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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • Since calendar is an app, but fundamental email service isn’t, one thing that I found is that apps can interact in ways that are completely unintuitive.

    For example, I activated the ncdownloader app, and it caused mail to stop showing emails, or I activated nextcloud music and it stopped nextcloud news from updating.

    You should check your logs, because usually when there’s a problem it will show up in there. The logs I’m referring to are in your administrator panel. It will be completely unintuitive as to what exactly is going on. The other thing that you can do is just pay attention to which apps you’ve installed, and if there are any that are a little bit unusual, just try to disabling them and seeing if calendar mail works after that.


  • I personally used 7digital to rebuild my music collection. They sell good licensed mp3s.

    I have absolutely nothing negative to say about them. The prices were decent, the files are boring DRM free MP3s, and they had a really good selection of music.

    Honestly it looks almost exactly the same as when I used it for the first time like 15 years ago.




  • I moved to Proxmox a while back and it was a big upgrade for my setup.

    I do not use VMs for most of my services. Instead, I run LXC containers. They are lighter and perfect for individual services. To set one up, you need to download a template for an operating system. You can do this right from the Proxmox web interface. Go to the storage that supports LXC templates and click the Download Templates button in the top right corner. Pick something like Debian or Ubuntu. Once the template is downloaded, you can create a new container using it.

    The difference between VMs and LXC containers is important. A VM emulates an entire computer, including its own virtual hardware and kernel. This gives you full isolation and lets you run completely different operating systems such as Windows or BSD, but it comes with a heavier resource load. An LXC container just isolates a Linux environment while running on the host system’s kernel. This makes containers much faster and more efficient, but they can only run Linux. Each container can also have its own IP address and act like a separate machine on your network.

    I tend to keep all my services in lxc containers, and I run one VM which I use for a jump box I can hop into if need be. It’s a pain getting x11 working in a container, so the VM makes more sense.

    Before you start creating containers, you will probably need to create a storage pool. I named mine AIDS because I am an edgelord, but you can use a sensible name like pool0 or data.

    Make sure you check the Start at boot option for any container or VM you want to come online automatically after a reboot or power outage. If you forget this step, your services will stay offline until you manually start them.

    Expanding your storage with an external SSD works well for smaller setups. Longer term, you may want to use a NAS with fast network access. That lets you store your drive images centrally and, if you ever run multiple Proxmox servers, configure hot standby so one server can take over if another fails.

    I do not use hot standby myself. My approach is to keep files stored locally, then back them up to my NAS. The NAS in turn performs routine backups to an external drive. This gives me three copies of all my important files, which is a solid backup strategy.



  • One of many books that I’m working on behind the scenes is a programming book that is going to be for the free basic programming language, but is also intended to be a history of computing and a broader computer science course. One of the recurring jokes I intend to put into the computer history is “that would be the only time Microsoft did something sketchy”

    Their very first action ever was to announce that they had an Altair compatible basic ready to go. And it turns out that even that was a complete lie. They only bothered actually making the basic interpreter once it became obvious there was demand based on the feedback from the magazine letter.



  • I moved to proxmox earlier this year and it quickly became a huge deal for me.

    One nice thing is that I can easily create lxc containers for each service that has exactly what that service needs. Each service lives in a container that acts a lot like bare metal.

    A second nice thing is it’s really easy to administer everything remotely. All your machines end up accessible through the proxmox interface, and you can hop into virtual machines or lxc containers via the web.

    A third thing is you can easily handle hot standby and backups through an easy UI.

    Totally changed the game for me.











  • I started on Plex and even considered a lifetime Plex pass, but I felt like it was more interested in showing their content than my content. It was a lot of effort just to show music and movies.

    My family and I use jellyfin every day now, and a key thing is it starts off boring but it shows your music, your movies, your books, your photos.

    For folks who migrate who were paying, consider a donation to projects you make heavy use of. They don’t usually have big companies behind them and can use the help.