Ourgon · HackerTrans

Ourgon

no profile record

Submissions

Show HN: Spodcast, a Spotify podcast to RSS proxy

github.com

123 pointsby Ourgon4 lata temu37 comments

Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at [the UoT]

youtube.com

11 pointsby Ourgon5 lat temu7 comments

comments

4 lata temudiscuss

I've self-hosted more or less everything from the get-go back when I was working at a telco which provided me with a 4 Mb/s fixed line back in 1996. One of the first things I did was change to a self-hosted mail server with my own domain, the rest quickly followed. Just to name a few, used daily:

- Proxmox to run all mentioned services

- Software router to bind them all together (OpenWRT in a container)

- Database services (Postgresql, Mysql, Redis) used for many of the mentioned services

- Backup services (rsnapshot, custom backup scripts)

- mail services (Exim, Dovecot, Spamassassin, greylistd, dovecot-managesieve)

- web-related things (first Apache, then lighttpd, then nginx) running:

- "Cloud" (first Owncloud, then Nextcloud) with functional equivalents of e.g. Google Docs (Nextcloud Office), Google Reader (Nextcloud News), Google Meet (Nextcloud Talk, Jitsi Meet), Gmail (Rainloop app in Nextcloud, Roundcube), Google Maps (OSM app in Nextcloud), Calendar etc.

- Wiki (first Twiki, then Mediawiki, now Bookstack)

- Media (mpd, Airsonic, Jellyfin, Peertube, Pixelfed)

- version control (first CVS, then Subversion, then Gogs, then Gitea)

- Search (Searx and Recoll)

- big-tech proxies (Invidious, Nitter, libreddit, Spodcast, searx (see Search))

- Video surveillance (Zoneminder)

- Remote application/desktop service (X2go, NoVNC, now experimenting with Kasm)

- P2P services (Transmission, IPFS, MLDonkey (when needed))

- "Chat" services (first Prosody, then ejabberd, then back to Prosody)

- Timelimit service + app on my daughter's phone to keep her screen time in check, I can remotely give her more time when required

- a "stable" and "development" build server (Debian running in containers)

- ...and a lot more

Basic services are divided over a few containers - base, mail, auth. Most services run on a single container - serve. Some get their own container because they are only started irregularly (bookcook, the bookkeeping service) or they should be separated from the rest - p2p, session (remote application/desktop services). I tend to shun docker, preferring to tailor services to my own needs. Currently the only services using docker are Kasm Workspaces [1] and some linuxserver.io instances which I'm experimenting with.

[1] ...with the database (postgresql) and cache (redis) services being redirected to the 'base' container which runs all database services

4 lata temudiscuss

Depends on which one you're using, mine contains a Radeon HD 4670. There is a lot of NVIDIA on the PCI bus but this does not seem to be an obstacle to the thing running flawlessly:

   00:00.0 Host bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Host Bridge (rev b1)
   00:00.1 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
   00:03.0 ISA bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 LPC Bridge (rev b3)
   00:03.1 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
   00:03.2 SMBus: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 SMBus (rev b1)
   00:03.3 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
   00:03.4 RAM memory: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Memory Controller (rev b1)
   00:03.5 Co-processor: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Co-processor (rev b1)
   00:04.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev b1)
   00:04.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev b1)
   00:06.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 OHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev b1)
   00:06.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 EHCI USB 2.0 Controller (rev b1)
   00:08.0 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 High Definition Audio (rev b1)
   00:09.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 PCI Bridge (rev b1)
   00:0a.0 Ethernet controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 Ethernet (rev b1)
   00:0b.0 SATA controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 AHCI Controller (rev b1)
   00:0c.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
   00:15.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
   00:16.0 PCI bridge: NVIDIA Corporation MCP79 PCI Express Bridge (rev b1)
   02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV730/M96-XT [Mobility Radeon HD 4670]
   02:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series]
   03:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR928X Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
   04:00.0 PCI bridge: Texas Instruments XIO2213A/B/XIO2221 PCI Express to PCI Bridge [Cheetah Express] (rev 01)
   05:00.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments XIO2213A/B/XIO2221 IEEE-1394b OHCI Controller [Cheetah Express] (rev 01)

There is some Broadcom as well - the Bluetooth controller, which works fine - as well as some Qualcomm - the wifi controller which, again, works fine.

This is a 'Late 2009 27" iMac', running the internal display as well as an external 1920*1200 24" monitor through a DP->HDMI cable. Everything works, including the silly IR remote control thingy (tested using the IR blaster on my phone).

4 lata temudiscuss

If ever you get tired of Google - and for those who get tired of Apple or Amazon or whomever they have entrusted their digital photo archiving needs to...

Any of the personal cloud things - Nexcloud, Owncloud, Seafile, Syncthing and others - can be used to sync files - and with that photos and videos - from mobile devices to some server somewhere. This can be the server-under-the-stairs, your NAS at home, a wall-wart with a Raspberry Pi and a drive taped together, a VPS or a commercial entity offering these as SaaS. You can keep using your phones with or without Google, that is up to you. If you run the stuff yourself you'll need to install and configure the parts which make it work, if you use a commercial instance you just have to install the relevant app and tell it to sync your data. You can do this in parallel to using Google Photos, just to make sure you have a backup in case Google wants just that one extra piece of personal data to allow you to access your photos which makes you give up on them. Just one more piece... and one more please...

4 lata temudiscuss

Who gets to define the group and who gets to define what is good or bad for the group? Who gets to decide who is in the group and who needs to be cast out? Who gets to speak for the group?

Have a look at the history of politics and pay special notion to those strands which centre around grouping people, whether that be "proletarians versus capitalists", "those_who_belong_to_my_religion versus those_who_do_not", "those of our nation versus those from elsewhere" and now this "those who belong to my identity group versus those who do not".

Also have a look what most of these group-centred ideologies have in common, namely the identification of a specific scapegoat group which is blamed for all the woes - including those caused by the application of the group-centred ideology - which beset the in-group. In Bolshevist Russia is was the Kulaks [1], in Nazi Germany it was the Jews, in theocratic Iran it is "the great Satan" (i.e. the USA and its allies) while in this new "woke" cult it is the "cis-gender heterosexual white man".

The problem with all these group-centred ideologies is that groups do not have a voice, only individuals posing as the group do. Those individuals can gain a lot of power and as such either tend to get corrupted or are drawn to the role of spokesperson because they already are corrupt. Group-centred thinking works well on a small scale - family, small neighbourhood, etc - but it often fails when the members of the group no longer personally can know each other since that makes it possible for the corrupt spokespeople to make their play.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/kulak

4 lata temudiscuss

While I agree to most of the glued/soldered/planned obsolescence criticisms related to applethings I do feel the need to point out those "obsolete" macthings tend to run Linux just fine. I should know, writing this on a 'late 2009 27" iMac' which I got for free due to its video card being broken (which it is no longer, 8 minutes in the oven at 195°C is all it takes) running Debian. While it is also possible to get more recent versions of macOS to run on these things this is not nearly as easy nor useful as running Linux which just supports the hardware without any qualms. Apple does not want you to use older hardware so they don't build macOS for machines which are perfectly capable of running it. Installing unsupported versions is made possible by monkey-patching the release in a rather hit-and-miss fashion, often leaving parts of the hardware (bluetooth, sound, wifi) without or with sub-standard support. All this while Linux runs flawlessly on the same hardware.

4 lata temudiscuss

> I wish more linux laptops had the build quality and support of macbooks

I'm glad my "Linux laptops" are very much not like those macbooks with their glue and solder and "no user-serviceable parts inside (and we really mean it)"

> This isn't a rant from an Apple fan, this is a rant from a laptop fan. ThinkPad's aren't good laptops despite what the guy with the pocket protector says. They are flimsy and feel cheap. They still have 20th century tech (eraser mouse, c'mon!). They are my grandfather's laptop.

The good thing with those machines is that you'll be able to keep on using your grandfather's laptop while those whose grandfathers opted for macbooks are left wanting. I'm using a T42p from 2005, apart from putting in an SSD I have not changed the thing. It was, and still is, a perfectly useable tool.

4 lata temudiscuss

Drop Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Tiktok, NYT, WaPo, Fox and all those other creators of permanent anxiety. Take up farming, buy a plot of land and build your own house, create something. Realise that:

- the climate has always been changing and it always will but humans and most other species survived. It takes an extinction level event to make a big dent in the biosphere

- social inequality is far less now than it has been in earlier times when people often lived or died at the whim of some aristocrat

- there is no shortage of workers, only a shortage of people who want to do a given job for a given reward

- there have always been 'billionaires' and there will always be since having a lot of resources makes it easier to gain more resources. Some billionaires do interesting things with their resources, others lie on them like Smaug. As long as there are enough resources left for the non-billionaires I don't care about them other than doing my best to not feed them if I can

- the media is rubbish. Don't criticise the media, be the media. Corporate media doesn't bite the hand that feeds it so just avoid them (see above).

- corruption is everywhere and has always been, it is not for nothing that Utopia was named so - it does not exist. Just like I try not to feed the billionaires I try not to feed corrupt institutions, occasionally breaking a law or two instead of giving in to their demands. That means they have a stick to hit me with if and when they want but knowing that they always will be able to find that stick means it doesn't make any difference to me

4 lata temudiscuss

Eventually we will but it will take a shake-up of the market by an outsider who does not have an existing business based around cars priced at current levels. Electric cars are far less complex than ICE-based vehicles so there is no real reason for them to be more expensive. The current excuse for their high prices is the cost of the battery pack but battery prices have been on a downward trajectory for a long time now. Eventually a newcomer will find the lure of selling an EV for half of the lowest priced competitor too large to ignore and the rest will be history. That newcomer will be derided by the existing sellers and the media which depends on advertising income from those established actors but that attack won't succeed if the increase in price-performance is large enough.

4 lata temudiscuss

That is the theory, now look at the practice of proprietary software/services and see if the theory holds. It clearly does not, one of the bigger problems with proprietary IT is the lock-in caused by undocumented data formats, services which do not allow bulk data extraction and similar obstacles.

4 lata temudiscuss

Proprietary vs. open is like renting vs. owning without the legal protection offered to renters. If your data is locked in some proprietary format you're beholden to the proprietor who can - and often does - abuse his power by raising prices, adding intrusive 'features', selling access to your eyes and more. No EULA is going to change that since those agreements can be changed more or less at will.

In other words keep your EULA, I don't want it.

4 lata temudiscuss

Selling that excess power is possible, as is buying some extra panels - there is enough space for at least 36 more on just that single roof. For now I choose to add panels - and batteries in the not too distant future, once the market is flooded with used EV-batteries - and continue on my course of decentralising the 'net using 'old' hardware - not a single new product is used in any of my computing endeavours. Most of it is either dumpster-dived and repaired, bought 2nd hand or acquired through places like Freecycle.

4 lata temudiscuss

There is a big difference between "introspection" and "revisionism". The '1619 Project' clearly falls in the latter category and as such deserves to be denounced for the fraud it is, as does its author. As to it being published as an "essay project", the NYT themselves presented it as [The 1619 project is] a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American Slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.

The gray old lady would never have published this. The current incarnation of the NYT is related to its predecessor in name only.

4 lata temudiscuss

Pull the thing out of the house and let it burn outside. It is a relatively small battery so outside it won't do much harm, this in contrast to what it seems to do in that room. Tossing it in the pool is also possible but given the small size that'd be a waste of pool water which would need to be replaced. Just let it burn outside. Use a rake, broom or whatever other long thing at hand to pull the thing outside.

4 lata temudiscuss

After the stack has taken what it needs there are 35 solar panels left on the barn roof. Excess heat is used to heat the upper floor, given that it is well-insulated it needs no additional heating. Problem, solved.

4 lata temudiscuss

I made a rack out of some dumpster-dived supermarket shelves, lumber, a couple of truck air filters and a forced draft fan. The thing doubles as drying cabinet for produce (mint, mushrooms, fruit etc.) by having the equipment in the top half of the rack followed by an air flow divider and 8 rack-sized metal-mesh-covered drying frames. From top to bottom the thing contains:

* HP ProCurve 2910al-24G J9145A 24 port Gigabit switch (managed switch, €47)

* HP DL380G7 with 2xX5675 @3.07GHz, 128GB (ECC) RAM and 8x147GB SAS drives (€450)

* NetApp DS4243 (24x3.5” SAS array, currently populated with 24x650GB 15K SAS drives (4 as inactive spares), €400)

* the mentioned airflow divider

* 8 drying frames

It is managed through Proxmox on Debian and runs a host of services including a virtual router (OpenWRT), serving us here on the farm and the extended family spread over 2 countries. The server-mounted array is used as a boot drive and to host some container and VM images, the DS4243 array is configured as a JBOD running a mixture of LVM/mdadm managed arrays and stripe sets used as VM/container image and data storage. I chose mdadm over ZFS because of the greater flexibility it offers. The array in the DL380 is managed by the P410i array controller (i.e. hardware raid), I have 4 spare drives in storage to be used as replacements for failed drives.

The rack is about 1.65m high, it looks like this (here with the old D-Link switch (now deceased) and minus the DS4243 array which now sits just above the air flow divider):

https://imgur.com/a/M4Lbf1K

In the not-too-distant future I’ll replace the 15K SAS drives with larger albeit slower (7.2K) SAS or SATA drives to get more space and (especially) less heat - those 15K drives run hot. After a warm summer I added an extra air intake + filter on the front side (not visible on the photos), facing the equipment. This is made possible by the fact that cooling air is pulled through the contraption from the underside instead of being blown in through the filter(s).

I chose this specific hardware - a fairly loaded DL380G7, the DS4243 - because these offered the best price/performance ratio when I got them (in 2018). Spare parts for these devices are cheap and easily available, I made sure to get a full complement of power supplies for both devices (2 for the DL380G7, 4 for the DS4243) although I’m only using half of these. I recently had to replace a power supply in the DL380 (€20) and two drives in the DS4243 (€20/piece), for the rest everything has been working fine for close to 4 years now.

On the question whether this much hardware is needed, well, that depends on what you want to do. If you just want to serve media files and have a shell host to log in to the answer is probably ‘no’, depending on the size of the library. Instead of using ‘enterprise class’ equipment you could try to build a system tailored to the home environment which prioritizes a reduction in power consumption and noise levels over redundancy and performance. You’ll probably end up spending about the same amount of money for hardware, a bit more in time and get a substantially lower performing system but you’d be rewarded by the lower noise levels and reduced power consumption. The latter can be offset by adding a few solar panels, the former by moving the rack to a less noise-sensitive location - the basement, the barn, etc.

As to having 19" rack equipment in the home I'd say this is feasible as long as you don't have to sit right next to the things. Even with the totally enclosed, forced-draft rack I made the thing does produce enough noise to make it hard to forget it is there.

4 lata temudiscuss

You mean the '1619' project NYT, peddling a fake history of your country by a faux historian as The Truth™, making the author the de-facto editor in chief of what used to be one of the cornerstones of solid journalism? The gray old lady is surely turning in her grave for the imposter which claims her name can not be her.

4 lata temudiscuss

Well, Sketchup itself fits the bill and can be used for free more or less indefinitely. I have used it to design an extension to our house, a 22x12 meter barn, a lean-to for my wife's horses, an octagonal chicken coop and much more. The drawings are accurate enough to use as templates for cutting wood to build trusses.

How to use Sketchup for as long as you need it? The solution lies in using Wine on Linux (or wherever you want to run it) to run Sketchup. Once Sketchup tells you the trial period is over - 30 days for Sketchup 2016, the version I use - you just wipe the relevant Wine directory and re-install Sketchup. Here's a script to automate this whole business:

   #!/bin/sh

   export WINEARCH=win32
   export WINEPREFIX=/home/username/.wine-sketchup
   export WINE=$(which wine)
   export sketchup_msi=/home/username/Downloads/SketchUp2016-x86.msi
   export gecko_msi=/home/username/Downloads/wine_gecko-2.40-x86.msi
   export vblank_mode=0
   export DRI_PRIME=1

   help () {
   echo <<-END
    use: $0 [-r] [-h]
   
    -r: reset sketchup (does a complete reinstall)
    -h: this help message
   END
   }

   sketchup_reset () {
    rm -rf $WINEPREFIX
    winetricks win7
    winetricks corefonts 
    winetricks vcrun2010 
    winetricks dotnet40 
    msiexec /i $gecko_msi
    winetricks win7
    msiexec /i $sketchup_msi
   }
   
   config () {
    winecfg
   }

   while getopts "chr" OPTION
   do
   case $OPTION in
   r)
    sketchup_reset
    ;;
   c)
    config
    exit
    ;;
   h)
    help
    exit
    ;;
   esac
   done

   $WINE "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/SketchUp/SketchUp 2016/SketchUp.exe"

4 lata temudiscuss

4 lata temudiscuss

> in schools, many boys might benefit from some good male role models in these systems

Very much so, the female domination of the educational system is a disaster not in the making but one we're reaping the bitter fruits from. It is not only boys who would benefit from having good male role models, this is just as much true for girls. Unfortunately education is one of those fields where men have been pushed out and are made to feel unwelcome by women. The few men who make it all the way to the classroom often end up hen-pecked and unable to become the male role models needed.

The primary school in my village in Sweden (~450 pupils) has not had a single male teacher for more than a decade now, they pushed the last - very popular - one out with the pretence of him not having 'the correct papers'. Never mind that he single-handedly managed to organise several popular school-wide activities every year, never mind that those activities created a bond among pupils, teachers and parents, never mind that those activities are no longer organised and that tensions at the school have been rising ever since. He was a man in a female-dominated workplace who had to go, who was pushed out by the female head of school.

Come August my then 11yo daughter will no longer go to this school, instead opting for another school in a place much further away which has a more balanced approach.

4 lata temudiscuss

It is nonsense, e.g. veterinary sciences are heavily female-dominated. Academia is female-dominated except for the STEM fields but even those disciplines are starting to become so. Here in Sweden middle and higher local government is female-dominated. Meanwhile mining, off-shore and garbage collection are male-dominated, to name a few fields which could be termed 'unappealing'.

First-wave feminists had a point. Second-wave and third-wave feminists are just belligerent searchers-for-trouble who have done more harm than good.