it for a very long time at Hetzners second lowest tier of Webspace they rent. It was not very fast there (you get what you pay for), but fast enough for our need here. Later I moved it to an Azure VM and after that to my Homeserver where it runs blazingly fast, especially since the last updates they pushed out.

In all that time I never reinstalled. I just upgraded to the newer versions when they were out. The only times I had problems upgrading was when I was hosting at the cheap Webspace instance at Hetzner and an upgrade process took longer than the PHP timeout my very cheap hosting instance provided. So it was never a fault of Nextcloud, but just that I hosted it on basically the cheapest hosting plan I could find.

We use it for file sharing, calendar + contacts (+ Sync with DAVx), Notes and of course Talk. For talk to make full use of Voice + Video calls, you should have a TURN Server, but if you do not use that (if you just text) it was running great even on the Webspace instance at Hetzner.

We are very happy in our family that it exists, that it is free and that it serves us well since many years.

I know nothing about PlexAmp, but could FinAmp be what you search for? Does Music only and let's you grab your songs for offline usage.

Every single one of them sounds like me singing under the shower or when singing in my car.

Thank you for your feedback! I get the impression that it might work if used on a small scale when it´s not public. I guess I will have a new container soon :-)

I always miss Demos for games, but totally forgot that on Steam you can refund within the first 2 hours of gameplay. It should not hurt if it´s used rarely. I can not figure out yet if Slay the Spire is for me (for some games it is pretty clear when reading about them), so this one might be a good opportunity to test it out.

That´s a good idea. A Sci-Fi setting is a nice change from the classic Civ theme. I loved Alpha Centauri back then, could not stop playing. This might scratch that itch. Thank you :-)

You would think so, yes. But to my surprise, my well over 60 Containers so far consume less than 7 GB of RAM, according to htop. Also, of course Containers can network and share services. For external access for example I run only one instance of traefik. Or one COTURN for Nextcloud and Synapse.

Oh wow, that is a lot more usage than I can think of for all of us here, haha! Thank you very much. That sounds very promising.

Oh cool. That looks like it might also be a battery saver and not causing too much excess heat in the tablet :-)

Thanks for the suggestion. "Unfortunately" I grew up with those and know probably each one of them inside out, as they have been replayed multiple times over the decades. But I did not think about SCUMMVM and reading this I get the urge to Talk to Mr. Tentacle Guy again :-)

I played Mini Metro on Android a long time ago... did not remember that I might have it on Windows already too! I think it was in a bundle at one time. Thanks :-)

Setup of the HMAC Key for the CouchDB was indeed the step I struggled with too. I think the first time I either made a mistake or used a broken Website to generate a Base64 value. The 2nd time my mistake was that I put in the Base64 value for the HMAC Key into the jwt.ini AND in the docker-compose.yml. But in the docker-compose.yml COUCHDB_HMAC_KEY, I had to put it unencoded and in the jwt.ini hmac:_default it has to be Base64 encoded. Maybe this is the thing you did wrong too?

I bet you are close!

On the other hand, if you are the only person using the shopping list and your current setup offers you what you need, maybe it is not worth it for you. For me it was (and updating when it runs is super easy, I promise!). The instant sync over all devices is great + it keeps working when I lose reception in a shop and syncs again instantly when I have internet again. But what makes Groceries for me are:

• The ability to have an item on multiple shopping lists if needed and if it is checked off from one list, it is checked of from the other lists too. I stopped forgetting buying stuff that was not available in the 1st shop to get in the 2nd.
• The ability to add items to aisles and move the aisles in different order for each list (every shop I visit has a bit of a different layout). This made shopping super quick for me, because I enter the shop and walk through it exactly once and have everything I need, because it is all in the correct order on the respective list.

Oh, and adding a photo to an item is super useful if you are like me and need very close instructions what to get for your partner if you stand in front of a shelf with 100 different types of cheese which look all exactly the same to you... having a photo is sometimes a life saver for me :-)

Oh wow! That looks like a pretty unique experience. I have a pen, indeed! Thank you very much :-)

The Jet boots I picked up only once so far. I was already bad at that Minigame when it was a thing back in the arcades. The time it takes me to get the boots is not worth it for me. But I must admit that expanding my Drillers abilities to get closer to the Scout by having the option to kill myself due to dwarven stupidity is quite amusing.

Me too, I have a lot of fun with it this season.

That´s quite a list! Thank you :-) I even have a few on that list and will try them out. I did not think about The Witness, but it´s worth a try. I did not finis it on PC, but it has some really hard puzzles in it that keep you occupied for a while at the same place without the need to move around a lot.

The Hexcells series is awesome, played through all of them (of course not through all the random ones in Infinite ;-)), but might be worth to try again on the tablet. I tried Tametsi (also a puzzler), but it did not scale with the High DPI screen and was super tiny.

The thing that stuck with me was that I always had the impression that the Video quality was much worse than on Youtube. IIRC when there was content that was available on both platforms, Youtube had the much better picture and sound. But maybe that was just specific to the content I watched back then. There was not THAT much to see in the beginning, not like today where you can spend 24h straight and always see new stuff :-)

Thank you. Knowing that I am able to deal with them other than trying so sneak around them will make things easier :-)

We designed a track, tried to log the best time we could and brought them to school on a disk the next day. Exchanged disks and tried to beat our buddies time. It always was super exciting trying our buddies creations and to see if the PB was beaten. You always had to wait a day for the results. Asynchronous Multiplayer :-)

Diablo 4 for me too. I did not play much last season, but this one I enjoy a lot. I like the changes regarding loot and crafting and I see myself finally using the Aspects now that they are not consumed, but can be pulled from the codex as often as I want. Previously I saved my good rolled aspects "for later"... and later was usually beyond my playtime for a season :-)

Hmm, what do docker logs -f <container> tell? I made myself a compose file and use traefik. Not on my PC atm, but when I had problems getting it running, I made mistakes with the secrets. But that should show in the logs.

Since we use Nextcloud, we just use Talk. It works well enough for us, but you should also host a TURN/STUN Server with that.

That looks sweet! I never heard about that, looks like a whole series. That´s on the list :-)

Never heard of that! Thanks for the link!

Could it be an MTU issue? Networking van be weird if packets get fragmented unexpectedly, but I see this mostly for IKEv2 and other VPN Services. Try to lower your MTU on the WAN side Maybe?

This was the first Flight Simulator I played with an analogue stick. This blew my mind and I had to have a PC! I only used digital Joysticks up until then.

Oh yes! SMG was the game we bought the day we bought our Wii back then and it is a masterpiece. It is also the only Mario Game I ever "finished" (all Stars with Mario, not Luigi tough). We loved everything in this game. The Music, Level Design, Controls... and whenever we thought that we have seen all, they came up with a new game mechanic that surprised us and was super fun. It was truly a fantastic and memorable experience.