I know right? What a poser!

/s

Sadly not really. I use the free tier Oracle, which honestly has worked very well, but I’m not going to recommend using Oracle aside to say that it functionally works for me.

If I were to switch I would probably go to racknerd.

VPS+VPN (WireGuard for me), with Tailscale as an emergency alternative, has worked very well for me. Knock on wood the only outages have been my own fault.

The messaging on 50 has been great IMHO. Basically, “this is an affront to democracy, but Texas did it first and if we take the moral high ground we’re screwed.”

Americans had “unity” after 9/11

Uh, no we didn’t. Source: am American, lived through that period.

Yes we had a brief period of unity (and solidarity with NYC) following 9/11, but as soon as the American War Machine woke up, my country was intensely divided.

I used Photoprism years ago, so my knowledge is probably pretty outdated.

My experience of Photoprism was that mobile was not tightly integrated. At the time I used Syncthing to sync photos — it worked ok for me, but I wasn’t going to set it up on my partner’s phone, for example.

Immich Just Works on both mobile and desktop. Multi user is great, sharing is great, and the local ML and face detection work remarkably well.

Whatever works for you is the best of course! Immich fits the bill for me, and it was very much worth it for me to “buy” it.

That’s how I start my refried beans. After pressure cooker add oil (lots…), salt, and a little vinegar. Sauteed onions, cumin, chili powder also good.

I think it’s way better than any vegetarian refried beans that you get in a can. Probably because they have more salt and oil…

There’s a joke about whitespace here somewhere, I just know it.

Regarding DNS servers, what router do you have? Some routers have simple enough DNS capabilities — I have a MikroTik, and have it set up with DNS entries for internal services (including wildcard). Publicly accessible services just use my registrar’s DNS (namecheap — no complaints).

Oracle Free tier, amd64. Only use it because it’s free—limited bandwidth, but given I have slow upload at home it’s never really been a bottleneck. Hate to admit it given it’s Oracle, but I’ve been completely happy with it.

If I switch to a paid VPS I will probably go with racknerd (suggestions welcome though if you have thoughts).

Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…

What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.

Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.

I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.

Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)

Adjusted for inflation, or better yet something like median salary, would probably be more meaningful.

Seems this will preferentially screw folks in low cost of living areas. If you’re in a HCOL/VHCOL area and making ends meet, then a new car is probably affordable. If you’re making ends meet in a LCOL area, then this is likely a huge expense.

Matter is also local—provisioning can be a PITA but once done I’ve been pretty happy with even the cheap Matter WiFi smart bulbs. Home Assistant supports them very well.

Cheap bulbs can be a little buggy, which usually means I need to power cycle some of them now and then.

My lights and motion sensors were obviously unaffected (HomeAssistant). My Emporia Vue2 power monitor would possibly have stopped working, except I flashed it with ESPHome firmware, so it’s local only, and of course it was fine. My security cameras (Frigate) were also fine.

If my smart home devices are going to stop working, it will almost certainly be my fault, thank you very much!

There’s an interesting discussion in the comments about the architecture: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/10/20/banana-pi-bpi-r4-pro-board-offers-2x-10gbe-sfp-cages-6x-10gbe-2-5gbe-gbe-ports-wifi-7-support/

Sounds like there are bottlenecks, and you can’t run all ports at line speed. User TLS says:

Is it just me, or is the MaxLinear MxL86252C switch connected to one of the 10 Gbps PHYs? The MT7988 only has a single 2.5 Gbps MAC and it’s shared with the second 10 Gbps MAC. It seems like they’re routing a 10 Gbps signal to the MxL86252C, which has two 10 Gbps SerDes interfaces, making the second set of 10 Gbps connected via the switch. This suggests that if the 10 Gbps port is running at full speed, you won’t be able to use the 2.5 Gbps ports.

the audio had glitched so I missed the voice over

This was not a triumph.

You’re right, for new drives it looks like a little more with this 20GB retailing for $230, or $11.50/TB.

For refurbished, I recently got a factory renewed 12TB Seagate for $112 ($9.33/TB), but that price is now up to $199 for the same drive (!).

Official numbers here https://www.debian.org/mirror/size

About 4.4TB, but that’s all architectures and (I believe?) all distributions (stable, testing…).

If you only want source+all+amd64+arm64, and only want stable, it will be smaller of course.

Not nothing, but at $10/TB or so, it’s not much.

And if you’re following 3-2-1, I’m pretty sure the “1” is already handled for you :)

I’ve been really impressed with Immich, can’t recommend it enough.