SGG

A good analogy for this is an episode of Star trek TNG. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booby_Trap_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

In the episode Geordi had the computer create an ai generated hologram based on another person. He then gets the hots for the generated person, probably banged her offscreen and clogged the bio filters.

Not a perfect analogy but the core of the point I am going for is that the romantic aspect in the episode is just advanced escapism. The real world chatgpt girlfriend you ask about is similar. Sure in the short term it feels great, but it is not real connection.

I’ve put a few smart lights/switches/sensors/power points in at home. Definitely helps mum as we can have wireless switches for the lights, and motion sensors to turn the hallway lights on automatically as well.

For ALL of them, I make sure there is a manual control that will work as a backup regardless. Even if a smart light is “off” due to the motion sensor not detecting movement, all you need to do is turn the old regular light switch off then back on and the light will default to being back on.

I have nextcloudAIO running on a VM with 6 vcpu, 16gb ram. No issues with performance.

The root partition is on an nvme drive, the data partition is on a HDD raid 1 array.

That VM is hosting another few services like nginx proxy manager, Heimdall, and a few other things I forget at the moment.

Never have any issues with performance

I am thankful I’ve never seen this (or at least, have not seen it yet).

I have however seen plenty of “app” style webpages over the years, but for a lot of them it makes sense, good examples would be Gmail and web based communication programs (discord in the browser as an example). They have to load a bunch of JavaScript and other resources to function.

Because even if this was implemented, rich assholes will find ways around it.

That house? Oh it’s owned by an LLC that rents it from the company I own for $1a month, I then house sit as a second job for $1 a month.

That car? Same deal.

My internet, home phone, electricity, water, insurance and all other home expenses? Paid for by my company as part of WFH rules for executives.

I also have regular business meetings in Hawaii and other overseas locations for business purposes.

Upside: not fired.

Downside: have to do work.

Upside: make money

Downside: not enough money

If you have docker containers and other stuff all on that USB drive I’d really reccomend getting it all off that USB (not just logging) and onto a proper drive of some kind. USB thumb sticks are not reliable long term storage, you will wake up to find the drive failing one day and good chance you lose everything on it with little to no warning.

My guess is log files are being written to it? Might want to install a proper drive internally and redirect log storage. With less activity the USB drive should not heat up anywhere near as much.

It does not whip the llamas ass.

1. It runs in browsers
2. If you hate your co-workers, then they will also feel your pain.

Nothing too special, just had to do some fiddling to get the Apache reverse proxy working correctly. Now I believe they have a pre-made example for it, but back then they only had nginx. I stick with Apache because that’s still what I know. Might start learning nginx, but my main work isn’t in web stuff.

Mine is nice and quick in regards to the web interface and general functions. However I run it on a server at home and my upload speed isn’t the best, so if I need to pull a larger file (Files On Demand enabled) then obviously the transfer speed of the file is a bit sluggish.

Hosted on a VM with 16GB RAM, 4 cores. Using the NextcloudAIO docker deployment option, all behind an Apache reverse proxy (I have a bunch of other services on another VM that all have reverse proxy access in place as well).

In very basic terms, and why you want to do them:

Attack surface is the ports and services you are exposing to the internet. Keep this as small as possible to reduce the ways your setup can be attacked.

Network topology is the layout of your home network. Do you have multiple vlans/subnets, firewalls that restrict traffic between internal networks, a DMZ is probably a simple enough approach that is available on some home grade routers. This is so if your server gets breached it minimises the amount of damage that can be done to other devices in the network.

Oh fun.

And disabling Bluetooth on phones isn’t really a viable option these days because so many people use Bluetooth headphones because of the removal of headphone jacks/the convenience of Bluetooth earphones.

Thankfully the devices I look after are mainly iOS, windows, and macos, so patches should be available in due time.

People with old Android devices are going to be left out in the cold sadly. Thankfully my Samsung s21 is still in support.

The first year price is a “loss leader” discount. Get you in the door, then make a profit from you in future.

Namecheap have a bit of a reputation (as can be seen here with a few people warning of poor support), Spaceship seems to be a bit of a offshoot/addition they have created, partly as it doesn’t seem to be a 1-1 comparison, and partly maybe to avoid their existing reputation?

However, it’s not entirely a bad idea to separate your registrar from your DNS provider. If one goes down, you still have access to the other to make changes. I used namecheap in the past because it was cheap, and cloudflare for DNS. If you are using both for only your registrar, it probably won’t matter much at all as you are probably not changing nameservers often, if at all, once set.

If you are going to use your desktop, I would suggest putting all of the self-hosted services into a VM.

This means if you decide you do want to move it over to dedicated hardware later on, you just migrate the VM to the new host.

This is how I started out before I had a dedicated server box (refurb office PC repurposed to a hypervisor).

Then host whatever/however you want to on the VM.

sudo apt-get install hackerman

Nothing, those are just links to those websites.

Losing things is one of the risks of any setup. With paid for services you are putting trust that the provider has put in place methods to prevent downtime/data loss. Self-hosting means the onus is on you. Make sure you document things, make sure you have some kind of backup in place, and update things regularly (but maybe not straight away, just in case).

Also expect to occasionally run into weird issues that you need to figure out a fix for. I am 99% sure it was for my NextCloud-AIO setup a year or so ago, but there was an update to it that broke the setup if you had created the containers previousy at a certian time. You needed to run a particular command inside one of the containers to fix it up.

There was also the time where I migrated things off a physical server to a VM, but missed the script that was doing my certbot DNS challenge renewal. I had not documented things back then and a few months later all my services stopped working, that took a bit to re-do.

I do make sure to keep backups of my VM’s, and for the VPS I run I pay a bit extra for vultr to keep backups/snapshots there. Along with actual documentation of how I did the setup, I’ve got things stable for the most part.

Here’s my Heimdall homepage to give an example of different services I run, as well as some links to other websites. Blanked out a few things for privacy and eyepatch reasons (not sure if that’s allowed here).

I use vaultwarden (open source implementation of bitwarden server). Yes it’s a seperate service to manage, but it’s a dedicated password/secrets manager that can do otp codes.

I’ve been running the docker container for a few years now and it’s been rock solid.