I just set a static IP in Windows, then block that IP from the internet in my OpenWRT firewall.

Correct, nothing to hide because nobody gets their games from the high seas.

Setting up full-disk encryption on a Steam Deck with an on-screen keyboard should definitely be an option during SteamOS installation, but it’s a pain as it stands. It’s my only Linux device not using LUKS.

Seems a lot of distros put it under an advanced section in the installer, but I think the “advanced” option should be not enabling full-disk encryption, meaning you know what you’re doing and have assessed the risk.

I use k3s with Calico so I can have k8s network policies for each service I’m running.

NVIDIA definitely dominates for specialized workloads. Look at these Blender rendering benchmarks and notice AMD doesn’t appear until page 3. Wish there were an alternative to NVIDIA Optix that were as fast for path tracing, but there unfortunately is not. Buy an AMD card if you’re just gaming, but you’re unfortunately stuck with NVIDIA if you want to do path traced rendering cost effectively:

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=OPTIX&compute_type=CUDA&compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&compute_type=ONEAPI&group_by=device_name&blender_version=4.5.0

Edit:

Here’s hoping AMD makes it to the first page with next generation hardware like Radiance Cores:

https://wccftech.com/amd-unveils-radiance-cores-neural-arrays-universal-compression-next-gen-rdna-gpu-architecture/

Yeah, I’m used to GPT and Claude for code, so Duck.ai just pales in comparison, as much as I appreciate that it might be more private.

Edit:

Actually, seems you can get access to more advanced models if you give them $10 / month.

In my experience, Duck.ai is practically useless, but their AI Search Assist is pretty spot on a fair amount of the time.

I mainly use DDG search as an incrementally better option than Google. Other options mentioned in this thread are probably better still, but DDG is definitely still a better option than Google that doesn’t require signing up with a credit card or self-hosting something, as imperfect as it may be.

I use Restic and also use Backrest to have a UI to browse my repos. I would use Backrest for everything, but I’d rather have my backup config completely source controlled.

Discord 😬

Edit:

DuckDuckGo’s AI says this, which sounds interesting if true, though it doesn’t provide a source to confirm:

Chaptarr is an upcoming project that is a heavily revamped fork of Readarr, currently in closed Alpha phase, and aims to improve interoperability with Readarr. You can find more information and updates on its development on GitHub

I originally thought it was one of my drives in my RAID1 array that was failing, but I noticed copying data was yielding btrfs corruption errors on both drives that could not be fixed with a scrub and I was also getting btrfs corruption errors on the root volume as well. I figured it would be quite an odd coincidence if my main SSD and 2 hard disks all went bad and I happened upon an article talking about how corrupt data can also occur if the RAM is bad. I also ran SMART tests and everything came back with a clean bill of health. So, I installed and booted into Memtester86+ and it immediately started showing errors on the single 16Gi stick I was using. I happened to have a spare stick that was a different brand, and that one passed the memory test with flying colors. After that, all the corruption errors went away and everything has been working perfectly ever since.

I will also say that legacy file systems like ext4 with no checksums wouldn’t even complain about corrupt data. I originally had ext4 on my main drive and at one point thought my OS install went bad, so I reinstalled with btrfs on top of LUKS and saw I was getting corruption errors on the main drive at that point, so it occurred to me that 3 different drives could not have possibly had a hardware failure and something else must be going on. I was also previously using ext4 and mdadm for my RAID1 and migrated it to btrfs a while back. I was previously noticing as far back as a year ago that certain installers, etc. that previously worked no longer worked, which happened infrequently and didn’t really register with me as a potential hardware problem at the time, but I think the RAM was actually progressively going bad for quite a while. btrfs with regular scrubs would’ve made it abundantly clear much sooner that I had files getting corrupted and that something was wrong.

So, I’m quite convinced at this point that RAID is not a backup, even with the abilities of btrfs to self-heal, and simply copying data elsewhere is not a backup, because something like bad RAM in both cases can destroy data during the copying process, whereas older snapshots in the cloud will survive such a hardware failure. Older data backed up that wasn’t coped with faulty RAM may be fine as well, but you’re taking a chance that a recent update may overwrite good data with bad data. I was previously using Rclone for most backups while testing Restic with daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots for a small subset of important data the last few months. After finding some data that was only recoverable in a previous Restic snapshot, I’ve since switched to using Restic exclusively for anything important enough for cloud backups. I was mainly concerned about the space requirements of keeping historical snapshots, and I’m still working on tweaking retention policies and taking separate snapshots of different directories with different retention policies according risk tolerance for each directory I’m backing up. For some things, I think even btrfs local snapshots would suffice with the understanding that it’s to reduce recovery time, but isn’t really a backup . However, any irreplaceable data really needs monthly Restic snapshots in the cloud. I suppose if don’t have something like btrfs scrubs to alert you that you have a problem, even snapshots from months ago may have an unnoticed problem.

Don’t understand the downvotes. This is the type of lesson people have learned from losing data and no sense in learning it the hard way yourself.

Having a synced copy elsewhere is not an adequate backup and snapshots are pretty important. I recently had RAM go bad and my most recent backups had corrupt data, but having previous snapshots saved the day.

I use k3s and enjoy benefits like the following over bare metal:

• Configuration as code where my whole setup is version controlled in git
• Containers and avoiding dependency hell
• Built-in reverse proxy with the Traefik ingress controller. Combined with DNS in my OpenWRT router, all of my self hosted apps can be accessed via appname.lan (e.g., jellyfin.lan, forgejo.lan)
• Declarative network policies with Calico, mainly to make sure nothing phones home
• Managing secrets securely in git with Bitnami Sealed Secrets
• Liveness probes that automatically “turn it off and on again” when something goes wrong

These are just some of the benefits just for one server. Add more and the benefits increase.

Edit:

Sorry, I realize this post is asking why go bare metal, not why k3s and containers are great. 😬

I ran it on a RPi4 years ago, but it didn’t perform well enough. It performs fine on an old laptop, but not so much in a Pi from my experience. Can’t speak to the RPi5, though.

There are unfortunately still useful things that only work on Windows, which is why I still begrudgingly dual boot. I like the idea of ReactOS, but development is slow-going and it’s still only alpha quality at the moment.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

It’s based on yt-dlp, which I can’t seem to get working reliably with my VPN, even with manual intervention like using cookies from a browser, switching servers, etc. Guess VPN IPs hit the rate limits pretty regularly, though I don’t want to risk my real IP getting banned. I’ve seen some people suggest using a VPS, but sounds like a lot of effort. Running something like this on a server and expecting it to reliably download videos in the background isn’t going to work that well from my experience.