Douch or turd sandwich?

I had a friend bring up this very topic this weekend and I replied “What would be more creepy and more likely is that the ad giants have algorithms for working out what you’ll buy that are that good that they know what you want before you do and you’re just noticing how good it is”

Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.

The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.

Great comment btw, it’s a good idea to have a list of the services you’d like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.

I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker

I see a lot of posts like this and it’s always people overthinking something they haven’t tried to do yet.

So my advice is to just do it.

You may lose everything at some point in the future, Satan knows I have a few times, but because you’ve actually done it, you can do it again.

Now, because you’re just thinking about doing it, it seems like a massive deal because you’ve not gone out and done it yet.

As for recommendations, I use a Proxmox VM with Debian and Docker. My Proxmox does backups, but my Docker compose is also a text document on my PC so I can recreate it all from scratch from that. I also have an idea what I did when I was learning how to do it, and have retained a good bit of that info so I could probably do it without either the backups or the Docker Compose, it would just take longer.

Just do it

Commenting just to add “nofail” to the fstab.

I didn’t do this in Proxmox and then the drive stopped working and so did Proxmox. As a noob I ended up starting fresh and losing lots.

After adding nofail the services start up, just without the NAS attached. Without nofail it just doesn’t boot.

Nofail for the win

I got 2 expensive (over £30) ones and the worst one became my travel cube. My cheap but decent cube is my work cube. Work in a factory so I have to not give a single fuck about it.

Thing is, now it’s just sat in my pocket at work for 6 months it’s actually pretty decent. When I bought it and tried to make it decent I couldn’t. It’s like the grease and silicone has made it a half decent cube

Makes sense since the internet is made of cats https://youtu.be/zi8VTeDHjcM

I’m into home automation and self hosting services and the only time I go to Reddit is when a Google search of something I’m researching takes me there.

I don’t log in (which sometimes fucks me, weed subreddits for example need a sign in for ages verification) so if I have to log in I just nope out, and I will actively try to not use Reddit if I can help it.

Honestly the short answer is practice.

Long answer is also practice, but with information lol.

I spent a long time moving from 2 look to 1 look (oll and pll) using this website https://jperm.net/algs/pll I’ve linked the PLL but there’s OLL there too.

On this page I learned as many of these as I could. You can click on the picture and change the status from unlearned to learning to learned, then go to the trainer and you can select those 3 statuses and it will show only things you’ve selected. You can also click on the alg to get alternatives or even put your own alg in.

So I’ve gone to that page and set an alg as training, then just practiced that one alg until I have it in muscle memory. I aimed at trying to get each type of alg learned, so corners are there, or middles need moving, or headlights are there, or even that there is no pattern.

I was advised to learn PLL first then OLL algorithms, but I kinda picked out the patterns I see most in both, or algs that seemed the simplest first. So I have been learning both together and working from easiest to remember to hardest, and also making my own up for the ones that are most complicated.

This meant that I could practice a few, then go and do solves and when the patterns I knew came up I’d get faster solves for those patterns.

Ok so that’s the big time saving out of the way, takes a lot to learn all the algorithms so it’ll take time. But there’s also taking time to plan your cross. That can save you a good chunk because there’s less head scratching when you start.

Then there’s the look ahead, which I’m only just getting. I did a lot of slow solves to get this in my brain and it’s quite big. This is what I’m practicing to get from my 40second average down to 25

So as you’re solving a corner and edge into the corner, once you have it set up into a 3 move insert, you don’t need to look at it anymore. It’s 3 loves to insert, so instead of looking at it as you put it in, you have to train yourself to look for the next 2 pieces you’re putting together.

While your learning the OLL and PLL and just doing solves (not training algs), when you get one you don’t know, try and alg you do know on it. Sometimes this changes your top pattern to an easier pattern that you can solve. It’s like a stopgap 2 look (pll or oll). Eventually as you learn all the algs you’ll find that you can “wing it” with some of the harder algorithms by just doing a couple of easier ones, which is all the harder ones are anyway, a couple of easier algs with a connecting move in the middle.

Hope all that helps. I’d also advise you have a “travel cube.”

I have an extra cube that lives in the pocket of my leather jacket (yes I’m a metal-head Dad, doesn’t quite fit the stereotype does it?) and it comes in useful when I’m stuck in a queue, or at the Dr waiting room or A and E (or emergency care as it’s called in the US). This allows me to cube instead of whipping my phone out when I have time to kill out of the house.

I have up FaceFuck after Brexit and the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

They brainwashed people into voting against their own interests by “Targeted Advertising” which is basically brain washing.

Of course nothing came of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and I can’t do anything about that as a Plebian, so I just left.

I left Reddit when they took my favourite app. I used it to Doomscroll and that wasn’t great for my mental health, so it was a no-brainer

So Lemmy and only Lemmy for me. I got over my addiction to social media by taking up the Rubik’s Cube.

I’m currently working on getting an average solve under 30 seconds…

So if you use your social media time to do something productive instead, you can do some crazy shit

It’s Cock Nose

Guybrush Threepwood. Still got the new one to go at

I get “Can I talk like a pirate” from Jake and the Neverland Pirates appear in my mind.

“I’ve been talking this way, since my birthdays began”

Then I artistically move my brain on to something I prefer. Alestorm

Just Google “Booting a pi from an SSD” and follow the steps

I can’t remember the steps (they were simple though) but when my Home Assistant raspi SD card died, I bought a 128gb SSD from AliExpress and a usb-sata cable.

I then did something to the pi that meant it can boot from the SSD, and flashed the SSD using Balenetcher or RUFUS or whatever (same program I was using to flash my SD cards basically).

Then it was just a case of plugging in and turning it on.

Runs exactly the same as with an SD card with less dying because SD cards aren’t meant for a lot of read/write but SSDs do.

Even if you manage to stop the WiFi hack he can still get in to your network through the ethernet ports. He could train an army of ants to pull a wire through a small hole in your wall and attach it to your router.

Just in case, fill all your unused ports with yoghurt. This will drown the ants

Follow the Left Hand Path

Love it. I bought a sign saying “Beware of the Leopard” for my toilet door yesterday

We are 138

We are 138

We are

138

I used to go to a metal club in my small town in Yorkshire, England, and get drunk and dance to stuff like this.

I also used to get beaten regularly because of the way I dressed.

So when Limp Bizkit played a gig last year in my small town in Yorkshire I had to go. It was fucking mental and I loved every second of it.

This year Korn are playing, can’t wait