When I die put my bones in an empty street
To remind me of how it used to be
Don’t write my name on a stone
Bring a Coleman lantern and the radio
Cleveland game and two fishing poles
And watch with me from the shore
Ghostly steel and iron ore ships coming home

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG6gpwYH1DM

Made me think of this. Apologies in advance. Now to find a distraction from the melancholy it always elicits.

I took a break from my X-Files binge to watch Mr. Inbetween. I thought it was phenomenal, if not a bit short. The YouTube algo kept pushing it on me so, when I finally caved, I was surprised to find out the episodes were only about 23m (half hour with commercials). The vibe I got, from the clips, was that episodes would certainly be hour-block to contain and meaningfully convey everything they had to. In reality the story is just very fat-free and told well. It parallels Ray’s spartan demeanor. I wish it was longer, and it easily could have been, but it wrapped up properly before it had any chance of going downhill.

First played it on my Sega Dreamcast. Probably the only way I could still play now since I don’t have a CRT anymore for light guns.

I’m not 100% sold on running actual ads although, if I recreated Nickelodeon, it might be fun to throw in commercials for stuff like Gak or the old Stick Stickley bits (provided I could find those). Maybe roll my own Snick and Nick-at-Nite blocks. For the latter it’d be neat to have some more period-correct stuff - even if it’s just Fred Flintstone hocking cigarettes or whatever.

I’d probably need to significantly expand my storage and media collection to make more than a couple channels doable. Definitely a bunch of bumps, “coming up next,” etc if I want to keep a strict 15/30/60 type schedule. And a 24/7 weather channel with the old WeatherStar 4000 style.

If you find the channel, let us know. I’d probably be keen to pull at least a handful of old adverts for padding.

I can’t find the video anymore but I remember someone recreating retro cable TV using dizquetv and an RPi (maybe just for the “receiver”). Searching now, I mostly find that ErsatzTV and FieldStation42 seem to be the goto options. I keep bouncing the idea around of setting up actual “channels” for Jellyfin, complete with silly self-recorded ads/bumps/promos/etc, but haven’t decided on a solution.

If you’re already doing so, do you have any insights? At a glance, ErsatzTV Next appears the most dynamic but also most barebones in that focus is mainly on the streaming. Library management and station programming looks to be external, which would mean having to roll my own scripts or whatever.

Boss makes a billi

I’ll die a renter

Drive company vans

Through his data center

What are your other hobbies/interests? What are some things you’re completely uninterested in but it’s annoying shit you would really like a better way of handling? Got some answers? Now check the awesome self hosted page to see if there are any existing solutions that look promising. If so, now you know at least some things to host.

How to go about it? When I started I was an idiot kid, on Windows ninety-something (or maybe ME), running Apache, MySQL and phpBB. Copy-pasting snippets in Notepad and not comprehending everything. I found desktop Linux later, learned about init systems, watched that go out the window with systemd, etc. I was installing Ubuntu on every beige clunker I could get my hands on back when the Beryl (Compiz) cube desktop video went semi-viral. Eventually moved on to Arch, learned more about CLI tools, editing configs, etc. If you have something that can host VMs, and you want to play with mock bare-metal setups where you create the users, directories, set permissions, blah blah blah - VMs aren’t a bad way to go. It’s good stuff to learn and know. Gives you an excuse to play with tmux’s synchronized input feature, maybe learn some Ansible, and whatever else. If you just have one dust collector sitting around, start trying distros on it. Mess with stuff til it breaks, boot into install/recovery media and try to unbreak it, repeat. As long as it’s fun (or tolerably annoying enough to reach some end goal).

I’ve personally gotten lazy and I’m nearly all-in on containers. A few things are manual but I’ve come to like Docker. I do still manage mine with compose files, even on my TrueNAS system with their “apps,” because compose files are easy to read, keep track of, and modify. My non-TrueNAS machines, I use Docker + Portainer. I should maybe look into podman and quadlets but haven’t bothered yet.

My recent hardware went from RPi4B to Thinkcentre mini PC to building out a 2U TrueNAS system. A PoE switch powers a Home Assistant Yellow and a few cameras. The RPi was repurposed to only host Homepage, NUT (server, watches my UPS and tells more power hungry machines to shut down during outages) and might eventually host Grafana if I ever get into learning it. Another 4B is my Pi-Hole. The Thinkcentre has an 8TB external plugged in and scheduled rsync tasks, on the TrueNAS machine, push back ups of my more important files to it. It also has a couple users set up strictly for running game servers (ioquake and teeworlds at the moment). Those aren’t containerized and things like rcon, config management, map rotation, mods, etc are all handled manually.

TrueNAS hosts everything else. If you need ideas based on what others are hosting, here’s some of what is on it:

• Jellyfin, for TA (see below) and my legally obtained DVD backups.
• TubeArchivist, (TA) for backing up YouTube videos, descriptions, comments. Has a Jellyfin plugin so your backup library is watchable in JF
• Homebox, for home inventory management. I use it to keep track of my tools mostly. You can have locations, sub locations, items… if I pull a rail of sockets, stick them in my toolbag, then carry it out to the shed - so long as I bothered to update their locations in Homebox I won’t waste time digging in the back of my truck, tool chest or other bags because I can’t remember where I last used my 1/2" drive 14mm deep impact. It’s a mildly inconvenient extra step to essentially “check in/out” my own tools, as if I’m working in an aircraft hangar or I’m doing IT asset management, but I find it worth it.
• LubeLogger, for keeping track of vehicle service. Early this year I put a lot of money into fixing my truck. A lot of tools, fluids, and parts to handle a broken water pump and do some preventative maintenance. Still a quarter of what a shop might’ve charged. Since I’m becoming my own mechanic, I wanted something to properly record what I do and how much I spend on it. LubeLogger fits the bill.
• Factorio, for the factory must grow.
• Dawarich, self hosted GPS logs. Seems decent but I might shop around still. I just wanted an alternative to Google Maps for tracking my travel history.
• Audiobookshelf, for some audiobooks but mainly for archiving a small handful of podcasts.
• Romm, because I’m compelled to hoard old games and occasionally even play them.
• Immich, because I’m not paying Google to store my photos.
• FreshRSS, because there’s still a dwindling number of sites that don’t force you to visit them to read an article in its entirety. Mainly for Hack A Day, a couple devlogs from game makers, the latest CVEs, some global news sites, NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” (APOD), etc.
• Samba, for some SMB shares that family can dump files into
• ClamAV, because family is dumping files into their SMB shares

I’m looking at hosting lemon-manuals (successor to charm.li). It’s basically a massive collection of service procedures, bulletins, fluid/torque/etc specs, and so on for decades worth of automobiles. Stuff the industry would like to force you into paying AllData, Identifix, or whoever for. I just haven’t had a chance to review their provided “server.” It’s also over 1TB. It’s overkill when I’m only working on three vehicles (mine and my folks’) but I’d like to have it all in case an auto industry lawyer tries to shut them down or i inevitably get a new set of wheels.

I’ve also got intentions of implementing some sort of documentation system but I haven’t settled on one yet. It’s not really for me. I can read my configs and go off plain text. Mainly it needs to be simple enough for my family to work with. My homelab has a bus factor of Me. Whoever has to deal with it when I’m gone needs to know enough to retrieve my encrypted password database so they can get into my emails/bank account to cancel/pay for things or whatever, back up any media of mine they want to keep, back up their own stuff, probably some instructions on how to burn their shows/movies/music back to discs, and shut everything down. Because one day things will break, servers they don’t understand will have failures, they’ll sell the hardware or give it away to designated friends/family members who can hopefully use it… all that unhappy stuff most of us don’t think about until it happens. In fact some sort of contingency plan should probably have been the first thing I recommended, but with some luck you’ve read this far and will put your own into place.

Anyway, hopefully something in the above rambling helps you on your way.

Everything old is new again. In my teens, one of the more popular RATs out there was Sub7. In one of the later releases an IRC bot feature was added. Fortunately I was neither tech savvy enough nor grand enough in thinking to grasp the implications or I’d have probably set about building my own botnet. To what end? Who knows. Driven more by curiosity than malice, I’d probably have been tickled just kicking back and watching machines pop in and out of my own little digital aquarium. The same way I got a goofy grin firing off an ansible playbook just to watch the LEDs blink on my RPi devices (maybe I’m still not grand enough in thought 😅).

Unfortunately I can’t help in that regard. I keep everything local/unexposed so my solution for them was just running Jellyfin at their place. I was already rsyncing some stuff to a NAS I set up for them (and vice versa), as off-site backup. Since the files were already there it made the most sense to just give them their own instance.

I don’t have the link(s) on hand but there’s a Tizen build of Jellyfin for Samsung TVs. It runs rather slow on my old tube so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of a last resort. It’s actually smoother for me to just open the app on the TV and then remote control it from a browser/app on another device (my Steam Deck is my homelab universal remote). But you can use the Tizen dev tools or a simpler docker container to push it to the TV.

For my folks I got a cheap Walmart brand Android box (Onn 4k Plus). I installed Jellyfin from the app store then black hole’d the thing because I’m wary of cheap Android apps and their history of supply chain attacks. It’s much more responsive and also leaves me with the option of installing additional stuff like Smart Tubes, Retro Arch and whatnot.

I’m a fucking dolt that dabbles and picks up the gist of things pretty quick, but I’m not authority on anything, so “grain of salt”:

You’re already familiar with OCR so my naive approach (assuming consistent fields on the documents where you can nab name, case no., form type, blah blah) would be to populate a simple sqlite db with that data and the full paths to the files. But I can write very basic SQL queries, so for your pops you might then need to cobble together some sort of search form. Something for people that don’t learn SELECT filepath FROM casedata WHERE name LIKE "%Luigi%"; because they had to manually repair their Jellyfin DB one time when a plugin made a bunch of erroneous entries >:|

The 2A crowd opposed to the current regime isn’t declaring war for the same reasons the people bold enough to cry out loud “please, now is the time to shoot these people” don’t find the stones to do it themselves. Nobody wants to be the first. Nobody wants to risk winding up in a sting trying to recruit/join others. Nobody wants to go it alone and end up a crazed, lone gunman that maybe clips one head off the hydra before their own brains are splattered by a sniper team and their family is left with a closed casket and the shame of whatever propaganda gets cooked up to explain their actions. “He was a bad dude. A real bad guy. It has been said he had terabytes of transvestite furotica and a pet cat named Karl. He once took a picture of a rainbow. A disgusting man.” Then, two weeks and two fresh heads later, the media cycle has moved on and the world is just a little worse than before.

It’s not worth it if they’re still comfortable. It’s not even worth it if there’s a sliver of hope to continue eking out a tolerably miserable existence - “at least I’m not dead.” They’ll carry on until there’s a knock at their door then either go out in a hail of gunfire or hand over their arms and freedom because “False, indefinite imprisonment? At least I’m not dead.”

That was mostly directed at OP, who is welcome to show us how it’s done. To your own point - Years ago, and probably still, “tanks and drones” was a routine troll over on /k/ and the answer to it is always “Asymmetric Warfare.” You don’t go toe-to-toe and fist fight the wrecking ball swinging toward you. You blast the tracks off the crane. You hydrolock the engine. You make people too scared to sit in the operator’s seat. Guerilla tactics, sabotage, etc.

You also don’t police with military drones. You surveil and exact precision strikes. The second the American military launches missiles at Americans in America, we’ll have that civil war that nobody with a brain actually wants. In our current political climate I genuinely believe that would kick things off. Point of no return, war were declared, hope you stockpiled canned goods and water because the supply chain is getting disrupted.

As for tanks, you can ruin the streets with them to stick them on the corners but it’ll only be a show of force - an intimidation tactic. Tanks are rolling shields for infantry and other equipment, with a few bullet hoses and a big gun to blast encampments and other tanks. They also need those same foot soldiers, willing to kill their fellow citizens, to defend them from folks flinging molotovs or dropping DIY explosives down the barrel.

If you’ve got a water jug of pre-1982 pennies, that you haven’t been bothered turning into pizza and beer or selling for the slightly higher scrap value, and you never stared at it and thought “I could smelt these down into cones because… I just really like the shape of cones,” you’re not trying hard enough to break the illusion that you’re already defeated.