My favourite ones are these ones from Sengled: https://a.co/d/9UPGMTZ

I’m in the USA so these are US-style ones. They support 1800W (which is the max for standard US outlets), use Zigbee, and are ETL certified.

Thanks for the explanation!

I’m using a UPS now so I’ll get rid of the smart plug. I’ve been using it for three years and haven’t had issues with it cycling though.

Good point. I am using a UPS now so I’ll get rid of the smart plug.

I don’t know anything about this company, but fiber is almost always better than cable. Lower latency, more reliable, and it’s usually symmetric (upload speed is the same as download speed).

must be doing some construction on my street because they made survey marks on my property and painted where the gas line and water lines are. Could this be because they are putting in the fiber cables?

It’s possible! Those marks means that some sort of digging/excavation is happening nearby. The company that wants to do the work calls a “dial before you dig” service (811 in the USA) and all the utility companies come out and mark their lines.

Cute. I love it!

A while back, I saw a story in the Home Assistant Facebook group about someone’s child saying “Hey Google, turn on everything” and it messing things up. I was telling the story to my wife and forgot to replace “Hey Google” with something Google wouldn’t pick up on. Oops. It heard my “turn on everything” and chaos ensued. I have some Zigbee alarms that all started sounding. It enabled several different scenes and ran several scripts. All TVs turned on. My Xbox and Nvidia Shield were fighting for control of the TV (there’s some issue with HDMI-CEC that I haven’t figured out where if both are on, they get stuck in a loop changing the TV input between HDMI2 and HDMI3 about once per second).

Don’t do that. “Turn off everything” is bad too. I have used to have my server rack plugged into a smart plug to measure power usage, and “turn off everything” turns that off. I want to figure out how to disable these two voice commands.

KDE still has some of the most popular effects built-in, including wobbly windows, desktop cube, magic lamp when minimizing/maximizing, blurring semitransparent windows, “exploding” windows when you close them. They’re built in with no extra software required - just go to the “Desktop Effects” settings.

I usually use HTTPS, because a lot of web features only work over HTTPS.

You can use Let’s Encrypt DNS challenges to get real TLS certificates for internal hosts, instead of having to use your own CA or self-signed certificates.

Tailscale has several NAT bypass / hole punching methods for double NAT (including CGNAT) and symmetric NAT, but they don’t work in 100% of cases. https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

IPv6 is definitely a good solution since then you don’t have to deal with NAT at all. IPv6 is pretty easily doable in the USA (at long as you’re not using Starlink) but can be harder in other countries that don’t have as robust IPv6 infrastructure.

this means their permissions do not work like docker, and it is not in fact a drop-in replacement for docker

It might a drop-in replacement for Docker if you’re running Docker in rootless mode? Not sure how common that is, though.

If it’s not decentralized then it’s vulnerable to takedowns. Why not decentralize it?

For your sake, I’d strongly recommend not monetizing the site at all. Publishers will come after you if you make any sort of profit from the site especially if you’re located in a western country.

That’s one of the main reasons Nintendo took action against Yuzu - they were making a lot of money from Patreon.

I like Unraid because it’s essentially “just Linux” but with a nice web UI. It’s got a great UI for Docker, VMs (KVM) and Linux containers (LXC).

Don’t. Use a VPN like Tailscale or Wireguard. Tailscale uses the Wireguard protocol but it’s very easy to configure, and will automatically set up a peer-to-peer mesh network for you (each node on the VPN can directly reach any other node, without having to route through a central server).

The only things that should be exposed publicly are things that absolutely need to be - for example, parts of Home Assistant need to be publicly exposed if you use the Google Assistant or Alexa integrations, since Google and Amazon need to be able to reach it.

Hosting in Singapore is definitely more expensive than the USA or Germany, but cheaper than Australia or New Zealand. It’s often a good compromise for web hosting companies since you get good connectivity not just to Australia but to the rest of Asia too (compared to hosting in Australia where you only really get good connectivity to people in Australia).

GPUs are expensive everywhere. I’m an Aussie living in the USA and would offer to buy stuff here and ship it to you, but it’s getting to the point where some stuff here is actually more expensive than Australia now, thanks to significantly worse inflation compared to Australia, and the Trump tariffs.

Renting a dedicated server or VDS with a decent GPU would be pretty expensive too. A lot of people are using them for AI, which has caused a lot of price increases as plenty of people are willing to pay a lot for a server with powerful AI capabilities.

I know this is a piracy community, but if you really do want to do online game streaming, a service like GeForce Now would end up quite a bit cheaper even after factoring in the cost of games. Their highest tier (which comes with a GTX4080 and 16 vCPUs) is $20/month which is significantly cheaper than what it’d cost to rent a similarly specced system.

To the point where light speed limitations means rtts of like 200-300 ms

Consider testing servers that are located in Singapore, especially if you use Optus or if your ISP uses Optus as one of their upstreams.

If you’re lucky, your ISP will route from Australia directly to Singapore and you’ll get around 100-120ms ping, about half what you’d get compared to a US-based server. If you’re unlucky, it’ll be 400+ms, routing to the USA then from the USA to Singapore.

this community is literally built around hosting your own local infrastructure.

That’s part of it, but using a dedicated server, colocated server, or VPS are also considered “self hosted” too. “self hosted” is broader than just having a server at home, and means any server, web service, etc where you maintain it yourself.

Hardware in your own house is generally referred to as a “home lab”.

For storing the backups, I use a storage VPS. I got one from HostHatch a few years ago during Black Friday sales, with 10TB space for $10/month. Hetzner have good deals with their storage boxes, too - they offer 5TB space for $13/month if you’re in the USA (you need to add VAT if you’re in Europe).

A good rule of thumb is to never pay more than $5/TB/month, and during Black Friday it’s closer to $2/TB/month. The LowEndTalk forum has the best Black Friday deals.

I use Borgbackup for backups, and Borgmatic to handle scheduling them. Borgbackup is a fantastic piece of software.

Borgmatic has an “append only” mode which lets you configure particular SSH keys to only be able to add data to the backup, not delete it. Even if someone/something (ransomware, malicious users, etc) gains access to your system and tries to delete the backups, they can’t. Essentially, this is protection against ransomware.

This is a very common issue with other backup solutions - the client has full access to the backup, so malware on the client system could potentially delete all the backups.

I have two backup copies of most things. One copy on my home server and one copy on my storage VPS. If you do do multiple backups, Borgbackup recommend doing two separate backups rather than doing one then rsyncing it to another server.

“The full source code of Lego Island? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your archives?” “Yes” “… Can I see it?” “No”