This post doesn’t mention the country they’re in. But then, it doesn’t really need to.

I think your reply would have been more useful if you’d given some pointers about how, instead of just “do it right”.

It’s fine, but not going to be the cheapest.

Cheap to buy: Any old PC desktop, really. Most will run linux and windows fine, depending on what you want. Anywhere from free to £100. If you have an old desktop or laptop already, use that to start with.

Cheap to run: Any mini PC. I run a Lenovo ThinkCentre M53 for low power duties. Cost £40 and runs silently at 10watts, idle. (I have a secondary, much beefier server for other stuff that runs at around 100w which lives in the garage)

But plenty of people do run mac minis as home servers, often on Linux. They’re fine - just do your homework on the CPU ability, how much ram you can add, and whether you’re okay with external disks if you can’t fit enough inside.

Plenty of men support abortion - it removes financial responsibility from them, after all. Protests at abortion clinics are often held by women as much as men.

The more important demographic here is that most opposed to abortion are strongly religious.

Look outside the US and you’ll see that countries that do support choice are less influenced by the Church. It’s not coincidence.

As far as I can read from that, they’re still maintainers, just have had their credit removed from the contributors page, no?

Still a strange thing to do and I look forwards to an explanation.

The bar chart might be more useful if they weighted the source with its number of users. Facebook isn’t 7 times more hateful than Telegram. It has around 3.5 times as many users - but also the two are used very differently. I use Telegram, but only as a free messaging platform for automated alerts.

Then there’s the algorithms, which tend to feed you what you engage with and from those connections you’ve made on it. The exception recently is X which has a very strong political bias and has turned into something that pushes hate very strongly.

Fair play - it’s good that there’s choice and if it works for you, great. I also totally get the fun of building something yourself.

The local storage is a big one if you don’t have a nas or home server on the network. Although, if you’re linked into the *arrs then I would think most people already do. It’s nice when new episodes just turn up automagically in Jellyfin.

I tried Kodi before but I found the commercialisation of it very jarring. Jellyfin is entirely free - your fifth point might give it extra credit for that. The Jellyfin app doesn’t (afaik) feed any info to anyone, but you do need to load it from the Amazon fire menu, so you can’t entirely skip their advertising. It is the only thing I use the fire stick for, and the price is cheap compared to anything else - it cost £25 and works on any TV. Being a dongle, there’s no noise either.

Why not? It’s a computer that displays tv? At 4k, 5.1 audio, that’s not too shabby, no?

I made a PC specifically for streaming video back before sticks were a thing, but it was expensive, noisy and not very good in comparison and I don’t miss it. What about a stick is inferior to what you’re talking about? Genuine question - educate me, please. What software, what hardware, why choose it over something else?

Using the native Jellyfin app available for Amazon’s fire tv stick.

Alternatvely: Eww, Earth, you’re infested. Look at all those little things crawling all over you!

Not really suitable for a Home Theatre PC

Not sure where you got that idea, but it’s absolutely what I use it for. That I can also watch content from multiple sources as well is part of the appeal. Plus no constant upsell like Kodi and Emby.

Scuse the cut and paste, but this is something I recently thought quite hard about and blogged, so stealing my own content:

What to back up? This is a core question to ask when you start planning. I think it’s quite simply answered by asking the secondary question: “Can I get the data again?” Don’t back up stuff you downloaded from the public internet unless it’s particularly rare. No TV, no Movies, no software installers. Don’t hoard data you can replace. Do back up stuff you’ve personally created and that doesn’t exist elsewhere, or stuff that would cause you a lot of effort or upset if it wasn’t available. Letters you’ve written, pictures you’ve taken, code you authored, configurations and systems that took you a lot of time to set up and fine tune.

If you want to be able to restore a full system, that’s something else and generally dealt best with imaging – I’m talking about individual file backups here!

Backup Scenario Multiple household computers. Home linux servers. Many services running natively and in docker. A couple of windows computers.

Daily backups Once a day, automate backups of your important files.

On my linux machines, that’s things like some directories like /etc, /root, /docker-data, some shared files.

On my windows machines, then that’s some mapping data, word documents, pictures, geocaching files, generated backups and so on.

You work out the files and get an idea of how much space you need to set aside.

Then, with automated methods, have these files copied or zipped up to a common directory on an always-available server. Let’s call that /backup.

These should be versioned, so that older ones get expired automatically. You can do that with bash scripts, or automated backup software (I use backup-manager for local machines, and backuppc or robocopy for windows ones)

How many copies you keep depends on your preferences – 3 is a sound number, but choose what you want and what disk space you have. More than 1 is a good idea since you may not notice the next day if something is missing or broken.

Monthly Backups – Make them Offline if possible

I puzzled a long time over the best way to do offline backups. For years I would manually copy the contents of /backup to large HDDs once a month. That took an hour or two for a few terabytes.

Now, I attach an external USB hard drive to my server, with a smart power socket controlled by Home Assistant.

This means it’s “cold storage”. The computer can’t access it unless the switch is turned on – something no ransomware knows about. But I can write a script that turns on the power, waits a minute for it to spin up, then mounts the drive and copies the data. When it’s finished, it’ll then unmount the drive and turn off the switch, and lastly, email me to say “Oi, change the drives, human”.

Once I get that email, I open my safe (fireproof and in a different physical building) and take out the oldest of three usb Caddies. Swap that with the one on the server and put that away. Classic Grandfather/Father/Son backups.

Once a year, I change the oldest of those caddies to “Annual backup, 2024” and buy a new one. That way no monthly drive will be older than three years, and I have a (probably still viable) backup by year.

BTW – I use USB3 HDD caddies (and do test for speed – they vary hugely) because I keep a fair bit of data. But you can also use one of the large capacity USB Thumbdrives or MicroSD cards for this. It doesn’t really matter how slowly it writes, since you’ll be asleep when it’s backing up. But you do really want it to be reasonably fast to read data from, and also large enough for your data – the above system gets considerably less simple if you need multiple disks.

Error Check: Of course with automated systems, you need additional automated systems to ensure they’re working! When you complete a backup, touch a file to give you a timestamp of when it was done – online and offline. I find using “tree” to catalogue the files is worthwhile too, so you know what’s on there.

Lastly – test your backups. Once or twice a year, pick a backup at random and ensure you can copy and unpack the files. Ensure they are what you expect and free from errors.

Nice ditty.

What reason do you suggest why “his or her” would be preferable to “their” in this context?

Regional dialect, fluidity of language, variety - even habit.

“It’s grammatically incorrect” argument doesn’t hold much water

Oh, I do respectfully disagree with that, especially when you cite medieval English but reference an American language dictionary as your source.

I could just as viably give “his or hers” as equally valid as “theirs”, because it is. We’re not newspaper headline writers, nobody penalises us if we use a few more characters for any reason. And you could switch back and forth between them both for variety.

The best English literature doesn’t follow the basis of most convenient or shortest. Sometimes there are other reasons to choose a word of phrase.

The plot of Romeo and Juliet could be rewritten in a paragraph but probably wouldn’t have had the same impact.

Surely y’all have monitoring and alerts for excessive cpu load already?

Especially during the transition from 2 to 3. Let’s hope that’s all behind us.

Same. Just…works?

Why did we have to learn what modelines were to get a picture on screen?

This just makes me worried to rely on uBO but more because what if the author just fucks off because someone else pissed them off.

That is very concerning to me, also.

Large parts of the internet relying on one or two tiny one-man FOSS projects? (UBO and ADguard are often cited as the only two reliable-ish and safe adblockers)

If he can’t be bothered with that nonsense, how secure is UBO’s future? How secure is the future of adblocking?

I would bet that advertising companies are rubbing their hands now and planning to ramp up pressure against these poor devs.

I think Ubuntu made sense back in the day when Debian wasn’t as user-friendly.

This is a very good point.

When Ubuntu launched, it was a big moment for linux. Before then, setting up a linux GUI was a lot of pain (remember setting modelines for individual monitors and the endless fiddling that took - and forget about multiple monitors). Ubuntu made GUI easy - it just worked out of the box for most people. It jumped Linux forwards as a desktop a huge way and adoption grew a lot. They also physically posted you a set of CDs or a DVD for free! And they did a bunch of stuff for educational usage, and getting computers across Africa.

That was all pretty amazing at the time and all very positive.

But then everyone else caught up with the usability and they turned into a corporate entity. Somewhere along the way they stopped listening to their users, or at least the users felt they had no voice, and a lot more linux distros appeared.