Back in the old days, a lot of people went through the “Linux From Scratch” process to literally build up the OS from absolute scratch. No distro, no packages, no precompiled kernel, nothing but the raw ingredients. It is a good way to really understand the fundamentals not just of Linux but of the whole computing paradigm our systems are built on. It is not as hard as it probably sounds, but it’s an investment. It takes some time and you need to put your brain in gear to actually learn.

Yeah, that’s all it is. Calibre Portable. In a folder on Nextcloud.

Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books from Calibre (or right through USB if you’re hardcore for some reason) and you’re basically off to the races.

All the choices for “ebook stores” and ereader ecosystems are proprietary vendor-locked services with no self-hosting options. While Calibre is primarily a “local” tool it is a true alternative to all these proprietary services and I think it’s at least in the spirit of self hosting, if not strictly the letter.

For what it’s worth, I self-host a Calibre Portable library on Nextcloud, which enables me to access all my ebooks anywhere, and to upload new ones to my ereader from anywhere, as long as I have access to my Nextcloud. And I also share the same library through Calibre Web for when I don’t. I retain control of all my books, I remove all the DRM and convert them to epub. Calibre isn’t a hosted service on its own, but it fits nicely into the self-hosting ecosystem, and for that I am grateful.

Nextcloud AIO via docker is super simple and has clear instructions.

Install docker through whatever tools Fedora has to install packages/rpms/whatever. Then follow steps 2, 3 and 4 at least. 5 if you need it.

Discord is a completely proprietary walled-garden that bans third-party clients to maintain full control AND (soon) has Wall-Street-ownership.

Jitsi is open-source built with multiple open protocols BUT has Wall-Street-ownership.

Neither is great, but these are two distinctly different situations.

Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real money from the coup is made!

If you don’t have a government that can be held accountable to some level of trust, then what you have isn’t a government it’s tyranny.

The state has no idea where an umarried person lies on the spectrum from aromantic-asexual to bouncing from orgy to orgy on a daily basis. They don’t know if someone is into BDSM, roleplay, doing it outdoors or threesomes. They also rarely know much about non-sexual hobbies.

Seems naive to me. The question is not whether your government has or can get that kind of information if it wants to (the gestapo had little trouble figuring out things as personal as that without any help from an app) the question is whether your government would lose the cost-benefit analysis if it was ever found to be using such information. You have to hold them accountable and keep their activities in the open so that accessing that information is as close to zero value to them as it can be and they have no incentive to try to get it because people will be able to find out if they do.

“Who watches the watchers?” We all do. At least we’re supposed to. If you don’t trust your government, priority 1 is fix your government, you’re way beyond anything a dating app’s data can be expected to help with. You’re not going to be any safer from an unaccountable government because you denied them access to a dating app.

I don’t use arch (shocking I know), so I can’t help you directly, but I will recommend instead that you invest some effort in learning about the Linux networking stack. It’s very powerful and can be very complicated, but usually the only thing you need to do to get it working is something very simple. Basically all distributions use the Linux kernel networking stack under the hood, usually with only a few user-interface sprinkles on top. Sometimes that can get in your way, but usually it doesn’t. All the basic tools you need should be accessible through the terminal.

The most basic things you can check are ip a which should show a bunch of interfaces, the one you’re particularly interested in is obviously the wired interface. This will tell you if it’s considered <UP> and whether it has an “inet” address (among other things). If it doesn’t, you need to get the interface configured and brought up somehow, usually by a DHCP broadcast. Network Manager is usually responsible for this in most distributions. Arch seems to have some information here.

If those things look good, next step is to look at ip r which will tell you the routes available. The most important one is the default route, this will tell your system where to send traffic when it isn’t local, and usually sends traffic to an internet gateway, which should’ve been provided by DHCP and is usually your router, but could also be a firewall, the internet modem itself, or something else. The route will tell it what IP the gateway has, and what interface it can be found on.

Assuming that looks good, see if you can ping the gateway IP. If your packets aren’t getting through (and back) that suggests something is wrong on a lower level, the kernel firewall might be dropping the packets (configuring the kernel firewall is a whole topic in itself) or one of the IPs is not valid and is not registered properly on the network, or the physical (wiring) or the hardware on either end is not functioning or misconfigured.

If you can ping the gateway successfully, the next step is to see if you can ping the internet itself by IP. ping 8.8.8.8 will reach out to one of Google’s DNS servers which is what I usually use as a quick test. If you get no response then it’s either not forwarding your traffic out to the internet, or the internet is not able to get responses back to it, and ultimately back to you. Or Google is down, but that’s not very likely.

If you’ve gotten this far and 8.8.8.8 is responding to you, then congratulations, you HAVE internet access! What you might NOT have is DNS service, which is what translates names into IP addresses. A quick test for DNS is simply to ping google.com and like before, if that fails either your DNS is broken or Google is down, which is still not very likely.

Hopefully this will help you at least start to find out where things are going wrong. From there, hopefully you can at least steer your investigation in the right direction. Good luck!

That means Bedrock unless you use the Geyser tool someone else mentioned to allow Bedrock to connect to Java but I have no experience with that and am not sure how reliably it would actually work as they are quite different versions of the game. I have no idea how it would handle mods that are not supported by the Bedrock clients for example.

First you need to understand the difference between Bedrock edition and Java edition. Bedrock is for consoles, phones and Windows, it’s the default version that Microsoft pushes now. It’s not compatible with Java clients or Java servers. So if you’re planning to have the kid play on Switch or something like that, it’s not going to work.

Assuming you’re clear on all that, you have a few options for Java servers, you can run a plain jane vanilla server (the one that Microsoft provides) fairly easily but it has some limitations, and it’s not the most manageable solution. Modded servers are much more capable and flexible but also can be a little more complex in some cases. Overall, I’ve found Purpur the easiest and most sustainable choice at least a few years ago when I was looking for the right choice it seemed like most people agreed this was the best option. Fabric is another great option, especially if you want to use mods! Fabric has a huge modding ecosystem, second only to Forge.

However I also need to mention that I’ve got a heavily modded Forge-based server running right now and I really didn’t find that any more difficult to set up than any of the others. Even though people usually complain about forge being “difficult” somehow. So take that for what it’s worth. I think it doesn’t really matter THAT much which server software you use unless you have specific requirements around things like mods, spawn protection, and other kinds of configuration that are probably most useful for large, public servers.

If you do want to run a bedrock server, it gets a little more complicated as you might have to break some things out of the walled garden. I haven’t had a lot of success with that but I understand it is possible.

That push and pull is exactly why they’ve been intentionally using them to rot people’s brains. The dumber and more apathetic you can make your users, the more you can monetize them, you first minimize the push so you can maximize the pull. This is not an accidental “quirk” of modern algorithms, it’s part of the design. Money must be maximized at all costs, including the mental health of the users and the stability of society. Money uber alles. The techbros will drive our society into the ground without a second thought if it makes them a few bucks richer. They’re not planning to stay here anyway. We are just a resource to them, and they will exploit us to the fullest to pursue their unachievable techno-utopia fantasies.

We can helpfully answer that for them by making sure they get sued.

Florida is basically the unofficial US Capitol now, so it would be confusing and ambiguous to have it associated with the traditional forms of unexpected insanity. Now it’s going to be an entirely new kind of unexpected insanity, so Ohio has been selected to represent the old kind of unexpected insanity that Florida used to represent.

Matrix and its implementations like Synapse have a very intimidating architecture (I’d go as far as to call most of the implementations somewhat overengineered) and the documentation ranges from inconsistent to horrific. I ran into this particular situation myself, Fortunately this particular step you’re overthinking it. You can use any random string you want. It doesn’t even have to be random, just as long as what you put in the config file matches. It’s basically just a temporary admin password.

Matrix was by far the worst thing I’ve ever tried to self-host. It’s a hot mess. Good luck, I think you’re close to the finish line.

While it sounds a bit hacky, I think this is an underrated solution. It’s actually quite a clever way to bypass the whole problem. Physics is your enemy here, not economics.

This is kind of like trying to find an electric motor with the highest efficiency and torque at 1 RPM. While it’s not theoretically impossible, it’s not just a matter of price or design, it’s a matter of asking the equipment to do something it’s simply not good at, while you want to do it really well. It can’t, certainly not affordably or without significant compromises in other areas. In the case of a motor, you’d be better off letting the motor spin at its much higher optimal RPM and gear it down, even though there will be a little loss in the geartrain it’s still a much better solution overall and that’s why essentially every low speed motor is designed this way.

In the case of an ammeter, it seems totally reasonable to bring it up to a more ideal operating range by adding a constant artificial load. In fact the high precision/low range multimeters and oscilloscopes are usually internally doing almost exactly the same thing with their probes, just in a somewhat more complex way behind the scenes.

I still use Nextcloud for syncing documents and other basic stuff that is relatively simple. But I started getting glacial sync times consuming large amounts of CPU and running into lots of conflicts as more and more got added. For higher performance, more demanding sync tasks involving huge numbers of files, large file sizes, and rapid changes, I’ve started using Syncthing and am much, much happier with it. Nextcloud sync seems to be sort of a jack of all trades, master of none, kind of thing. Whereas Syncthing is a one trick pony that does that trick very, very well.

I feel like you are the one who is confusing a “NAS device” or “NAS appliance” as in a device that is specifically designed and primarily intended to provide NAS services (ie, its main attribute is large disks, with little design weight given to processing, RAM or other components except to the extent needed to provide NAS service), and a NAS service itself, which can be provided by any generic device simultaneously capable of both storage and networking, although often quite poorly.

You are asserting the term “NAS” in this thread refers exclusively to the former device/appliance, everyone else is assuming the latter. In fact, both are correct and context suggests the latter, although I’m sure given your behavior in this thread you will promptly reply that only your interpretation is correct and everyone else is wrong. If you want to assert that, go right ahead and make yourself look foolish.

Joke’s on Reddit, I’ve always been posting unhinged misinformation.

I really like what they’re doing to GIMP lately and I am looking forward to 3.0!