greybeard

They may have a diamond tipped nozzle. I’ve been considering getting one for my printer. It would potentially mean I never have to worry about wear for the life of the printer.

A lackrack is a fun little project, but you would struggle to have full size servers in there without issues.

I don’t really remember why everyone hated him (Besides being annoying and once using a slur, for which he probably was lacking complete cultural understanding), but he was pretty young when he popped off. Not everyone changes as they age, but many people do. It’s very reasonable to say he is a different person now.

If you know someone in IT, it’s worth asking them what their company does with old computers. At my last place, we sent off old PCs to recyclers, old often only being 3 years or so. Most of them were basic i5s with 16GB of RAM, but they were more than powerful enough for a good docker host. I’ve got small stack of them that I rescued from the recycle pile.

Not to mention the laptops that went to the recyclers. Of course, many of you might think that is wasteful, but the recyclers were refurbishing them and reselling. We got them off our hands for free, and they got to make a few bucks off them.

WebRTC is a thing. You don’t have to build all that from scratch. It’s very reasonable to piece together a lot of standard technologies to make this progress much quicker. I haven’t looked into this project, so I don’t know, but I know it was pretty trivial to setup a WebRTC app 10 years ago, which would appear to be a fully functioning video app.

The hardware requirements are quite steep, but I’ve got local AI running in my house. It’s mostly just there for when I want to screw around with it, but technically I could setup OpenClaw and point it to my AI server to use as its brain.

I’m not stupid enough to do that on any real computer I use, but it might be cool to do on a VM where I can tightly control what it can see and have access to. Of course, that limits its usefulness, but security has a cost.

At the same time, I can see the allure of a real digital assistant. I’m old enough to remember when professionals had personal assistants that not only helped them keep track of their work life, but also their personal life. Scheduling their personal life like doctors appointments or house repairs. Dealing with vendors to make sure stuff actually gets done, and making sure they are in the right place at the right time. That would be rad to have.

Every 4-5 prints? What are you doing to your printer? I rarely even alcohol wipe down my plate. I have one side marked for PLA and the other for PETG (Since I’ve found the PETG residue tends to cause PLA not to stick). The only time notably clean my plate is when I accidentally forget to flip it between material changes or I touch it in the build area.

Another worth while consideration is heat generation. That takes more power to offset that too. During the winter maybe it wont be so bad, but it can be brutal in the summer.

Wasabi is a very affordable destination for backups. And it has the advantage of not being one of the big three.

I’m glad they are offering a bigger option. The CORE One is the same build plate size as the MK3&4. It’s got some extra z height, but that’s it. I’m enjoying my CORE One, but the limitation on bed size is a little frustrating, especially now that some of their biggest competitors are offering much larger build plates at similar prices.

I’m really glad to see quadlets taking off. I’ve been playing with them myself and really happy with the results. They pair well with ansible. Letting you write your quadlet files in a way that makes them highly portable.

I haven’t gotten too far, but right now I’ve got persistent volumes being pushed by NFS from my NAS. I’m using rocky Linux VMs as my target, but for this use case, Fedora CoreOS should be the same.

I haven’t yet tried using Ansible to create the VMs, but that would be cool. I know teraform is designed for that sort of thing, but if Ansible can do it, all the better. I’d love to get to a point where my entire stack as Ansible.

I don’t yet have Ansible restarting the service, but that should be a simple as adding a few new tasks after the daemon-reload task. What I don’t know how to do is tell it to only restart if there is change to any of the config files uploaded. That would be nice to minimize service restarts.

Here is a redhat blog about it: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/quadlet-podman

This docs page has more details: https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/10/html/building_running_and_managing_containers/porting-containers-to-systemd-using-podman

And last, this page shows most of the options you’d expect to find: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.unit.5.html

Unfortunately not. I found documentation largely lacking. I mostly read the docs and searched specific questions that came up(which often just took me back to the docs). I did as a local LLM for help, but found it’s knowledge base lacking. Sometimes it would work for a hint, but it more often than not made up parameters and features.

I spent some time last week learning both Ansible and Podman Quadlets. They are a powerful duo, especially for self hosting.

Ansible is a desired state system for Linux. Letting you define a list of servers and what their configuration should be, like “have podman installed” and “have this file at this location with this content”.

Podman quadlets is a system for defining podman containers as a service. You define the container, volumes, and networks all in essentially Systemd unit files.

Mixing the two together, I can have my entire podman setup in a format that can be pushed to any server in seconds.

And of course everything is text files that git well.

Being Linux, if you were really motivated, you could probably write a shim service that converted CEC to basic input that it does support, or someone out there probably already has.

You are probably correct that the firewall is the culprit. Good suggestion.

I realize disabling the firewall for testing is OK, but I recommend looking up what it takes to open the ports or app in the firewall instead. I’ve spent my whole career running into and fixing instances where techs disabled firewalls for “testing” and never re-enabled them.

As others have mentioned, the websites tend to be limited both by resolution and functionality.

My TV supports CEC(most do these days) which will pass the remote input onto the devices connected to it, like a computer. Which means with Plasma Big Picture I can navigate with my remote, and any app that supports navigation with simple arrow key input would work great.

Unfortunately, the streaming websites, last time I tried, absolutely suck at that and assume you are navigating with a mouse.

Glad to see it being picked back up. I tried it previously and I really didn’t like it. It felt half baked. The new version looks like a substantial improvement. Now if only every streaming app didn’t lock their services behind DRM and mobile apps.

There’s nothing saying you can’t have ports forwarded for the NAS, and have a VPN for everything else. Censorship may be a problem, but those more often block VPN services like NordVPN, not protocols. So running your own is less likely to be stopped. That said, of course comply with local laws, I don’t know where you live or what’s legal there.

If you really want multiple things exposed at the same time, you have two options(which can be used in combination if needed/wanted):

1. A reverse proxy. I use caddy. I give it a config file that says what address and port binds to what hostname, and I forward port 443/80 to it. That works great for web content.
2. Use custom ports for everything. I saw someone else walking you through that. It works, but is a little harder to remember, so good notes will be important.

I still recommend against forwarding a lot of ports as a beginner. It’s very common for software and web apps to have security vulnerabilities, and unless you are really on top of it, you could get hit. Not only does that put all your internal devices at risk, not just the one that was original breached, it also will likely become part of a botnet, so your local devices will be used to attack other people. I’d recommend getting confident with your ability to maintain your services and hardening your environment first.