I mean as long as you need a buncha copy-paste operators that somehow command multiple hundred thousands a year in salary per head (along with additional costs and perks and hardware and whatnot), you need bottomless coffers i.e. venture/vulture capital.

if those costs are somehow alleviated, e.g. by hiring people who are fine with less than a 10th of that, are willing to partially work for equity, not handing apple a truckload of cash for supposedly must-have hardware, etc., your options for financing expand dramatically.

I’ve stood up a number of startups and NGOs and the first step is always slashing the ludicrous spec sheets for hardware, offices, manpower and such.

tried seedvault, that’s a broken mess that apparently nobody ever tested IRL.

like, I have two similar phones and I’d like to clone my main device, by trying the built-in seedvault backup thingy. perfect use case to test it, I did the backup, lost the device and I’m now trying to restore it to the new device. in the past was put off with the idiotic “verify you really got the passphrase” screen (you’re supposed to type in TWELVE words with your phone’s keyboard) and was like nah fuck that.

well, this time I persevered and entered the hidden interface for said operations. in it, two choices - backup to phone’s storage or to webdav. don’t have one of the latter ever since I booted the nextcloud atrocity off my systems so let’s try the on-device thingy.

naturally, it won’t let you choose where to store the fucking thing, nor tell you about where it’s at. ddg where the fucker stores the backup - it’s in /sdcard in a dot-folder. for some reason syncthing doesn’t want to sync the fucking thing even though I tried it with a non-dot copy in another folder… man, fuck this, no normie is going through this shit so it’s a moot point even if it works.

let’s try the webdav thing. I have nginx in front of all my self-hosted stuff and apparently it can do a simple webdav share, let’s go with that. after dicking around with paths and users and permissions it sorta works. fine, let’s connect it… nope. the internal webdav client doesn’t like that there’s no user/pass. setting up a basic-auth .htpassword file, trying to remember how to hash the password… ok, you like me now? nope, won’t work over http. seven hells fuck the fucker who conceived this crap.

wait, there’s a separate DAVx option, I’m already using it for calendar and contacts for radicale without https, maybe that works… it most certainly does not, one cryptic error after another, fuck you and the calyx “institute” and whoever let this loose on the populous.

so I give up - I’ll spin up a nextcloud docker instance; talk about waste, this bloated stack only for my FOSS device to talk to my FOSS server, because two devices I have root on, residing on the same fucking LAN 10 cm apart can’t talk to each other, madonn’…

so, phone #1 happily accepts DAVx and starts the backup. I’m observing the molasses-like “speed” and I’m trying not to dwell on all potential points of failure in this stack. after some time has passed, it’s finally done… or is it?

tapping the notification about it being “done” informs me that a buncha apps weren’t backed up because they weren’t used “recently”… who fucking told you to do that!? reviewing the backup UI shows there’s no way to fix this.

fuck it, let’s go over to phone #2 (fresh LineageOS install) and restore what did get backed up. the 12-word screen, fine, start restore… internal webdav - no go. DAVx - no go, you need to install it first. sigh… fdroid, davx, add mount… we done? yep, restore starts!

except, it doesn’t. every app is marked with an icon, indicating that you need to install it first. by hand, individually, 60+ of those. so not only does this useless piece of shit not restore the apps, it also doesn’t restore its data. before you ask, “backup my apps” is toggled ON in both places in the app and the restore flow lists app data (500 MB) and apps (1.6 GB) separately. at this point, I am fucking OUT.

how is a non-techie supposed to use any of this?! this is in its 10th or whatever version, don’t those people have relatives and/or friends who do other shit for a living, can’t you put one of those things in their hands and observe the uselessness of this crap?

software that’s a hassle to use (not to mention, doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do) is never ever getting used, that’s like the definition of useless.

aside from the usual counterpoints (it’s not hiding it’s deciding what to share), the main thing I see too often overlooked in such diatribes is that the decision you’re making now is coming to bite you in the ass five or 10 years down the road.

our chicken brains can’t comprehend that, we need a feedback loop; i.e. hot stove, touch it once - ouch, you ain’t touching it no more. that works.

but, light a cig and 20 years later you might get emphysema, wear a mask or you might catch COVID and get the long kind, don’t let the app with its kompromats firehose away your data or you might get pigbutchered or whatever - we don’t innately understand those things, not really.

so we have to make an odyssey’s pact - in our (rare) moments of lucidity we need to ensure that we’re not in any position to make any of those slip-ups.

it’s a forever moving target and you’ll never achieve full security. but you’re better off with it than without.

other than hardware (close to anything you got lying around + dirt cheap used 3.5" drives) I don’t see what the expensive part is. granted, if you follow the youtubers with their specialized builds with $400 motherboards and virtualize this and kubernette that, sure, that’s gonna cost you. but if you disable transcoding on the server and store standard 1080p h264/x265 files that practically anything can play, a humble 10+ year old PC will do just fine.

start small - you already have a PC of some sort, run jellyfin server on with a couple of movies and shows and make it work. once it works within your household, look into accessing it from the outside. once that works, add an user or two.

once you make all of that work then you can look at drawing up optimal specs and setting up a separate box and whatnot.

the lina thing is an alter ego of the dude that quit already so this is made up bullshit, chill out with the apple-men-in-black scenarios.

I don’t see how them two things are related, my email has nothing to do with my chattings. it also doesn’t explain why it’s needed as it supposedly acts like a aggregator for the different protocols. upon signing up with a throwaway, it reveals itself as a matrix client and all them chat bridges are hosted by them. I have no idea as to their reputability, credibility, and longevity and at this point this is way too many things I need to get to the bottom of in order to consider it, so I’ll check back in a year or two and see how it’s holding up.

first time I heard of it. why is it that, the knees? looks like a trillian type-of-thing. wants my email. only appimage available. oh it’s electron crap. website isn’t great, the copy is super-amateur hour. it got acquired by the wordpress lunatic. I mean, OK, but doesn’t look very promising.

switched my server from i7-870 (my ex-workstation) to Pentium G6405 (got it free). switch went without a hitch, debian with a ton of docker services (jellyfin, servarr, pihole, radicale, etc.), 8 GB RAM only. although it’s a quadcore to dualcore switch, no performance issues. I know there are better options out there, but I don’t spend money unless I really have to.

there’s this thing https://furilabs.com/ but not FOSS; hopefully some of their hacks can make it into mobian or sumsuch

or live in a city where the air quality meter never ever dips below “poor” so them little bastards can’t exist!

10-year old 40" 4K in standard 16:9 ratio. way less neck swivel than two 24" side-by-side and way more screen real estate. 60 Hz max, runs off a $30 RX 570 4 GB. got no HDR, 100+ Hz, freesync, and other rich-people-stuff.

to me ultrawides are like what I have, only they chopped off like a third of the vertical resolution and they want more money for it.

they can get fucked with those prices, along with the fat fuck with the skinny jackets. tech is supposed to get better and cheaper at the same time.

RX 570, a midrange GPU, was introed at $170 in 2017. almost a decade later, midrange starts at $600? gtfo.

anyone care for a tl;dw?

when I see random folks sticking their mugs into the camera for the entirety of the video I just have the urge to close and block.

never heard of:

• zme science
• nature metabolism
• mihal andrei
• tibi pulu

also sample size. Imma assign this the weight of an eye-lash suspended in vacuum.

zero problems with docker, maybe try that.

docker?

before you take the jump, consider a way lighter and easier alternative - syncthing (files) and radicale (calendar, contacts). dependable, bullet-proof, super-lightweight, zero issues - everything nextcloud isn’t.

I was the happiest when I finally booted nextcloud off my network, never to return.

thinkpads are interesting because they are heavy-duty machines that can be had for cheap on the used market. they are cheap because businesses buy them by the truckload and then offload them after three+ years and switch to Newest & Best. flooded market plus a buncha older models still around from earlier floods plus civilians selling their shit -> low price, otherwise nobody would buy them.

if you haven’t got access to such a market, either by being around where they’re being dumped directly or by having local businesses importing them in bulk and reselling them locally, then you should look elsewhere for value, as they’re only interesting if they can be had for cheap.

e.g. you have similar options from hp (elitebook) and dell (latitude), they are also business-class laptops with durability and serviceability in mind, perhaps you can find those locally.

as an aside, you should skip all AMD platforms up until 5000 series; many issues (power management, GPU performance, etc.) especially if you’re going to run linux.

first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad “sectors”, that’s gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what’s more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.

the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it’s plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don’t have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it’s not a worry vector per se.

looking for “privacy issues” in iOS is like wondering if the sandwich you found in the sewer has healthy and organic salami, as if that’s the only issue preventing you from eating it.

you’re being spied on from the moment you activate it, including when it’s “off”, so does it matter if there are seven or actually nine things invading your privacy?