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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Instead of one super chunky battery, how about a laptop with replaceable batteries, in combination with a UPS?

    UPS is so you can actually replace the laptop battery with a spare one , even during a power outage. Just run the laptop on AC from the UPS while changing batteries. Or see if you can find a UPS with a long lasting battery. Entry level ones only have like 15-30 minutes of battery life though, since they’re more intended for safe shutdowns or brownouts.


  • You might want to look up SMR vs CMR, and why it matters for NASes. The gist is that cheaper drives are SMR, which work fine mostly, but can time out during certain operations, like a ZFS rebuild after a drive failure.

    Sorry don’t remember the details, just the conclusion that’s it’s safer to stay away from SMR for any kind of software RAID

    EDIT: also, there was the SMR scandal a few years ago where WD quietly changed their bigger volume WD Red (“NAS”) drives to SMR without mentioning it anywhere in the speccs. Obviously a lot of people were not happy to find that their “NAS” branded hard drives were made with a technology that was not suitable for NAS workload. From memory i think it was discovered when someone investigated why their ZFS rebuild kept failing on their new drive.



  • This sounds like a FOSS utopian future :)

    There’s a few projects that have started towards this path with single-click deployable apps, you could even say HomeAssistant OS does this to some extent my managing the services for you.

    I believe one of the biggest hurdle for a “self hosting appliance” is resilience to hardware failure. Noone wants to loose decades of family photos or legal documents due to a SSD going bad , or the cat spilling water on their “hosting box”. So automated reliable off-site backups and recovery procedures for both data and configs is key.

    Databox from BBC / Nottingham University is also a very interesting concept worth looking in to:

    A platform for managing secure access to data and enabling authorised third parties to provide the owner authenticated control and accountability.









  • The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.

    Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.

    You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just “link” someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room

    Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord




  • With everything stored in a single file, does that mean you need to close Treedome on ComputerA before it can by synced to ComputerB?

    If computerA makes an edit in one note while computer B makes an edit in another note, does that create a sync conflict? (Assuming syncing with Nextcloud, syncThing or similar)?



  • Maybe it’s a different culture, or matter of car and people density, but in my country (Norway) most people cycle on the sidewalk. Including kids of course, from the age of 10 they can cycle to school instead of having to walk.

    Many footpaths here are also officially designated “cycling and walking paths”. Generally the only cyclists you see in the road are sports cyclists in racing bicycles and tight skin suits.

    The thinking here is that cyclists and pedestrians are both “soft traffic participants” so they share a space, while “hard traffic participants” like cars, trucks and motorcycles are kept separate.

    Pedestrians do have right of way over cyclists. As the heavier faster party, cyclists have the responsibility to avoid conflict, by giving right of way, and slowing down and/or chiming their bell to signal their presence before passing pedestrians.

    Personally, if I was told that tomorrow I’m only allowed to cycle on the road, I would get rid of my bike. If I’m gonna be on the road full of lorries busses and SUVs going 60kph, I’d rather just be in my car. It’s just not worth the risk and constant peril. This is in a more suburban and industrial/commercial setting, where the sidewalks have gaps to buildings, and pedestrians are far apart.

    I can however see how in a dense, crowded downtown area where the cars mostly drive slow and the sidewalks are dense with people, that cycling in the road makes more sense.

    Thinking about it the only roads with 30kph limit and a sidewalk are in the very center of the city. All other places with 30kph are basically neighbourhoods etc where there are no sidewalks and everybody shares the road. Roads here with a dedicated sidewalk also have higher speed limits that what a casual cyclist can achieve


  • People often rode them on sidewalks posing a danger to people walking.

    I’ve seen this sentiment around, but where else are you supposed to ride eScoooters and bicycles? Of course ideally they belong in the bike lane, but most places don’t have bike lines, so the alternatives are sidewalks or in the road with cars.

    If we’re gonna get people out of cars, we need to recognize that walking+transit doesn’t work for everyone a lot of people and that a bicycle/ eScooter is the solution (look at Amsterdam/ Copenhagen how well bicycles work) , but bike lanes don’t get built overnight, especially when few people cycle, if their banished from the safe sidewalk and only allowed to cycle in the dangerous road.

    (I’ve lumped bikes and eScooters together since they both solve the same problem of rapid personal transport, both having speeds of 20-30 kph which is significantly more than pedestrians but less than cars)