I like Markor. https://f-droid.org/packages/net.gsantner.markor/

1. I’ve had trouble getting Jami to work at all, I think because of incompatibilities between versions and whatever. You might have better luck with something like Linphone.

2. I haven’t tried a VOIP hardphone but I use Linphone on Android sometimes. I would say call quality is worse than normal cellular voice calls even those are certainly VOIP at some level too.

3. VOIP is more crap to fool around with and periodically troubleshoot, but you can get it to work if you have to. I don’t find landlines to be worth it any more (I just use mobile voice) but they’re probably still the most reliable of the approaches, and I guess it depends somewhat on your family’s discomfort level with technology.

VOIP hardphones are nicer to use than mobiles, but I guess unlike traditional landlines, they don’t work in power outages. All the ones I’ve seen rely on a power cube.

Epub is html with some crap wrapping it. Converting it to text follows the html formatting, like using the lynx browser.

Mostly pandoc (for epub to text) and a few stupid python scripts. I’m a luddite and prefer reading text files. I don’t use any particular collection management beyond filenames and grep.

Try smartctl -a on the drive (install smartmontools if needed), to see the error counts. Yeah, back up your stuff, which you should do anyway.

CMMC is more about how well your processes work. Low level = more chaotic, stuff basically works but people have to scurry around and improvise when it breaks. Mid level = it can break but procedures for fixing it are documented and regular, and various good practices are followed to make it reliable. High level = can’t break, very rigorous standards. No attempt at certifying to any level at all = never mind, just wing everything.

I wonder how much turning everything into piles of AI crap is involved with this.

So they’re admitting their stuff is crap and that they expect for it to stay that way.

BYOVD = bring your own vulnerable driver. Seems to mostly be a Windows thing. Closed source drivers, bah.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/54-edr-killers-use-byovd-to-exploit-34.html

IDK really. I’m repeating what I saw someplace years ago. I would say do a real RAID if you manage it. Maybe RAID 5 on 3 drives.

While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID, I ended up choosing nas drives for the 24/7 intended usage,

The purpose of a NAS drive is to be LESS reliable than a regular drive, not more reliable. Explanation: if a regular drive gets a read error on a block, it will retry for quite a while before giving up. The host, meanwhile, has to wait for the data to be retrieved if the retries work. That’s all it can really do, wait and hope. Meanwhile, the waiting slows the application down.

A NAS drive instead will fail once or twice, then give up immediately, since it knows that it’s in a RAID system and that the data is also present on other disks. The RAID then puts the data together from the other drives and gets it to the host, logging the error. It will also hopefully mark the bad block on the drive with the read failure, and rewrite the recovered data to a spare sector. So this is faster than all the retries even though the drive that had the bad block gives up on it rather than attempting recovery by repeated reads.

So if you buy NAS drives, put them in a RAID.

Drives are currently around 2x as expensive as a year or so ago but they are available if you can afford them. I guess that’s better than shortages where they’re hard to find even if you can pay. We’ve had that before too.

I like to think the current situation will settle out. Who knows though. Drive space is still way less expensive than in 2010 or anything like that.

The pi is pretty slow too, compared to a basic x86 laptop. I use a Logitech K40 wireless keyboard (USB dongle, not bluetooth) that has a built in trackpad though. So that gets rid of the mouse and two cables, and you can actually use it in your lap.

I think ID for new customers is widespread now because of the growth of scams. I enrolled at Porkbun from the US a number of years ago without ID (before they started asking for it) and they haven’t asked me for it retroactively, so I don’t think it’s required, it’s just something they do as an anti-scam measure. I’ve never tried for a UK or other national domain from them.

Try https://tld-list.com/ for comparisons.

Thanks, I’m more interested in quality than speed, but will try the smaller models to see if the results are usable. My CPU has Intel Integrated Graphics 4000 (this is in an i7-3770 which is way old by now) and I kind of doubt Pytorch supports that, though it’s possible. I can imagine upgrading to a newer processor but probably not a real GPU. Actually it looks like everything is way more expensive than it used to be, no big surprise.

Thanks, I don’t have a GPU so if the program required one, I’d rent an hourly one (vast.ai has lots of affordable rentals). But it’s easier if I can run cpu-only. If I were doing this a lot (I don’t expect to), I could see getting a Ryzen APU server, if the GPU in those is supported.

Thanks. My old i5-something server is probably in the same speed range as your laptop. It’s good to hear about the transcription quality. If conversion is slower than real time, I can live with it. I can just throw a bunch of files at it and let it run overnight. Faster is always nicer of course.

Thanks, I have heard of it and the configuration does look manageable. Do the more accurate models run at tolerable speed without a GPU? Or even with one for that matter? I’d hope to get transcriptions as good as Youtube’s (they have lots of errors but they’re fairly usable). Is that realistic?

Thanks, that’s interesting and I might try it, though it’s an Android app. I was hoping for a Linux CLI tool that I could run on a server.

Added: the phone app says it wants microphone and video permissions, which is a bit annoying. I don’t care at all about live transcribing. I only want to convert files. It also wants network permissions and special protocols, which seems weird. I can understand if it wants to download models, but I wonder what else it wants the network for.

I don’t see the point then. I can install direct from GitHub if I want that. I don’t want a random intermediary that’s another possible attack vector.

What’s wrong with F-droid?