Your ps output doesn’t show systemd as running. The only output is the grep command itself.

If you want to play files over SMB, you can just open the SMB mount in the file explorer and double click it. On Windows you can mount it as a network drive (like V: for videos) so even non-technical users understand it. I don’t understand how mpv is easier for that use case.

With systems like Jellyfin and Plex, you can (and should!) turn off transcoding when streaming at home. The only times you should enable transcoding are when:

1. You’re away from home on a slow internet connection (or your home internet has slow upload speed); or
2. You’re streaming to a less powerful device that can’t handle the full bitrate of the video.

Transcoding is very useful, because otherwise you’d need multiple copies of the same movie to handle different environments. Transcoding can dynamically adjust the bitrate based on the connection speed.

If they want to try new distros, maybe try Fedora with KDE? Installing the Nvidia drivers isn’t too difficult.

For RTX 20 series and above, it’s recommended to use Nvidia’s open-source drivers. The instructions for how to switch on Fedora are here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Kernel_Open. Note that this is not Nouveau, which is a different open-source Nvidia driver not made by Nvidia themselves.

you can not properly control dependencies per project otherwise.

Says who? Use proto for your tooling (which lets you lock the version per project), and a lockfile for your app’s dependencies.

Devcontainers work fine without an immutable distro, too.

I wonder if Google will ever release a new version of the Coral, with some of the newer TPU tech.

(yes, I know Google handed that off to Asus…)

I’m 95% sure the settlement with the publishers would have included a clause requiring the Internet Archive to delete all “infringing” material in their possession.

I have mixed feelings. I’m glad they survived the lawsuits, and now they can spend their funding on their actual goals rather than it going towards lawyers.

On the other hand, it’s really sad that they had to delete so much of their archive - over half a million books, and a bunch of recordings from their Great 78 Project (which was archiving 300k+ music albums released between ~1900 and 1950). A lot of the things that can’t be archived are eventually going to become lost media.

This is a great post that I hadn’t seen before. Thanks for the link!

I feel the same about software development. For personal projects, I’ll often use a technology stack I’m very familiar with, like C# and MySQL on a Debian Linux server. Maybe not the fanciest, but they’re proven, reliable technologies that have been around for a long time, and will likely still be around a long time from now.

New frameworks, libraries, and languages pop up all the time, but some of the ecosystems move way too quickly. I have some Node.js sites I built years ago that I can’t even run any more without major changes.

Relevant: https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/happiness-is-a-boring-stack.html

I wish there was a law stipulating that smart devices must allow for local control. That’d never happen in the USA (since companies couldn’t make as much money selling the data, and we can’t hurt the poor companies’ revenue streams), but maybe it’s happen in Europe one day.

It was a feature built in to the web browser, providing a website, file sharing, a music player, a photo sharing tool, chat, a whiteboard, a guestbook, and some other features.

All you needed to do was open the browser and forward a port, or let UPnP do it (since everyone still had UPnP enabled back then), and you’d get a .operaunite.com subdomain that anyone could access, which would hit the web server built into the browser.

This was back in 2008ish, when Opera was still good (before it was converted to be Chromium-powered). A lot of people still used independent blogs back then, rather than everything being on social media, so maybe it was ahead of its time a bit.

“cloud” still mostly means services like AWS and Google Cloud. People don’t refer to Hetzner dedicated servers as “cloud” for example.

I’m sad that Opera Unite failed. It was the closest thing to self-hosting for regular non-technical people.

They should say at least one thing that’s unique to the cloud, though.

Dual-booting works fine. You can even have more than two OSes - for a while I was running Windows 10, Fedora, and Debian. Ended up sticking with Fedora.

base RAM usage down super low (50MB to 100MB range)

A base Debian system (minimal netinstall with nothing selected in the tasksel step) doesn’t use much more than this, or at least it didn’t in the last stable release. For https://dnstools.ws/ I have a few VPSes with 256MB RAM that run Debian and the DNSTools worker. They run fine.

The article is very confusingly written. Maybe AI? It’s conflating “cloud” hosting (AWS, etc) with renting hosting infrastructure (which includes the cloud, but also things we don’t refer to as “cloud”, like dedicated servers, VPS services, and shared hosting).

This paragraph makes it sound like Amazon were the first company to allow renting their servers:

As companies such as Amazon matured in their own ability to offer what’s known as “software as a service” over the web, they started to offer others the ability to rent their virtual servers for a cost as well.

but Linux-based virtual servers have been a thing for 20+ years or so, first with Linux-VServer then with OpenVZ. Shared servers in general date back to the mainframes of the 60s and 70s.

Similarly, this paragraph makes it sound like the only two choices are either to use “the cloud” or to run your own data center:

Cloud computing enables a pay-as-you-go model similar to a utility bill, rather than the huge upfront investment required to purchase, operate and manage your own data centre.

Pika is a GUI for Borg.

Rsync is doable, but it’s not great since you essentially only have one backup set. If a file gets corrupted and you don’t notice before the next backup is done, you won’t be able to restore it. Borg’s deduping is good enough to keep lots of history - I do daily backups and keep every day for the past two weeks, every week for the past three months, and every month indefinitely (until I run out of space and need to prune it). Borgmatic handles pruning the backups that are out of retention.

I’m using Fedora KDE and haven’t set up backups on my desktop PC yet, but on Linux servers (both at home and “in the cloud”) I usually use Borgbackup with Borgmatic. All my systems have two backup destinations: My home server and a storage VPS, both via SSH.

Looks like Pika Backup is a GUI for Borgbackup, so it should be a good choice. Vorta is also popular. GNOME apps tend to focus on simple, easy to use GUIs with minimal customization, so it’s possible Vorta is more configurable. I haven’t tried either.

Don’t forget the 3-2-1 policy: you should have at least three copies of your data, in at least two different mediums (hard drives, “cloud”, Blu-rays, tape, etc), one of which is off-site (cloud, a NAS at a friend’s or family member’s house, etc). If you’re looking for cloud storage, Hetzner storage boxes are great value. Some VPS providers have good sales (less than $3/TB/month) during Black Friday.

Definitely going to fill this out once I get some free time. What will the data be used for?