My primary use case is safeguarding my important personal artifacts (family photos, digitized paperwork, encryption key / account recovery / 2FA backups) against drive failure (~2TB), followed by my decently sized Plex server (23TB), immich, nextcloud, and various other small things like selfhosted bitwarden, grocy, ollama, and stuff like that.

I run all of my stuff off of a 6 bay Synology (more drives helps with capacity efficiency as double redundancy with 6 drives costs you 30% and I wanted to be protected against drive failures during rebuilding) with an Intel nuc on top to run plex/jellyfin transcoding using quicksync instead of loading the poor nas with cpu transcoding, I also run ollama on the nuc since it has faster cores than the nas.

The last I heard about that it turned out that the inclusion of a non free dependency was a packaging mistake and has been supposedly fixed

“The sdk-secrets repository and packages will no longer be referenced from the client apps, since that code is not used there.”

My retirement account has roughly doubled between Dec 2021 and now, I basically only invest in mutual funds and ETFs with a medium risk, low fees, and high return according to Morningstar ratings (I’m not sure how reliable those metrics are but it’s what shows up when browsing funds on fidelity and it seems to be picking good options so far)

Not sure about Facebook since authenticating for private videos is a hurdle, but for my partner who uses a mac I downloaded open video downloader which is just a foss GUI for ytdl, it also keeps ytdl up to date which is a requirement for me since I don’t want to be called when it stops working. I think on windows you have to manually install msvc2010redist but besides that it seems to just work out of the box.

Wait you can train the Futo keyboard? I tried it a while ago and noticed the poor accuracy and decided to shelve it for a while.

The key difference is that during normal use, the private key of the passkey doesn’t leave the device (or password manager). The passkey basically comes in 2 parts, the public and private (secret) part. In order to log in, the website presents a cryptographic challenge that is only solvable using your private key - and crucially you can solve the challenge without revealing your private key. An attacker could get your answer to the challenge and still be unable to solve additional challenges without the private part of your passkey.

This of course makes it basically impossible to manually log in using a passkey and a keyboard, without any password manager to do the cryptographic calculations (unless you have a LOT of paper and time), but the security advantage of making it near impossible to be phished is generally regarded as a net positive. In order to steal a passkey there would need to be a vulnerability in the software, since passkeys make it much harder to trick a user into giving it away (since tricking the user into logging in on a fake website doesn’t work due to the aforementioned cryptography, the main way to steal a passkey would be to trick the user into exporting it - which is a much higher bar).

If you mean the “passkeys” that are becoming popular as a “password replacement”, it’s basically speaking a public private keypair. What makes it more secure is that, under normal conditions (aside from backing up the passkey), the private “secret” part of the keypair never leaves the app or device it’s stored on. It’s only used temporarily to sign messages and prove that you have the secret key, unlike a password which needs to be sent securely to a server to validate.

You could in theory store a backup on a USB drive but since passkeys are new, it highly depends on the password manager you use to store the passkey. Since passkeys are more complex than something you can memorize/type, it has to be stored in a password manager of some sort to be useful, so you would need to check that password manager allows backing up passkeys. There is currently work being done to standardize the formats/protocols to transfer passkeys so it seems this is very much up in the air. For example, I use BitWarden which stores passkeys, but it seems like I can only add or delete passkeys to an entry, not export them and apparently they get exported with the passwords when the vault is exported. BitWarden also syncs your vault to every logged in device though so you could see that as a form of backup. Going one step further, even though BitWarden doesn’t have a passkey export/backup feature yet (in addition to Bitwarden’s vault export), the self-hosted server also stores all your passwords including passkeys in regular files which also can be backed up (this is how I back up my VaultWarden instance) - although it would probably be hard to use that backup in any other way besides restoring it onto a BitWarden server instance.

Edit: I didn’t realize passkeys were exported with the vault export, since I haven’t used it and noticed that editing an entry doesn’t allow you to view passkey data - only remove, updated my comment to reflect that.

I concur about rechargeables - it doesn’t seem common for devices that take AA or AAA to have a battery gauge and it would be nice to be able to check the level on my rechargeables stock so I can know if I should top them off without needing to put each of them into the charger.

First I’ll say, if you aren’t able to boot a windows installer off of a flash drive (and nothing’s wrong with your flash drive and you created it without errors and there isn’t a setting in bios preventing you from booting it like disabled USB boot) then it could be a hardware issue that Linux won’t fix (it’s not clear how you tried to reinstall windows). But if you’re able to get to the windows logo or the menu for safe mode then it sounds like it “POSTs” (gets past showing the bios screen) and windows should be reinstallable. In short, I think it’s unlikely to be a problem that only Linux can fix if you want to stick with windows.

That said, if you are otherwise interested in trying Linux and create a USB installer, most will allow you to exit the installer or choose to go into a temporary “live desktop” where nothing is saved, so it’s a good opportunity to try out how that distro feels to use - just don’t save anything important. And if you do end up installing either OS, you can use that “live mode” to use programs to back up any files from your main hard drive to another plugged in drive.

Either that or charging a micro transaction for loading the page. But yeah the goal is to make it cost a small amount that is insignificant to a regular user but adds up to a huge amount at the scale of a spam farm. And it’s also the same rationale behind hashing passwords with multiple rounds. It adds a tiny lag when you log in correctly but adds an insane amount of work if you’re checking every phrase in a password cracking dictionary using an offline attack because it adds up. (In the online scenario you just block them after a few attempts)

Yes I do this. Same exact library folders so I can let my friends use whatever they prefer. If everything is named in a Plex friendly way it should just work in jellyfin.

My main complaint is when it decides to just stop casting to Chromecast in the middle of episodes randomly - then I have to open the app, reconnect, and resume.

Also I find the Chromecast controls stop responding frequently making it so I can’t pause what I’m watching - it’ll like disconnect from the Chromecast but keep playing.

My partner also complains about lots of bugs on the iOS app.

I would just accept the terms and disable wifi, or if you don’t want to double nat just use a switch and accept the terms / login on every device connected to the switch.

Is running a pds really equivalent to running your own instance? As I understand it, 2 friends running their own pds cannot federate without the centralized relay which still can’t be self hosted.

I’ve done a backup swap with friends a couple times. Security wasn’t much of a worry since we connected to each other’s boxes over ssh or wireguard or similar and used tools that allowed encryption. The biggest challenge for us was that in my selfhosting friend group we all prefer different protocols so we had to figure out what each of us wanted to use to connect and access filesystems and set that up. The second challenge was ensuring uptime and that the remote access we set up for each other stayed up - and that’s what killed the project as we all eventually stopped maintaining the remote access and nobody seemed to care - so if I were to do it again I would make sure all participants have alerts monitoring their shared endpoint.

Federation sounded interesting so I looked at the website and it sounds like on prem can’t yet federate with people using “cloud” which I guess is the hosted version - they can only federate with other on-prem instances.

It looks promising though and would be cool to host my own instance and still chat with friends.

I can’t wait until the immich photo editor gets enabled and hopefully it eventually duplicates all the google photos editor features because that’s the only reason I keep around the google photos app.

Probably because he already did an nft collection apparently, according to the article.

I’m glad to clear it up! It’s a super powerful tool, and I still occasionally skip the automation and just use it for manual searches since it reduces that process to a single click to search all configured torrent sites and a single click to download and have the rest automatically handled.

Before when I was visiting friends and wanted to quickly add something to plex, I used to need remote access to my torrent client and separate remote access to my NAS filesystem to move/rename files when downloads finish which was a really manual process. Now all I need is the reverse-proxied sonarr/radarr UI since it handles moving/copying/renaming on download completion - and while the UI isn’t mobile-first, it’s very usable and feels less error-prone than moving/renaming files remotely using a file explorer app.

I mean yeah there’s a lot of stuff it does, but you can pick and choose what you want to use it for so it depends on what you would find useful - you don’t have to use the full automation. I started just by using it as a read-only way to see what movies I had and in what qualities and keep things organized. You can use it as a manual interface to do one-off downloads - basically just as an interface to search 5 torrent sites in 1 place where you are still picking exactly what you want it to download. You can use it only to rename files to a consistent format. So there are a lot of ways to use the various features of sonarr/radarr besides automatic downloads. You’re not forced to go all-in and out of the box it doesn’t start automatically downloading until you enable that.

I think it’s a common misconception that if you use sonarr/radarr you have to use download automation and set up trackers but it’s not the case. It’s a useful library organization tool even if you don’t ever have it download anything.