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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I’ve self hosted at least one domain for decades.

    Initially self hosted email, webserver, and whatever else I wanted. But now I’ve started paying for some of the hosting.

    If you want a really reliable service and aren’t an sysadmin already, pay someone.

    If you want to learn and do it yourself, go for it.

    I still mostly host myself on a VPS node (Web, Blog, ssh git access, and DNS master), but pay to have email hosted. Server is a VPS at Linode I’ve had for probably nearly two decades. Email is hosted on Google Workspace so it includes calendar, address book, storage, groups, Google Docs, etc.




  • You know what would be a killer feature?

    Being able to buy movies without DRM crap at full resolution (blu-ray or 4k HDR) at a reasonable price (same or less than physical media) that includes extras. Extra points if everything is already named and in the correct folder layout to just drop it on the server in the right folder. Extra Extra points if Plex manages the download in the background and puts it in the right place when finished, or an incoming folder that awaits approval. Even several hours or more to download it would be fine (just make download resumable).

    (yes I know this is exceedingly unlikely to happen, but we can dream)





  • Depends on specific machine setup and how good the backup is.

    Backup requirements for /usr there are sticky bits set on some binaries. That needs to be preserved. In all cases soft links likely need to be preserved for things to work correctly on future package installs. Hard links can be problematic, but if you have a large enough drive or not that many it wont matter. Running package verification can be help after restore to make sure everything looks right. If running a Linux system with SELinux in enforcing mode (RHEL on many derivatives), then the security context will also need to be preserved BUT running a relabel will probably work if the security context was not included in backups. Sometimes running the relabel process wont work if there are files that needs a specific security context but are not listed in the security context database. Can’t provide more details because most of my experience with that is on systems we just replace (LSPP custom labeling resulted in systems that if you booted into permissive would then be unbootable, so they were just reinstalled once any debugging was done).

    For /boot things can get tricky depending on the distribution, what boot manager is used, and /boot was a separate partition or not. Basically the boot manager (probably grub) needs to know how to find the files in boot so it can load the kernel. In most cases if you restore /boot and rerun the tools to update the boot manger everything will be fine. BUT some distributions, hardware setups, or dual boot configurations are more complicated, so extra work might be needed.

    You didn’t mention /dev, which is all special files. These don’t need to be restored, just make sure the right processes recreate them. There are tools to do this, hopefully the packages are installed. Or boot from a rescue disk and fix it. Look up instruction for your specific distro.




  • This is a response to the very bad kids online safety act. See EFF’s post for details on why it is bad: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/kids-online-safety-act-heavy-handed-plan-force-platforms-spy-young-people

    EFF’s article is better, but here are some of the details of why it is bad. The effect of kids online safety act will be censorship and tracking of kids online when research suggests that is counterproductive for the age group being added. Would require more detailed tracking of everyone, not just kids. Services likely would need to block certain content from everyone to reduce liability to a reasonable level. They would potentially be liable if kids got access to content even when it wasn’t for kids no matter how the kids got access (lying, using someone else’s account, bypassing filters, etc.). Content to be blocked is vague and open to be interpretation by the most conservative people in the US, which is obviously problematic. The previous COPPA needs updating, but the version of kids online safety act has so far been financially flawed.





  • Over a long enough term it will be worth it.

    But as a said elsewhere neither electricity nor phone being run to rural US homes was cost effective for companies. So the US decided that was shit and paid for it to get done. Started to do the same for internet access. Phone companies refused, used the money for other purposes, inflated prices faster the inflation, etc. and yet neither FTC nor congress held them accountable. Other countries have done the same thing for power and phone, there is nothing fundamentally different about physical internet access stopping anyone from doing the same thing.




  • Sugar and refined carbohydrates are two big culprits. Then changing the balance of HDL-cholesterol to LDL-cholesterol changes with weight gain making it all worse and possibly leading to a positive feedback loop. The historic denigration of all fats, good and bad, helped to further tilt the HDL to LDL in the population making lots of people less healthy. It isn’t HFCS, it is the over use of sugar in most of our food. This is especially true in North America, but then we exported much of the same food tech to the rest of the world who did the same.

    All that processed food? Full of refined carbs and sugar. Drinks? Often full of sugar. Cheap food? Usually highly processed and refined, so more sugar and refined carbs. You need carbs for energy and fats to keep everything going with balance of nutrients and protein. Any of that out of balance and health suffers. Too little fat can even kill you (rabbit starvation/protein poisoning). The modern diet in North America is terrible because we were told good things were bad and carbs were good. So we ate too little of the good fats, too much of the refined carbs, and too much sugar. Now were here, increased heat disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.


  • I think the term is demographic inversion

    Standard of living is supported by those who can produce versus those who cannot. As population declines the demographics skew to mostly be older non-working people. There is a certain point where the percentage of people working versus not working is too small, then the economy can no longer produce enough for everyone’s current standard of living. It can range from relatively minor case of not being able to get all the variety of food, or it can be major where people starve because not enough food can be produced. Or medicine, or care, or electricity, or oil, or plastic, or TV shows, etc.

    Given enough time a new equilibrium and standard of living comparable to the old one will likely result, but getting to that new standard of living can mean people died.