93n

Tangentially, my home server is a slightly newer NUC with a toy of a celeron N3050. That runs great for the overwhelming majority of use cases, too. The only obviously slow operations are anything heavily CPU-bound, like compiling (esphome) and photo indexing (photoprism). In the latter case, I run it at night on a cron, so it's not really an issue in practice.

I'd expect your T400 is similar to my E6510 in terms of construction since they're both business machines from the same era. The E6510 is a tank. The hinges are still solid and there's no wear on the keyboard. There's a single panel, held on by just a single screw, that pops off on the bottom to expose the majority of user-replaceable parts.

It'd be useless with Windows, but works great with Linux. The only issue I have is severe lag on google maps.

I still run, and am writing this from, a 16-or-17 year old Dell E6510 (i5-540) that serves as my "around the house" computer. The battery life (with a huge 9 cell that protrudes out the back) isn't great, and it's hot and heavy, but with 8GiB of RAM and an SSD it works pretty well on Trixie with Cinnamon.

My main machine is a 13 year old Lenovo y510p running Debian and KDE. You'd be hard-pressed to tell that it's anywhere near that age.

The only aspect that has been annoying with both is graphics. Both machines are nvidia and are long past their support periods. The y510p has SLI (one graphics card is in the CD drive slot) which never worked on Linux. When removing the second card, the on-processor Intel graphics can be used, which have better support than nvidia, so I stick with that. I don't do anything graphics intensive anyway.

The biggest upgrade with old computers, without any doubt, is an SSD. I still remember getting my first one back in about 2011, a used 60GiB OCZ Vertex, and it was truly magic seeing the computer boot to the desktop in a few seconds even on a core 2 duo.

FWIW: Depending on your use case, Cloudflare doesn't have visibility into to cleartext. In my setup, I use their arbitrary TCP tunneling feature to tunnel SSH for a remote host, which works great.

That said: I do also tunnel HTTP, and I've come to terms with the privacy risk. Being able to setup enforcement of things like mTLS at the edge is quite nice.

Yep, I run esphome in a separate stack w/o issues.

The host I run HA on is Ubuntu server. If memory serves me right, the Bluetooth issue was related to apparmor and dbus restrictions on docker

I go the container route, and have only had one issue: allowing HA to access my system's Bluetooth adapter. I had some ESP32s lying around, so I used ESPHome to make a Bluetooth proxy, which solved that issue.

I don't run addons though, which might be part of it.

> The fun part is in the building, it's in the understanding, the growth of me.

I agree with this sentiment as well. Without a doubt, my favorite part of the job is coming up with a solution that just 'feels right', especially when said solution is much cleaner than brute force/naive approach. It sounds cheesy, but it truly is one of my favorite sensations.

I'm the senior-most engineer on my team of about 15. I try to emphasize software craftsmanship, which resonates with some but not all. We have a few engineers who have seemingly become reliant on AI tooling, and I struggle with them. Some of them are trying to push code that they clearly don't understand and aren't reviewing, and I think they're setting themselves up for failure due to lack of growth.

I decided to cut an hour out of my in-the-office time recently, figuring that I'm sitting on the bus for any hour anyway, so I might as well use that time to knock some work out instead. Tethering is pretty good other than a predictable problem spot or two.

Much better experience than working on a plane. I've done a handful of cross-US flights this year on Alaska Airlines, and trying to do anything network-related on those flights was torture. Super spotty, high latencies, constant timeouts; very frustrating.

+1. I switched from Pop OS to Debian + KDE last week, and KDE has been solid. I too read a handful of articles calling out the choice fatigue, and other than a few tweaks (maybe half an hour?) I was ready to go. I run old-ish hardware (circa 2013) without any issues.

Something notable is that the all the hotkeys felt 'just right'. I had to tinker a bunch in Pop OS to get satisfying hotkey combos, and the COSMIC upgrade reset them all.

Yeah, I know this feeling very well.

I usually attribute it to people being lazy, not caring, or not using their brain.

It's quite frustrating when something is *so obviously* wrong, to the point that anyone with a modicum of experience should be able to realize that what was implemented is totally whack. Please, spend at least a few minutes reviewing your work so that I don't have to waste my time on nonsense.

My mom was paying a few hundred a year to Wix for a basic single page, static site. I finally decided that it was a waste of money and went down the Hugo-on-cloudflare route a few months ago. Can't beat it - all she's paying for now is the domain.

The only issue I had encountered was moving the domain from wix. If memory serves me right, I had to point the NS records to CF to do the transfer, and Wix doesn't allow control over them. I ended up transferring over to Porkbun instead, but using CF for DNS.

Hugo took some getting used to. Most of the templates I had seen were for blogs, but "hugo-scroll" works like a charm for the basic single page site.

Native WebDAV mount support in Android would be handy. I use davx5 (https://github.com/bitfireAT/davx5-ose), but accessing files is a bit clunky.

I like WebDAV because it 'just works' with the mTLS infra I had already setup on my homelab for access from the outside world.

I use sftpgo (https://sftpgo.com/) on the server side.

Another +1 for miniflux.

Something atypical about my setup is that I wired up miniflux webhooks to n8n and gotify so that when I click "save" on an entry, I get a notification for it. It's a rudimentary way to setup a "read it later" list.

I self-host n8n along with about two dozen other services for personal use.

I make extensive use of the webhook triggers. Being able to spin up an endpoint with minimal effort is quite handy.

The data table feature looks useful. Similar to another poster, I've been using json blobs on disk instead, since I don't have concurrency, scaling, or performance concerns for my use cases.

I get some very weird vibes from the n8n subreddit. There's a bunch of 'get rich quick with AI workflows' posts which feel icky.

Same setup, minus the Pi. That includes originally starting out with jellyfin!

When on Jellyfin, I used to manually transcode the entire library to ogg and use syncthing to replicate it to my devices. Symfonium's ability to cache transcoded files is quite handy (although the initial backfill of ~20K songs took a few tries)

I have the same "confuse humans" problem. I use CloudFlare to forward ${company}@accounts.${me}.com to a personal GMail. I've had a limited number of cases where the sender will accept the address, but internally fail to send to it, Costco being one of them (the person in-store at Costco couldn't get over the address)

+1. Would love to talk about self-hosting with other people interested in the hobby

Plus backups, which you want to ensure are solid for data like this.

Late 20s, same thing. I am constantly forgetting words for things, but can visualize what it's describing in my head.

Jan 2022 for me. I also have the "air hunger" sensation, but it comes in spurts. I was also perscribed an inhaler, and have used it a few times, but it doesn't seem to have much of an impact.

Another Caddy fan here. I've used it for the past year or two since I started getting into homelabs, and it works great.

Visible (Verizon) has a "plus" plan for $45/mo which includes Apple Watch service.

I feel exactly the same way. My main machine is an 11 year old IdeaPad with a 4th Gen i7, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD. No performance issues whatsoever on Mint. From what I recall, battery life isn't great, but I've used it exclusively as a desktop for most of its lifetime.

Windows on the original 5.4k disk, especially booting, was a truly awful experience.

My "lounging around" machine is a 14yr old Dell E6510 with a 1st gen i5, 8GB of RAM, and an SSD. It also works like a charm with Mint.

Senior here too. It's a mix - usually my manager pushes hard on the less in the weeds-type topics, and I push on those in addition to the lower level topics. I can say with certainty that neither my manager nor I are ignored.

Selfhoster here. I use mutual TLS rules with CloudFlare's WAF to filter out everyone but my known-good callers. Works great. Since the only folks with access are my family, it was pretty easy to setup as well (everyone gets a unique cert that I can revoke if need be).