I like the choice of SIlverstone for the case. I got one of those for my proxmox server. It was compact, but not so compact that I left a lot of skin and blood behind after mounting components. I will say that other manufacturers (like Fractal Design just seem to understand how to design an interior a lot better, though.

Have we figured out if this solves the Netflix password sharing limitation yet?

Why are you upgrading? Is it to take advantage of the 10g network speeds?

Okay, I have a lot of recommendations here.

how can I quit textEdit/close a textEdit document and either:

Choose not to save at all or

To my knowledge, this can’t be done. Choose a different text editor, such as BBEdit instead. In BBEdit, if I want to choose not to save, I press Command-W to close the window. The “Save changes before closing?” dialog box will accept Command-D as input for the “Don’t Save” button. BBEdit also has command line utilities, which I will come back to.

Choose to save somewhere and pick a location and filename to do so WITHOUT touching the mouse?

You have already answered this one. All application Save As dialog boxes accept the command-shift-G (Go to) command. You can then type the path to where you want to save your file and use tab-completion to make it go faster. Saving files in locations that can be accessed with tilde expansion will dramatically speed your workflow.

For example, I often work on little projects that involve editing lots of files. I will choose to put my project directory in my home directory so that I can access it with the following keystrokes:

1. Command-Shift-S (Save As)
2. Command-Shift-G (Go to)
3. ~/Rot(tab)/Proj(tab) (which tab-completes to /Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/)
4. (enter)

But what I keep thinking about while reading your post is how much you should be working with an open terminal window. The zsh commands you can use there will change your life. It requires learning unix, and it requires you changing the way you work a bit, but I can immediately think of approaches that would make it so that you never have to use the Go To command again. Let’s walk through that now.

In Linux/Unix, it is not uncommon to create your file in a location before you even edit it. For example, I can do this:

touch ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

This creates an empty file at that location. Now I can open the file, edit it, and save it, and I don’t have to specify where. My hands never have to leave the keyboard. But we can do better:

nano ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

Now I’ve opened the text editor nano. I can write in that file. When I save it, it will be saved at that location. But we can do even better.

Remember how I mentiuoned that BBEdit has command line tools? Once those are installed, we can use bbedit as the text editor instead of nano.

bbedit ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py

As you might have guessed, this opens a new BBEdit text window. The BBEdit developers have gone the extra mile, though. That empty BBEdit window will have the name you passed to it in the title bar as well as the path to the file visible in the toolbar even though the file doesn’t even exist until you save it.

So far so good, right? Once you start using a terminal window in your workflow, you can begin to take advantage of things like environment variables, symbolic links, and commands like find and grep to rapidly increase your productivity.

Oh, one more thing: if you don’t know how to use regular expressions, set aside some time to learn how to use them. Regular Expressions are probably the single most life-changing thing I’ve ever come across for computers.

Commnad-option-C will copy the path of the currently-selected folder or file to the clipboard. If you use a finder replacement like PathFInder, you get this behavior with just command-C.

Regardless of whether or not any of the titles do or do not contain said content, ChatGPT’s varying responses highlight troubling deficiencies of accuracy, analysis, and consistency. A repeat inquiry regarding The Kite Runner, for example, gives contradictory answers. In one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseini’s novel to contain “little to no explicit sexual content.” Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book “does contain a description of a sexual assault.”

On the one hand, the possibility that ChatGPT will hallucinate that an appropriate book is inappropriate is a big problem. But on the other hand, making high-profile mistakes like this keeps the practice in the news and keeps showing how bad it is to ban books, so maybe it has a silver lining.

TIL! Are there good GUI front-ends for Rsync for when you want to browse the file versions?

My friend’s requirements were that the transfers be encrypted (which ssh does) and that his family have a server that was easy for them to use to upload and download files. The file server also had to be private – meaning not stored in the cloud. They aren’t technically savvy, so we needed an option where they could literally drag and drop a file from their desktop onto a web browser window. It worked well for them. My only regret is that the VPN was so complicated to set up. But on the bright side, Synology unifies the username and password between the VPN server and DSM, which makes it a little easier for my friend (and his family) to maintain.

Offsite backups are hard

If you build a NAS instead of using Synology stuff it will be as easy as setup SSH between the machines and rsync.

To be fair, you can do this with Synology as well. Rsync is built-in and even integrated into DSM. The advantage to using Hyperbackup is that you get block-level incremental backups.

I love that Verizon mounting solution! Velcro is the civilized man’s duct tape!

Just a quick follow-up on how we set up self-hosted cloud storage for my friend:

Synology has an OpenVPN server built-in. We configured that to grant his offsite family members access to his network, and then set up DSM to have a custom URL specifically for Synology Drive. (It’s in the Remote Access section of the control panel.) This way users could just visit /drive and get access to a google drive-like interface that was easy for them to use. Setting up the OpenVPN client on their computer was a pain in the butt (as per usual for OpenVPN), but after that was properly configured, they just have a little toggle switch that enables them to access his NAS, which is easy for them to use.

When you share files with someone on Synology Drive, it even sends them an email telling them that you made a file available. Very convenient! They just have to remember how they access the NAS.

I just got through helping a friend set up a NAS. Even today I recommend people stick with Synology because you get so much with it. Security updates and software upgrades are easy, you get good software packages for free, and the Synology platform is just easier to manage unless you want to be a real power user. Honestly, I would replace your current Synology device with an updated one. The DS423+ I set my friend up with had a reasonable processor that could even do hardware transcoding for Plex. Not a lot, mind you, but plenty for his 1080p and DVD library.

I use my Synology NAS for computer backups, photo storage and display, and occasionally I use Synology Drive (Synology’s NextCloud clone – or possibly a fork of NextCloud) to host files for people to access from my network. I wouldn’t say that any self-hosted solution would be extremely easy to use, but Synology Drive was really excellent for moderately techy people.

Offsite backups are hard. I just use Synology’s HyperBackup to create an archive of the files I can’t afford to lose and physically carry those drives to an offsite location. I’ve had to restore from it from time to time, and it has been a nice experience. I especially like that I can restore only specific files and that it handles versioning. It gets hard when you need an immense amount of space for your backup. But these days you can get drives that are positively huge.

On the other hand, fixing all those problems makes you a really effective problem solver. You learn which technologies are good and which are bad; you learn where to find reliable solutions to problems; and you begin to see where tutorial writers have a lack of knowledge (or were really lazy) and how to fix their problems. It forces you to create good habits and to follow best practices. And years down the line, you’ll have some great, stable software that is the envy of your techie friends.

I prefer porkbun for my domain provider. They’re kind of the darling of the self-hosting community, it seems. But I picked them because they were pretty inexpensive.

Paradoxically, Apple has regularly introduced features over the years that result in me needing to use my devices less. When I got my first iPhone (an iPhone 4, I believe), every little notification would light up my phone’s screen. These days that doesn’t happen, and Apple has further cut down on those intrusions with focus and bed time configurations. I’m big into using HomeKit for home automation. And while it annoys me that home automation is still such a simple application, Apple has done a good job of insulating me from the need to use my devices when I want things to happen in my home.

In short, letting myself take advantage of the Apple ecosystem reduces the touch-points of the technology I use. I just have to invest the time to learn about features and how they work, and to tune them to my preferred lifestyle.

I’ve actually used Plex for this before, but I was looking for something simpler. Good call, though!

Sadly, this doesn’t appear to have a slide show feature.

Gotta love that prominent pin-up girl pasted to the front of the terminal in the training video. Sideburns knows his priorities!

I can do better than that: here are a couple of videos from LearnLinuxTV’s Proxmox Course.

• Episode 15: Clustering
• Episode 16: High Availability

You should be able to watch them and get the overview you’re looking for. But really, this whole course is excellent from start to finish. I watched it before I ever touched Proxmox, and I’m glad I did. It was instrumental in helping me choose Proxmox as my hypervisor and gave me a great idea of what hardware I wanted to use and how I wanted to use it.

I run a lot of these services in my homelab. I didn’t really feel like I had something with real potential until I started using Proxmox as my hypervisor. That’s when things exploded. You can create VMs and containers on it with ease, and all the features I would normally have to rely on command line for were also available on the Proxmox web interface. That is so convenient! Need to do a snapshot because you think you might screw up your install on step 37? No problem, just take care of it in the GUI.

Proxmox also handles clustering really well, which will probably benefit you. You can add a Raspberry Pi or two, or a PC, and Proxmox will just manage them all. It will even move services from one device to another if one device gets turned off. It’s really incredible!

The one thing I wouldn’t build yourself is a NAS. I went with a Synology, and I’m glad I did. Building (and maintaining) one from scratch is just more work than I really have time for. With a NAS, you want things to go perfectly all the time, including updates and security updates, so I’m happy to leave most of the testing and configuration to Synology’s team. I just have to remember to update things periodically, which I’m willing to do.