I have a note saved in Obsidian with every app I install on a new Mac. Unfortunately many of these are paid apps:

• AltTab: switch windows instead of apps (useful for apps with multiple windows open)
• Bartender 4: let’s you hide icons on your menubar
• BetterMouse: lots of control over mouse. Ability to inverse scroll on mouse only and leave natural on touchpad. The right click pan scrolling is great too.
• DisplayLink Manager: let’s you use more than one external monitor on non-pro machines if you have a compatible dock.
• Fantastical: great calendar app if you manage multiple calendars and need to send your availability to people external of your company.
• Greenshot: I take a ton of screenshots
• iStat Menus: puts cpu, memory, network, etc graphs on your menu bar.
• Jump Desktop: best RDP client I’ve found.
• Obsidian: not Mac specific, but an amazing note taking client.
• Raycast: expands your cmd+space with many plugins available. Probably my most used app.
• Rectangle Pro: Better window management including snapping windows to sides of screens.
• iTerm2: Much better terminal app than the stock one.

IMO ansible is over kill for my homelab. All of my docker containers live on two servers. One remote and one at home. Both are built with docker compose and are backed up along with their data weekly to both servers and third party cloud backup. In the event one of them fails I have two copies of the data and could have everything back up and running in under 30 minutes.

I also don’t like that Ansible is owned by RedHat. They’ve shown recently they have zero care for their users.

Old dogs can learn new tricks. Picking up programming has never been easier. Everyone wants to act like ChatGPT is going to replace programmers, but in reality it is a great tool to walk you through projects and explain the how and why.

You’ll also need a security device like a firewall or router

This is one of the major reasons I'm moving to Proxmox. I'm going to virtualize OPNsense or pfSense and put everything behind that. I guess I should have said that I've host multiple dedicated servers over the decades, so from a security standpoint I'm pretty familiar. Really just trying to focus on the hardware side since this is the first time I will actually be responsible for managing and maintaining the hardware.

I've actually created a Lemmy instance (Lemmy.link) to bridge the gap between RSS feeds and Lemmy. We have 36 communities (topics) you can subscribe to from your home instance. Each community has the RSS sources listed in the "Feeds" section of the community sidebar. I'm always open to feedback on new community ideas or how to make it better. Currently I'm working on having the bot parse the article and ignore if it is an ad or sponsored and also including the channel name in the subject line for YouTube sources. Eventually I'd also like to train a model on which topics don't receive upvotes or comments and attempt to ignore them for a better signal:noise ratio.

Unfortunately EVs aren’t in a place where they can be used by everyone. I owned a Model 3 LR and never got anywhere near the range it claimed. It was constantly recalculating my next stop to charge.

On long drives the range is a real problem. A 9 hour drive turned into 12 because I had to stop every 2 hours to charge for 20 minutes. I actually had to turn around go backwards an hour because it decided I couldn’t make it to the next charger. This wasn’t during extreme cold or heat.. it was beautiful outside I was doing the speed limit without the AC on.

The range issues plus the dozens of phantom braking incidents on that trip caused me to trade it in for an ICE car as soon as I got back home. EVs are great for around town daily driving, but if you ever take long trips they are not ready yet. I want to own an EV and will certainly have one as my next car, but today is not that day.

This is good info! I'll follow up with the provider. Unfortunately even though I live in a large city, of the two dozen or so places I contacted only two of them would consider less than a half rack.

consider server motherboards with KVM over IP capabilities

I had not considered this. My plan was to initially just swap the consumer grade stuff I have over to the 826 since it supports ATX, but now I'll reconsider. Remote KVM has come in handy a few times with my dedicated servers over the years, so lacking that would suck pretty bad. I don't know that I won't have access, but several of the other providers stated on their websites that shared cabinets won't have physical access (which I honestly would prefer since I'll have several thousand dollars in hardware sitting in there).

Data centers are businesses and as a costumer they should be answering your questions about their operating policies. If they aren’t consider a different DC.

Great point and I totally agree! Just didn't want to walk in like a complete noob asking a bunch of dumb questions if I could prevent it.

You’re no longer behind a home router with a firewall that has sensible rules, so it is now up to you to avoid getting pwned and footing the power bill. It is also up to you to avoid spamming out stray traffic.

Thankfully I've got quite a bit of experience hardening servers exposed directly to the internet. *knocks on wood* So far I've managed to not get pwned by turning on automatic security updates, keeping open ports limited to ssh with password/root login disabled and reverse proxying everything. If I need access to something that doesn't need to be exposed I just port forward through ssh.

The Two Generals Problem

lol. ya that linkbot guy just doesn't stop posting.

Does the IPMI or KVM go on a private network of some sort? Surely you wouldn't want to expose that to the internet.

I have a spare Pi4 sitting around the house that I could pretty cheaply turn into a PiKVM. Looks like there are some slick hats to install into a PCI-E slot so I don't have a Pi and a bunch of wires hanging out in the chassis. Looks like I'll be going that route. Just need to figure out how to power it (they all seem to require external 5v or POE).

We had four of our own and then the fostering system reached out to us asking us to take in two kiddos right in the middle of COVID. It's not easy, but you're making such a huge positive impact during an extremely tragic time. Don't feel alone .. there are tons of resources out there, myself included!

You’re mostly spot on, but point updates are usually patches for security and bugs. You SHOULD take all point updates.

Twitter is claiming that Meta hired all of the people that Twitter laid off and have stolen their "trade secrets". Considering that Threads uses ActivityPub I don't believe their claims have merit.

In my opinion, Elon sees this as the only opportunity to recoup the billions he lost by purchasing Twitter.

The bot doesn’t have a way to tell between what is “gaming” and what is not. If the website posts it on their gaming rss feed it posts it. I’ve removed polygon since it has had several issues like this and added Kotaku.

Seems like “Stars on Mars”, but without the fake reality drama. Hopefully they’ll live stream this.

You have to put yourself in their shoes. He has threatened to run as an independent previously and his base makes up an extremely large percentage of Republicans in general. If they don't nominate him, they are basically dooming any chance of Republicans winning back as their votes will be split between two candidates.

Should give them gold if they march on Moscow again. They are a mercenary company after all.

This has been the biggest struggle for me so far: finding RSS feeds that stay on topic. I tried making a couple communities for sports teams I follow and they all had articles from other teams and sometimes even other sports in them.

I understand the anger. I too am angry they didn't make it all the way to Moscow.