It all depends on how you want to homelab.

I was into low power homelabbing for a while - half a dozen Raspberry Pis - and it was great. But I’m an incessant tinkerer. I like to experiment with new tech all the time, and am always cloning various repos to try out new stuff. I was reaching a limit with how much I could achieve with just Docker alone, and I really wanted to virtualise my firewall/router. There were other drivers too. I really wanted to cut the streaming cord, and saving that monthly spend helped justify what came next.

I bought a pair of ex enterprise servers (HP DL360s) and jumped into Proxmox. I have an OPNsense VM for my firewall/router, and host over 40 Proxmox CTs, running (at a guess) around 60-70 different services across them.

I love it, because Proxmox gives me full separation of each service. Each one has its own CT. Think of that as me running dozens of Raspberry Pis, without the headache of managing all that hardware. On top of that, Docker gives me complete portability and recoverability. I can move services around quite easily, and can update/rollback with ease.

Finally, the combination of the two gives me a huge advantage over bare metal for rapid prototyping.

Let’s say there’s a new contender that competes with Immich. They offer the promise of a really cool feature no one else has thought of in a self-hosted personal photo library. I have Immich hosted on a CT, using Docker, and hiding behind Nginx Proxy Manager (also on a CT), accessible via photos.domain on my home network.

I can spin up a Proxmox CT from my custom Debian template, use my Ansible playbook to provision Docker and all the other bits, access it in Portainer and spin up the latest and greatest Immich competitor, all within mere minutes. Like, literally 10 minutes max.

I have a play with the competitor for a bit. If I don’t like it, I just delete the CT and move on. If I do, I can point my photos.domain hostname (via Nginx Proxy Manager) to the new service and start using it full-time. Importantly, I can still keep my original Immich CT in place - maybe shutdown, maybe not - just in case I discover something I don’t like about the new kid on the block.

That’s a simplified example, but hopefully illustrates at least what I get out of using Proxmox the way I do.

The cons for me is the cost. Initial cost of hardware, and the cost of powering beefier kit like this. I’m about to invest in some decent centralised storage (been surviving with a couple li’l ARM-based NASes) to I can get true HA with my OPNsense firewall (and a few other services), so that’s more cost again.

Jimmy Diresta. I’m a huge fan of makers, and the maker movement in general, and there was a time I just couldn’t wait for Jimmy’s next video.

Lately, I’ve come to feel that he no longer lets his work speak for itself. His videos used to just be really well made time lapses of him making a thing. But, for the past couple of years now, he feels the need to narrate just about everything. And there’s the faintest whiff of semi-arrogant self promotion about it, which just puts me off every time.

Don’t get me wrong. Talking through the making process is 100% OK with me. I watch plenty of makers that talk through their videos (Pask Makes, Wesley Treat, etc) but something has changed in Jimmy’s style, and I just don’t like him any more.

Shame. Arguably, Jimmy is the one that (re)ignited the movement’s popularity on the internet, but it just kinda feels he’s let it go to his head somehow.

lol - I stole from someone else, so all good here mate.

I do exactly this! I use Calibre Web and have all the PDF manuals for my appliances in it (among other books). I then encode an NFC tag for the Calibe Web URL to the manual for the appliance in question. Works perfectly!

Came here to say this exact thing! lol

Some people just want to watch the world burn

I’ve written my wiki so that, if I end up shuffling off this mortal coil, my wife can give access to one of my brothers and they can help her by unpicking all the smart home stuff.

I’m using self hosted wiki.js and draw.io. Works a treat, and trivial to backup with everything in Postgres.

Have seen both sides of the fence on this.

Met my first wife when I was in my 20s, she was a bit older, already divorced with kids. We were together for over 10 years, and one of her sons lived with us off and on during his teenage years. We enjoyed all the benefits of a childless existence - disposable income, freedom to do whatever we wanted evenings/weekends, etc, etc.

Eventually our marriage broke down. The reasons for it are entirely unrelated to us not having kids, but we were definitely not destined to be together for the rest of our lives.

About a year or so later I met an incredible woman, and I truly learned what it meant to have a soulmate. We were awesome together. She already had two young kids - 6yo and 9yo - and, a year or so later again, we had our own baby girl. We married a couple of years after that.

We now have a family that includes an amazing 21yo woman, a fabulous 18yo fella, and a beautiful 10yo daughter. My life is complete and I can’t imagine it without any of them in it.

When you know, you know.

It doesn’t have to be hard - you just need to think methodically through each of your services and assess the cost of creating/storing the backup strategy you want versus the cost (in time, effort, inconvenience, etc) if you had to rebuild it from scratch.

For me, that means my photo and video library (currently Immich) and my digital records (Paperless) are backed up using a 2N+C strategy: a copy on each of 2 NASes locally, and another copy stored in the cloud.

Ditto for backups of my important homelab data. I have some important services (like Home Assistant, Node-RED, etc) that push their configs into a personal Gitlab instance each time there’s a change. So, I simply back that Gitlab instance up using the same strategy. It’s mainly raw text in files and a small database of git metadata, so it all compresses really nicely.

For other services/data that I’m less attached to, I only backup the metadata.

Say, for example, I’m hosting a media library that might replace my personal use of services that rhyme with “GetDicks” and “Slime Video”. I won’t necessarily backup the media files themselves - that would take way more space than I’m prepared to pay for. But I do backup the databases for that service that tells me what media files I had, and even the exact name of the media files when I “found” them.

In a total loss of all local data, even though the inconvenience factor would be quite high, the cost of storing backups would far outweigh that. Using the metadata I do backup, I could theoretically just set about rebuilding the media library from there. If I were hosting something like that, that is…

The whole point of this particular comment thread here is that we’re already starting to see what’s happening: people are taking back control. You’re here on Lemmy, proving that exact point.

I never said we needed Cory to tell us what comes next. Just come up with another colourfully descriptive term like he did with enshittification.

You sound like that insufferable ponytail from Good Will Hunting.

Cheers. Fixed.

We need Cory to coin a term for what comes after enshittification. Perhaps we can call it the Great Wipening, where we all stop paying to be treated like serfs and start taking back control of our content and data.

Bloody oath! My brothers and my closest mates all get hugs, and my near 18yo stepson and I still hug goodbye or goodnight too.

I pay for Usenet - not my fault if they don’t pass it on.

Joking aside, like some others have said, I support many artists via Bandcamp.

lol - I’m the same, and frequently wonder if I’m allowing tech debt to creep in. My last update took me to 8.0.3, and that was only because I built a new node and couldn’t get an older version for the architecture I wanted to run it on.

Nice one. This statement in particular sums it up nicely:

Jung did not see the type preferences (such as introversion and extraversion) as dualistic, but rather as tendencies: both are innate and have the potential to balance.

I remember reading elsewhere that it’d be like drawing a line down the middle of a table of people’s heights, so that those who were 5 feet 10 inches and under would be the “shorts” and those 5 feet 11 inches and taller would be the “talls”.

I’ve always felt that the Myers-Briggs shit was utter nonsense, having been forced many times to go through it at several employers over the years.

Any chance you’ve got a decent source that debunks it? I’d love to have it in my pocket for next time…

I remember buying some bits and pieces to setup my home theatre in a new house years ago, and the guy at the store tried to sell me a $100 TOSLINK cable. When I asked why a $12 cable was going for so much, he pointed out that it was the “premium” cable, to ensure the highest quality audio.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Like their special cable scrubbed the photons before sending them or something.

See? That just illustrates my point perfectly. I reckon Tarantino intentionally sets out to put people firmly on either side of the love/hate fence, with each film.