Thanks for a nice read!

Any particular problems you’re having or have you briefly used Pidgin in 2008 and think nothing has improved since then?

XMPP. It just works, requires very little resources, is stable and has decent clients.

I would go with Snikket instead of Prosody if I had been starting now.

Conversations on phones, Dino or Gajim on PCs, plus a conversejs install on the xmpp server, to allow web access when needed.

Conversations is easy for the family to figure out.

This whole thread is depressing to read, full of corporate bootlickers putting blame on you.

Sounds like phpmyadmin lol

They fucking what? I need to get off the couch and cancel my support too

Then yes, learning Ansible is a good way to have base OS settings for your systems. I love that it’s agentless - works over SSH.

The ugly part is that they keep updating it in a backwards incompatible way. In one version the paramerer is called “file” and in another it’s “dest”, they pull shit like this and don’t provide a tool to update playbooks automatically.

But updating is rather optional.

It’s crazy, given that all these devices have something powerful like an esp32, isn’t it?

I’ve done some of my home stuff this way, but I had to program it myself. Tasmota has some features which can be used without a server, but that’s just for simple stuff like switches. For whatever reason (simplicity for non tech people?), out of the box products don’t work this way.

If you don’t have days of spare time, you buy ready made products and set them up in minutes in Home Assistant

Additionally, libraries for XMPP exist in most languages, there is a varying degree of completeness, but they all do a good job of hiding XML from the programmer

Thos, exactly this. Whenever I ask the question OP asked, it’s always some people who used some ancient client in 2008 and never bothered to try again. And then Matrix came to existence with their marketing and they happily started using it, even though it didn’t have any better features

This prompted me to open Tempo I have installed from F-Droid but haven’t used in a while, and the app crashed on startup. Logcat had the most unusual message:

03-27 18:40:31.304 W/GooglePlayServicesUtil(6188): com.cappielloantonio.tempo requires the Google Play Store, but it is missing.

Two pitfalls I had that you can avoid:

• look at efficiency. It’s not always neglible, was like 40% of my energy usage because I oversized the UPS. The efficiency is calculated from top power the UPS can supply. 96% efficient 3kW UPS eats 4% of 3kW, 120 watts, even if the load you connected is much smaller than 3kW
• look at noise level. Mine was loud almost like a rack server, because of all the fans.

I replaced that noisy, power hungry beast with a small quiet 900W APC and I couldn’t be happier

No no, that’s how i’m working around the problem now, but i’m sure sni sniffing will sooner or later make my domain well known

I second the complaint about subpaths. I have all my services on a single domain, except for HA. It’s for security by obscurity, when you issue a certificate for a subdomain you start getting malicious traffic probing for vulnerabilities almost immediately. I don’t have this problems for services with non-obvious subpaths.

I can’t understand the stubbornness of developers to accept patches for fixing this problem.

Kodi is good for many streaming services too, just not Netflix. It has been good with HBO Max.

You did not say what kind of streaming services.

For anything self-hosted or torrents/debrid, just get a Raspberry Pi with LibreELEC.

If you use Netflix and the likes, you will likely want something officially supported. My partner likes Netflix for some reason and after years of using the unofficial addon by CastaginaIT, I gave up and got her a Firestick this winter (having set up a separate VLAN for it and ripped out the microphone, of course).

The unofficial Kodi addon is an amazing piece of reverse engineering work, but it’s not really great that you have to log in using your computer every month or two, and occasionally download a 2GB binary, before you can watch a movie on Netflix half-asleep.

See? You’re a part of the problem.

I actually wrote to the author, not being from the US too, and they said they are working on a version where you can specify your country/location. Nothing about adding your news sources, though

Woah, I never thought about it this way. You just helped me understand why my dad keeps making these odd decisions.

Wouldn’t call him a conservative, btw, just an old person.

I chose a new phone based on its LineageOS support. I only booted the original OS once before installing LOS. Been running smoothly for 5 years now.