One foot planted in “Yeehaw!” the other in “yuppie”.

  • 4 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Don’t know why the other poster is giving you such grief there. It’s important to note that when you encrypt your root partition that you can’t view it from refind. It doesn’t have a mechanism to decrypt the contents it finds.

    The way to address this is to ensure that you’re using a Unified Kernel Image. Essentially, a full image of your Linux boot image that lives on your EFI partition. Keep in mind it can’t get to your personal data until it decrypts your root disk, but at least you can get things booting.

    So, you should take the time to switch to a UKI boot process.

    I recommend disabling secure Boot and encryption first and Getting the UKI Boot working through refind. Then add secure boot using sbctl. Then re-encrypt your discs. Since secure boot is all set up at this point, you should be able to back your decryption with your systems TPM chip.

    Here’s the page on unified kernel images.

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Unified_kernel_image




  • Pretty sure it’s against the TOS to do that. So if found, the account is simply terminated and it ceases being valuable. That means that even if it’s sold - it’s value isn’t in the games, but your friend network - as a sort of trojan spam/burner account. Which also means that it’s not worth more than a few dollars at MOST unless you’re some big-time twitch streamer with a vast network of steam friends.

    So yeah, just be aware of what you’re getting into. It’s not likely some guy who wants an instant steam library - it’s someone who wants to exploit your friends, family, and acquaintances for money via scams. Don’t be that guy.




  • I had a unique upbringing. My father was an illiterate dyslexic (and maybe autistic himself) and he is fuckin weird - to put bluntly. That side of my family never really understood neurodivergence per-se, but they understood that everyone’s a little weird - but we embraced that we’re VERY weird. Hanging out with my dad’s extended family is a lot of flailing, weird humor, and zany shenanigans and they embraced every moment.

    My mother by contrast was more “abled” but she relished the “weirdness” that my father had in spades. Her own family had a bit of a zany streak as well - with my maternal Grandfather very obviously being undiagnosed autistic and having his own brand of severely understated and jump-scare humor.

    Masking was entirely unnecessary in my family - and I can recognize the state pretty easily. It’s more mentally relaxed, less hypervigilant, and generally more comfortable.

    It was great not having to mask in my childhood - until I went to school and it suddenly wasn’t a good thing.

    Learning my masks was an absolutely agonizing process because “being myself” wasn’t acceptable “out there”. I felt so out of place compared to my peers. I was also bullied relentlessly to the point of PTSD. My masks eventually became automatic through the tumultuous times. It wasn’t until my diagnosis in my early 30’s that I even began to understand what it all was, and start deconstructing the masks.

    Unmasking was as easy as accessing a “younger” me and simply not caring about the social results. (to a point)

    For my echolalia, I don’t hold back my vocal stimming anymore. I used to feel embarrassed and self conscious around it. Now I embrace it and have fun with it. Will you get movie trailer voice me or death metal voice me? Who knows!? Will I throw a random phrase using an English accent into an otherwise monotone statement, yoooouuu bet!

    For my special interests, I LET my excitement bubble over. Sure, I might need to regain my composure from time to time, but hiding my excitement about these things nearly destroyed me. I try not to be hyper-focused though so as to allow natural conversational flow, but I also don’t overly police myself anymore.

    There’s a few other things, but it’s hard to reflect on them all.

    Ultimately I’m unsure how helpful my experience is to others - it’s a bit unique having a deep family culture of being really weird. I think that really helps me put my guard down and unmask. If I didn’t have these memories, finding my unmasked state would be a LOT harder.




  • I’d argue that the cloudflared daemon is even easier to use than a static wire guard or openvpn tunnel. It’s basically set and forget. The downside is that you must use cloudflare. This may, or may not be a big deal depending on OPs needs.

    I moved from a place with symmetrical gigabit to “gigabit cable” with 30mbps upload, it definitely wasn’t good enough for my small family. Photos are quite large these days - not to mention videos. Though it likely has a lot more to do with the bandwidth shaping my ISP does than the 30mbps rate.

    Also agree that it’s not perfect, but very likely the most newbie friendly solution at the moment. Especially from a deployment scenario vs going piecemeal.


  • The best “bang for the buck” in your use-case is to use Nextcloud - Nextcloud Talk is your Jitsi replacement, and the files feature can be extended with the Nextcloud Photos plugin (https://github.com/nextcloud/photos).

    As for your domain question:

    1. You should use any computer you’d like that meets the Nextcloud recommendations, the key is of course isolating this machine on your home network so any “funny business” stays on the server. You can do this with VLANs or an entirely separate LAN connected to a different WAN (ISP).

    2. Many places, I like porkbun.com for real custom domains for cheap, but for your use case, you might be able to use a Dynamic DNS provider for free. It just likely won’t be an easy to remember URL (or at least, as easy as a root domain only). If you have a newer ASUS or Netgear router/modem they both have Dynamic DNS built in and you can select from a few different providers that have both free and paid tiers. ALSO it might be better to use Google Domains (now squarespace domains) since, IIRC, many DynDNS configs for routers support Google Domains too. Cloudflare can also be a decent registrar, and I’d recommend using them if you use any other cloudflare services (see below).

    3. Other things to consider: Your ISP may block port 80, meaning lots of issues. If this is the case, you might want to use a tunnel of some sort. Cloudflare has a great solution here. Even if they don’t block port 80, they may aggressively throttle and shape your incoming traffic - causing issues. Again, the tunnel is a good solution here. And, of course, your upload bandwidth matters a lot, you’ll need something around 100Mbps upload for a decent experience when accessing your stuff over the internet. The 30Mbps that’s typical of DOCSIS modems won’t cut it. Outside of these concerns it’s all about making sure you isolate your server from your “home stuff” to keep things secure.



  • On a technical level, user count matters less than the user count and comment count of the instances you subscribe to. Too many subscriptions can overwhelm smaller instances and saturate a network from the perspective of Packets Per Second and your ISPs routing capacity - not to mention your router. Additionally, most ISPs block traffic traffic going to your house on Port 80 - so you’d likely need to put it behind a cloudflare tunnel for anything resembling reliability. Your ISP may be different and it’s always worth asking what restrictions they have on self-hosted services (non-business use-cases specifically). Otherwise going with your ISP’s business plan is likely a must. Outside of that, yes, you’ll need a beefy router or switch (or multiple) to handle the constant packets coming into your network.

    Then there’s a security aspect. What happens if you’re site is breached in a way that an attacker gains remote execution? Did you make sure to isolate this network from the rest of your devices? If not, you’re in for a world of hurt.

    These are all issues that are mitigated and easier to navigate on a VPS or cloud provider.

    As for the non-technical issues:

    There’s also the problem of moderation. What I mean by that is that, as a server owner you WILL end up needing to quarantine, report, and submit illegal images to the authorities. Even if you use a whitelist of only the most respectable instances. It might not happen soon, but it’s only a matter of time before your instance happens to be subscribed to a popular external community while it gets a nasty attack. Leaving you to deal with a stressful cleanup.

    When you run this on a homelab on consumer hardware, it’s easier for certain government entities to claim that you were not performing your due diligence and may even be complicit in the content’s proliferation. Now, of course, proving such a thing is always the crux, but in my view I’d rather have my site running on things that look as official as possible. The closer it resembles what an actual business might do, the better I think I’d fare under a more targeted attack - from a legal/compliance standpoint.