So it’s not really FOSS at all, it’s just a loss-leader to draw you into the network, trap your data, and then enshittify and monetize as per standard practice.

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!

Yes, you could probably use a laser furnace if it was cost-effective at those power levels. But it’s not even close. Arcs are and very practical in almost every sense and ridiculously cheap besides the power they consume. And a laser would consume more.

You can also automate this with autossh which is designed for exactly this kind of persistent tunnel. Although a simple “while” loop might seem like the intuitive way to keep it running, autossh is very reliable and takes care of all the corner cases for you.

DC adds an extra layer of isolation if something goes wrong, and an extra place for it to fail safely in a nicely enclosed metal box. It takes a really catastrophic failure for a 28A DC power supply to go much beyond 28A for very long. A mains supply can do it all day long unless there’s some other form of protection like a fuse or isolation transformer.

It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you’re familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that’s why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they’re distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody’s going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say “Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!” on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you’ll find that in almost all cases, it’s actually just a generic, non-specific detection of “tools associated with piracy or hacking” or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it’s literally detecting the fact that it’s a keygen, and saying “that’s scary! you won’t want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don’t worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!”

It’s not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It’s classic FUD tactics and they’re all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.

That’s what LCARS means, it’s the name of the computer console in Star Trek. In the show, it stands for “Library Computer Access and Retrieval System” although it’s often used for stuff other than the library computer too.

Almost like the context matters and the world isn’t entirely made up of black and white binary choices because we’re not robots or computers and discrete logic does not apply to human moral arguments.

It is. The web was eventually corporatized and the corporations sucked all the air out of the room suffocating anything too small to compete. The fediverse is, if not taking it back, at least opening a space for those who don’t want to consume from a fully corporatized web. These include many of the people who used to make “websites” instead of “apps” or “platforms”. When people complain that it doesn’t have as much content as say, Reddit, I look at that as a benefit, it’s helping solve the (massive) discovery problem by self-curating thoughtful people who can curate content intelligently and provide real opinions and meaningful thoughts. The signal to noise ratio is much higher, and it’s refreshing.

Magsafe is a really great idea, it’s just a shame Apple came up with it first and I can’t wait for it to be the universal standard for all types of external connectors forevermore. It’s as close as we can get to wireless without being wireless.

Never had a single functional problem with Nextcloud, other than the fact that it’s oppressively slow with the amount of files I’ve shoved into it. Mind you I also don’t use MySQL/MariaDB which I consider a garbage-tier DB. Despite Postgres not being the “Recommended DB” for Nextcloud it works perfectly for me. Maybe that’s the difference.

Nah, I wanted to love NixOS, and granted it seems like a perfect fit for my recommendation, but a bunch of things about it rub me the wrong way. It’s just not for me. I’ve always been most comfortable with Debian and that’s what my setup script is designed for. Lots of apt.

I would need to factory reset the whole server for that, which would be … highly inconvenient for me. It took me quite a long time to get everything working, and I don’t wanna loose my configuration.

This is your actual problem you need to solve. Reinstalling your server should be as convenient as installing a basic OS and running a configuration script. It needs to be reproducible and documented, not some mystery black box of subtle configurations you’ve forgotten about ages ago. A nice, idempotent configuration script is both convenient and a self-documenting system for tracking all the changes you’ve ever implemented on your server.

Once you can do that, adding whatever encryption you want is just a matter of finding the right sequence of commands, testing it (in another docker perhaps) and then running your configuration script to migrate your server into the desired state.

$400 is pretty steep. That is probably more than a lot of the computers this would be plugged into.

I can’t live without my Nextcloud + Email server. Having all my personal files, contacts, email, calendar, and other personal information immediately accessible synced and backed up with a single app on any device or platform I want to use, is a dream come true, and I get to do it without any Big Tech, avoiding their lock-in and privacy invasion and without any fees or limits beyond my own hardware.

OpenVPN is how I can access it from anywhere in the world, so that gets an honorable mention too.

It’s tough, but I hope you can make it work, because we love having you here!

Big cities are where the good jobs are, but they’re also where all the people are, and not nearly enough housing or land area for all of them, so it basically quickly turns into an unaffordable nightmare unless you have generational wealth/inherited property, which of course you won’t. Unfortunately it seems this is largely where the default “Canadian immigrant experience” will put you, and it’s really not working for anyone as far as I can tell.

I’d argue that you will do better to find yourself a small town to move to that’s more remote. Not necessarily somewhere far north or completely outside civilization (although there are many such places in Canada, and in many cases Canadian government will actually give you extra money if you live in these areas as they can be both extremely remote, extreme weather, and extreme cost of basic necessities) But you can find many small less urbanized areas throughout the country, some are farming communities, some are industry towns (lumber, pulp and paper mills, mining, etc) some are better connected and serviced than others, but generally speaking the further away you get from the major cities and capitals, the cheaper housing will be. Other stuff gets more expensive though, but housing is such a dominant cost of living problem right now that it’s still the main factor you’ll benefit from trying to minimize. Anywhere outside the major cities, jobs will probably suck, but there will be some jobs. They won’t be jobs that take advantage of any education you have, they will be simple jobs in hospitality, services, sales, business administration and other less skilled labor that don’t necessarily pay very well. Cost of living is much lower in more rural areas of Canada – depending on how you are willing to live. It can be a harder life, especially if you’re used to city life. If you can get some support in the community and are willing to sacrifice some conveniences I think it is probably one of the better and more cost effective ways to live for many people right now. But it’s not for everyone, and it may be especially tough for an immigrant as small communities can be insular and isolating. If you can find towns with a Ukrainian diaspora, that would be ideal, and there are already lots of them (and more every day!). Especially in the prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) which have long had a significant Ukrainian community well established.

For jobs I’m really not sure what the outlook is for a Ukrainian immigrant. I know there’s a lot of bureaucracy and obstacles in getting education and skills recognized over here, which is really a shame. I seem to find a lot of Ukrainian people working in hotels and restaurants for example, because it requires no formal certifications or proof of anything to get such a job, however often these people have extensive education and skills. It’s a shame for everyone involved, but a job’s a job, and you need a job to pay the bills, so at least there’s something. If you can find a way into something like the trades or industry, the money is crazy good and people are desperate to hire right now, but again, the process for getting people trained and certified is long and probably very frustrating.

I don’t know what you expectation of standard of living is like. I know Ukraine used to be quite a poor country overall, but I think it was quickly improving before the war, and like Canada, I think there was quite a significant variation between the relatively wealthier cities and the remote rural towns. I think you will find it overall is similar here, although the prices and scales will probably be much different.

Wish you all the luck, and hope you have a great experience here.