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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • It looks like a cool project. I wonder if anyone is working on higher PWM frequency for people who are PWM sensitive. Most ereaders with front lights use PWM at a fairly low frequency to control brightness and it can be very taxing on the eyes. Dimming using DC regulation is slightly more expensive but it should be fairly manageable with this kind of open hardware project.


  • I think this should be a thing. At the same time, I would also want something similar for funding or platforming fascists, but that is unlikely to end up being done. I think a simple tag, the [AI] one would work, is the best current solution. I think extra detail in the post is a good thing to do, for example AI assisted documentation, AI assisted bug finding, AI assisted vibe coding. They are all different and have different effects on the product and community. If someone uses AI to find bugs in their own code I am all for it, that is a great use if it. If they use AI to write their login system I am not keen at all given the likelihood of intense security issues and the low likelihood that they will ever fix it.


  • A quick question, what accent do you have? As an Aussie I have real trouble speaking naturally with most speech to text software, open or closed source. I feel like the guys in that Scottish sketch show in the voice activated elevator. I sometimes use voice dictation for my notes for work and I spend almost as much time correcting as I do speaking.

    That said, I have found a perfect solution. I can get well over the 95% correct mark by simply using an English or American accent. I can do both fairly well and the speech to text has no complaints. I imagine someone from Boston would have a tonne of trouble being understood, as would a Welsh person, but pretending to be a Californian or similar can help immensely.

    I would love to find something that can be trained by my speech like Dragon Naturally Speaking used to be. I used that in the early 2000s and at first it was awful, but training it for a few hours really did offer a noticeable improvement, and ongoing use continued to improve further. My computer died and I lost all the trained data, so I never went back, but if I could I would definitely do that again.



  • Sad to see this play out again. Lots of people are deficient in B12 and various other essential nutrients. The worst part from my perspective is obviously the loss of life, but the second worst is how easy this is to fix. I am by no means a vegan, I definitely eat my fair share of meat and eggs, but B12 deficiency is easy enough to get, especially if you eat a lot of processed foods or have a mono diet, eating the same thing every day.

    For B12 I would recommend nutritional yeast. It gives a cheesy sort of flavour and can be added to foods like beans, refried beans, ragu/bolognaise, various pasta dishes, the list goes on. A fairly small amount packs a lot of B vitamins and you can have quite a bit without any issue. It also keeps very well, just requiring an airtight container and maybe a dessicant packet for longer term storage.

    If you take some tapioca starch and add it to water then slowly reduce it you can make a really nice cheese sauce substitute, very similar to Mac and cheese. Nutritional yeast adds the full flavour and colour, making it actually tasty.


  • My personal recommendation is to get started asap with what you have. That would mean using any old thing you have laying around. Do you have an old laptop? They are ideal for beginner self hosting as you can physically access the machine and it includes a battery backup right in the machine. Usually they are also fairly lower efficient, so that is nice too.

    Buying dedicated hardware acts as a barrier to actually doing things, so getting past that is key. If you find you don’t actually want to do self hosting you can just stop using your old laptop, but if you bought a full server machine it will be a bit of a trap and make you feel like you failed in some way. Also, the cost right now is fairly prohibitive, but using existing hardware can make that much more manageable.

    As for what to run, I would recommend trying a fresh install of a distro based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Yes, four. They are different and have a different feel to them, but also have different communities. By going through the process of installing each one you will get a feel for the system and the community around it and have a better idea what works for you. I spent a few years having around the Debian end of things but eventually moved over to Arch stuff and am currently using EndeavourOS. Your experience will likely be different to mine but trying a few different options will help you figure it out.

    Then moving on to services. Try to see what you actually use your machine to do now and then find services for that. For example, if you use something like Google Drive to synchronise data from your phone to your desktop then try using Syncthing to replace that. If you use Netflix to watch stuff try using Jellyfin. If you do play things like Minecraft get a local server running.

    These will all be for learning, so their performance doesn’t need to be better than what a professional can provide, they just need to work and be yours to learn with. If you find you love doing this and enjoy the process but the hardware is holding you back this is a good time to upgrade to a dedicated machine.

    For this I would recommend getting an office computer like an Optiplex or similar, just a basic office computer with an i5 or similar. You will want a fairly good amount of RAM in it, probably 16GB minimum and really 32GB is where things start getting good. A dedicated graphics card is not likely to be useful this early as the iGPU in most modern processors is actually fairly robust and should handle transcoding video for most use cases at a small scale. Storage could be one SSD for the OS and multiple spinning disk drives in a RAID or similar configuration for storage. The SSD will make the actual OS faster, decrease boot times, and make it faster to install and update things making updates less disruptive. The spinning media is way cheaper and you can backup all of your OS drive onto the spinning disks as a cron job in low usage times.

    That’s my two cents on it, start with what you have, expand as you need but not aggressively before you need it, and try things now before you are too afraid to mess something up because you rely on it. Remember to have fun and experiment, nothing teaches better than experience. Enjoy yourself, don’t take it too seriously, and don’t lock yourself in to one specific thing, be flexible and willing to experiment.



  • What is crazy is this was actually a huge problem for frontier settlements. Tonnes of people would meet the indigenous population, be exposed to their society, learn enough of their language to communicate, and then go “fuck this” to all the European culture and just move in with the locals. They brought whatever skills they had including metalworking and so on and joined up and for the most part it went really really well for them, until the westerners came and killed everyone. Behind The Bastards had a great episode a few years ago about it, through the lens of one particular bastard, and yeah, faced with a culture where individuals were not exploited for every last shilling of value to the shareholders people wanted out.



  • rowinxavier@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldOpenWRT router
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    8 months ago

    This. I looked at a bunch of options and these are the best for OpenWrt and are very reasonably priced. Mine did torrenting, VPN, and a few other small services before I got my proper served up and running and now it is less loaded and more relaxed without that workload. Absolutely awesome, very high quality for low price, and it comes with a very slightly modified OpenWrt firmware which is unlocked by default.




  • Yeah, it is always fun having a climate destroying lie machine ruin the market for consumer products with an inevitable bursting of the bubble in a matter of months to years followed by a glut of products entering the market destabilising prices and likely killing smaller manufacturers, leading the further consolidation in the hands of the few remaining companies responsible for the bust in the first place. Capitalism is great. I love it. /s


  • Honestly, I haven’t tried backing up and restoring but it seems likely to work. I have however brought game files across and after copying them over I added them to Steam and the verified the files. It seemed to fix the permissions and ownership quite well, though that could have been luck.


  • Perhaps more modern ones, but the ones in my last and current laptops are both 18650s. 6 cells, 9 cells, you stack in series to increase voltage, parallel to get more capacity, so a 3s2p would have ~14V which is more than the required 12V for internal components, no boost converters needed. That said, now they do a lot of pouch batteries which are actually multiple internal pouches run in series to get the same sort of voltage but made with the chassis fitting them perfectly, no wasted space.


  • 18650 is awesome, a good balance of weight to capacity. They are the standard cells used in laptops, vapes, small powerbanks, power tool batteries, and so on. They can also go into a fairly standard charger for AA and AAA batteries and give a lovely nominal 3.7V.

    That said, pouches are better for inside a device like a controller. The weight of a battery is significantly influenced by the casing. A pouch is almost entirely capacity, a cell like an 18650 or AA is largely the metal of the casing. If you have the pouch inside the plastic of the device you can save that weight.



  • I had tonnes of problems when I used Mint which went away when I switched to Arch. I switched from Arch to EndeavourOS and didn’t get the problems coming back. I think EndeavourOS is about on par with Mint in terms of difficulty and set up time, but seems more stable and capable. I use KDE and the associated Bluetooth management stack and it works well.

    That said, in the rare case I do have an issue I just restart Bluetooth through systemctl and it starts working again. The most recent time I had this was when I had my left earbud working on my phone and my right on my computer. It worked fine until I stepped away for a second, it dropped from my phone but not my computer, but then the left earbud tried to join up with the right connecting to the PC and everything broke. A quick restart of Bluetooth and boom, all good.


  • rowinxavier@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldWhat's gluetun?
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    10 months ago

    That is essentially what gluetun does. It is a little simpler to set up given that it is all preinstalled and you just select your provider and details and it is done. And again, you just specify the network for other containers to use the gluetun service and it is done. Very simple, easy for using many services through one VPN connection, and available on things like CasaOS with simple setup.