thirdBreakfast

@thirdBreakfast@lemmy.world
7 Post – 145 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

I read somewhere that GoPros and other action cameras are one of the least used purchases, so I figured "that should mean there's plenty on eBay". So grabbed up second hand bargain, played around with it for a couple of weeks, bought some extra batteries and other accessories, and since then it's sat in the cupboard except for a single occasion.

Turns out you don't need an action cam if you're not getting any action.

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Guide to Self Hosting LLMs with Ollama.

  • Download and run Ollama
  • Open a terminal, type ollama run llama3.2

+1 for the main risk to my service reliability being me getting distracted by some other shiny thing and getting behind on maintenance.

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Me too. I've been carrying it around in my head as "the time we listened to scientists, and almost everyone worked together on some short term pain for worldwide long term gain". I was even hoping we might do something like that again.

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Infrastructure:
  • Proxmox VE - everything's virtualised on Debian, mostly in docker inside LXC's for neat backup/restore and moving between nodes
  • NGINX Proxy Manager - in front of most of my homelab services so they have https certificates
  • Tailscale - access everything, everywhere, including on phone, securely
  • Uptime Kuma - monitoring, with ntfy notifications
  • apt cacher NG - unnecessary caching of apt updates
Apps:
Currently in testing on the dev server:
  • neko - virtualised browser. Been experimenting with this in a container with a VPN for really simple secure browsing - ie launch it, do your online banking and then destroy the container.
  • Dashy - I go through periods of wanting a pretty home page with all my services, set it all up, then fail to actually use it and eventually delete it, then hear about another cool one...
  • Sharry - securish file sharing. I don't love just emailing my accounts off to the accountant.
  • LimeSurvey - survey software (like Survey Monkey) - just something I'm testing for work
  • Omada controller - I've got a TP-Link switch and WAP that don't really need centrally controlled, but you know, can be.
  • A couple of development environment LXCs I use VS Code in

I still have not landed on a music system. I've put some of my library on Jellyfin, and tried a couple of apps with, but haven't hit on a good combination yet. [edit:formatting}

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The Debian thong made me laugh. Who is buying this? For themselves, their partners? I'm imagining Christmas morning when I'm trying to explain the value of this gift you've just opened.

Would be handy for attaching your name badge, or if you need to put those little hard drive screws somewhere so you don't lose them.

E. Jean Carroll could buy it off them for the lols.

I've just been down this exact journey, and ended up settling on Kavita. It has all the browse, search and library stuff you'd expect. You can download or read things in the web interface. I'm only using it for epub and PDF books, but its focus is comics and manga so I expect it to shine there.

I don't think it does mobi, but since I use Calibre on my laptop to neaten up covers and metadata before I drop books on to the server it's a simple matter to convert the odd mobi I end up with. Installation (using docker inside an LXC) was simple.

It's been a really straightforward, good experience. Highly recommend. I like it better than AudioBookshelf (which I'm already hosting for audio books) which I also tried, but didn't like as much for inexplicable reasons. I also considered Calibre-Web, but that seemed a bit messy since I guess I'd use Calibre on my laptop to manage my books on a NAS share then serve it headless from the server with Calibre-Web? I might have that completely wrong, I didn't spend any time looking into it because Kavita was the second thing I tried and it did exactly what I wanted.

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Hay is cut from any sort of cereal plant early in it's lifecycle, specifically before the plant starts concentrating it's energy into the seeds. At this stage the plant stalk is sweeter (even to a human - give it a bite). After flowering, the plant is concentrating it's energy into the seeds. By the time it's fully done this (which takes a number of weeks), there is very little protein in the stalk, and it's far less palatable (or nutritious) to animals. The plant stalk is now essentially 'straw'.

Commercial hay can be mowed from a meadow (in Australia usually ryegrass) in which case it will have all sorts mixed in, or from crops intended for making good hay (in Australia usually oats or wheat). Commercial straw (which has a tiny market) is cut after the grain has been harvested from the top of the plant. In commercial broadacre cropping in poor soil areas (the bulk of Australia's grain areas) it's usually better economics to keep your crop residue including straw since the cost to replace the carbon would be higher that what you'd get for the straw after the cost of harvesting it.

Source: I play a lot of Minecraft

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I'm on board with original punctuation going inside the quote, but then to be consistent, capitalization has to as well. So instead of "This comment..." it should be "this comment..." since in the original quote that was just a clause separated by a comma, not its own sentence.

Built my own quad-copter and flew it around. Had to flash plane ESC's with custom firmware, wire it all up manually to a controller and muck around with the values to tune it, then you could hand fly it (very carefully). It was amazing! - an RC plane that could hover.

Nowadays, if I go somewhere and some normie's "flying" a DJ, I'm annoyed with them. It's really breathtaking how good these got so quickly.

If you didn't have to deal with a cumbersome spacesuit, I imagine you could run, but you'd lean over much more towards the horizontal - like maybe 45° or lower, so each 'step' would be a push backwards in line with your longitudinal axis. Don't waste energy by bounding up.

Source: wild speculation.

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My Dad gets confused trying to make a call on his phone, but he can say "Alexa, call Third Breakfast".

We have an emergency button to go around his neck, with an monthly phone plan, which seems to permanently live on the kitchen bench...

Love KeePass, I use it to store all my passwords including to SyncThing, then I keep my KeePass file in my SyncThing instance so I can recover from a disaster. Definitely nothing could go wrong with that ;-)

Lol, I was more thinking Nano is a hufflepuff who's just really easy to be around. Who needs rock climbing when you can just lie in on Sunday mornings scrolling your phone and showing each other memes.

Greta Tintin Thunberg

My NAS and production server run 24/7, I've got a dev server that I turn off if I'm not expecting to use it for a week or so. Usually when I do that, I immediately need it for something and I'm away from home. I have chosen equipment to try and minimize energy use to allow for constant running.

My view on UPS is it's a crucial part of getting your availability percentage up. As my home lab turned into crucial services I used to replace commercial cloud options, that became more important to me. Whether it is to you will depend on what you're running and why.

I've heard that one of the most likely times for hard drives to fail is on power up, and it also makes sense to me that the heating/cooling cycles would be bad for the magnetic coating, so my NAS is configured to keep them spinning, and it hasn't been turned off since I last did a drive change.

I started as more "homelab" than "selfhosted" as first - so I was just stuffing around playing with things, but then that seemed sort of pointless and I wanted to run real workloads, then I discovered that was super useful and I loved extracting myself from commercial cloud services (dropbox etc). The point of this story is that I sort of built most of the infrastructure before I was running services that I (or family) depended on - which is where it can become a source of stress rather than fun, which is what I'm guessing you're finding yourself in.

There's no real way around this (the pressure you're feeling), if you are running real services it is going to take some sysadmin work to get to the point where you feel relaxed that you can quickly deal with any problems. There's lots of good advice elsewhere in this thread about bit and pieces to do this - the exact methods are going to vary according to your needs. Here's mine (which is not perfect!).

  • I'm running on a single mini PC & a Synology NAS setup for RAID 5
  • I've got a nearly identical spare mini PC, and swap over to it for a couple of weeks (originally every month, but stretched out when I'm busy). That tests my ability to recover from that hardware failure.
  • All my local workloads are in LXC containers or VM's on Proxmox with automated snapshots that are my (bulky) backups, but allow for restoration in minutes if needed.
  • The NAS is backed up locally to an external USB that's not usually plugged in, and to a lower speced similar setup 300km away.
  • All the workloads are dockerised, and I have a standard directory structure and compose approach so if I need to upgrade something or do some other maintenance of something I don't often touch, I know where everything is with out looking back to the playbook
  • I don't use a script or Terrafrom to set those up, I've got a proxmox template with docker and tailscale etc installed that I use, so the only bit of unique infrastructure is the docker compose file which is source controlled on Forgejo
  • Everything's on UPSs
  • A have a bunch of ansible playbooks for routine maintenance such as apt updates, also in source control
  • all the VPS workloads are dockerised with the same directory structure, and behind NGINX PM. I've gotten super comfortable with one VPS provider, so that's a weakness. I should try moving them one day. They are mostly static websites, plus one important web app that I have a tested backup strategy for, but not an automated one, so that needs addressed.
  • I use a local and an external UptimeKuma for monitoring, enhanced by running a tiny server on every instance that just exposes a disk free and memory free api that can be consumed by Uptime.

I still have lots of single points of failure - Tailscale, my internet provider, my domain provider etc, but I think I've addressed the most common which would be hardware failures at home. My monitoring is also probably sub-par, I'm not really looking at logs unless I'm investigating a problem. Maybe there's a Netdata or something in my future.

You've mentioned that a syncing to a remote server for backups is a step you don't want to take, if you mean managing your own is a step you don't want to take, then your solutions are a paid backup service like backblaze or, physically shuffling external USB drives (or extra NASs) back and forth to somewhere - depending on what downtime you can tolerate.

Hard agree on helping out your future self. I routinely drop a commands.md file in every project now, and dump any commands in there for creating the dev environment, the build step, any thoughts that might help when I come back in five years.

#2 back and sides, finger length on top

I switched from Copilot to Codeium after only a couple of months of Copilot use - just based on the cost since currently I'm just a hobby coder.

The main difference I've noticed is that Codeium doesn't seem as smart about the local context as Copilot. Copilot would look at how I'm handling promises in a project, and stick to that, whereas Codeium would choose a strategy seemingly at random.

A second, and maybe more telling example, is that I do my accounts using 'plain text accounting' in VS Code. This is a very niche approach to accounting software and I imagine is hardly in the training sets at all - there certainly would not be a lot of public domain text accounts in the particular format (BeanCount) I use in public code repositories. Codeium doesn't make any suggestions for entries as I'm entering transactions, whereas Copilot would see that the account names I'm using are present in another file in the project and suggest them, and very quickly figure out the formatting of transactions and suggest them correctly.

  • Climate change contributing to
  • Climate refugees contributing to
  • Breakdown in social cohesion contributing to
  • Populism, oligarchs, and authoritarianism contributing to
  • Breakdown of international cooperation contributing to
  • Inter-nation conflict contributing to
  • GOTO 10

Good on you. For anyone else inspired, you can support Certbot here, and Let's Encrypt here.

I promise I don't work for them - I was just struck by how phenomenally handy they are.

An M1 MacBook with 16GB cheerfully runs llama3:8b outputting about 5 words a second. A second hand MacBook like that probably costs half to a third of a secondhand RTX3090.

It must suck to be a bargain hunting gamer. First bitcoin, and now AI.

edit: a letter

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Yes, a few. Signal (daily use), LetsEncrypt & Certbot (EFF). It's not enough.

One day I decided I'd spend $x every January (when I do all my other donations) on open source stuff I depend on, and roughly in the proportions I depend on them. It quickly became impossible - I can't just fund Debian (which I use a lot of in VMs), I'd need to think of all their dependencies, same with NGINX, Node etc etc. The mind boggles.

I need something like a Spotify subscription for open source to assuage my guilt of the great value I extract for my personal use of open source.

I started on a similar journey (escaping from Evernote rather than Nextcloud), and ended up on Silverbullet run at home and accessed over Tailscale. It is a bit of a different approach and has a small upfront learning time. I love having all my notes as reasonably plain markdown, so if I ever want to change my solution, my data's in an easily movable format - for example changing to Obsidian would not involve any import/export.

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There's a project called Filebrowser that allows you to edit text files in a web interface. You can just run that on the 192.168.1.2 machine. It's easy to set up simple auth, and you can restrict it to the /data/ directory.

I use the Jellyfin app from the store on my Chromeplay, and there's a couple of Jellyfin iOS apps that work great. Once the server is up, you're gold.

Instructions for avoiding sign in, and side-loading etc

In a different post I mentioned I'd left Dropbox, and that I was replacing Evernote with Obsidian. I had lots of good suggestions for markdown editors, and one that I'd never heard of, but I've been testing today is Silverbullet. It's main appeal to me is that I can use it effectively on iOS since it has a mobile friendly web interface.

My setup is I'm using SyncThing over tailscale to keep my laptop and server in sync, I run a local instance of SilverBullet on my laptop and the wepapp on my iPhone over tailscale to a SilverBullet instance on the homelab server.

+1 for Tailscale. It's a vital piece of the system for me now.

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I'm seconding this. The Pi-supply-dry is getting better, but for similar money to a Pi4 you can get an ex-corporate 1L mini PC (I like the HP G1 800's in a nice case, with engineered cooling, real storage, and easy memory upgrades.

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+1 for Syncthing. I run it on a server at home, then on my MacBook over Tailscale. For web access I run FileBrowser (also over Tailscale) against the same directory.

I love this idea (of just picking something I'm loving each month), it would help me overcome my decision paralysis about who to support.

I'm also on Silverbullet, and from OP's description it sounds like it could be a good fit. I don't use any of the fancy template stuff - just a bunch of md files in a directory with links between them.

I was wishing I had one just recently. I'm not smart enough to get my ancient APC UPS to interface to Debian with the USB cable, so I need a device I can ping that's plugged into the mains (ie not through the UPC) so I can run a script that shuts the server down when the Pi stops responding to the pings.

So that's all it'd need to do - respond to pings when it's powered on. I've ordered a B+ for exactly this job.

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- fiction
    - Abbott, Edwin A_
        - Flatland
            - Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott.epub
            - Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott.jpg
            - Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott.opf
    - Achebe, Chinua
        - Things Fall Apart
            - Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe.epub
            - Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe.jpg
            - Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe.opf

So in each directory that I use to delineate a library, I have a subdirectory for each author (in sort order form). Within each author subdirectory is a subdirectory for each book, with just the title, then the book with (edit - the anti-injection code mangled how I was trying to say the book file name. it's [book name]-[author].[extension])

I didn't invent this, it's just what Calibre spits out. When I buy a new book, I ingest it into Calibre, fix any metadata and export it to the NAS. Then I delete the Calibre library - I'm just using it to do the neatening up work.

Is that a mini? I love those little 1L HP's. I run 3 G2 800's. These are very nicely built and therefore a joy to work on, and sip power when idling. Highly recommend. Also +1 for Proxmox.

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