There are really two reasons ECC is a “must-have” for me.

• I’ve had some variant of a “homelab” for probably 15 years, maybe more. For a long time, I was plagued with crashes, random errors, etc. Once I stopped using consumer-grade parts and switched over to actual server hardware, these problems went away completely. I can actually use my homelab as the core of my home network instead of just something fun to play with. Some of this improvement is probably due to better power supplies, storage, server CPUs, etc, but ECC memory could very well play a part. This is just anecdotal, though.
• ECC memory has saved me before. One of the memory modules in my NAS went bad; ECC detected the error, corrected it, and TrueNAS sent me an alert. Since most of the RAM in my NAS is used for a ZFS cache, this likely would have caused data loss had I been using non-error-corrected memory. Because I had ECC, I was able to shut down the server, pull the bad module, and start it back up with maybe 10 minutes of downtime as the worst result of the failed module.

I don’t care about ECC in my desktop PCs, but for anything “mission-critical,” which is basically everything in my server rack, I don’t feel safe without it. Pfsense is probably the most critical service, so whatever machine is running it had better have ECC.

I switched from bare-metal to a VM for largely the same reason you did. I was running Pfsense on an old-ish Supermicro server, and it was pushing my UPS too close to its power limit. It’s crazy to me that yours only pulled 40 watts, though; I think I saved about 150-175W by switching it to a VM. My entire rack contains a NAS, a Proxmox server, a few switches, and a couple of other miscellaneous things. Total power draw is about 600-650W, and jumps over 700W under a heavy load (file transfers, video encoding, etc). I still don’t like the idea of having Pfsense on a VM, though; I’d really like to be able to make changes to my Proxmox server without dropping connectivity to the entire property. My UPS tops out at 800W, though, so if I do switch back to bare-metal, I only have realistically 50-75W to spare.

I have a few services running on Proxmox that I’d like to switch over to bare metal. Pfsense for one. No need for an entire 1U server, but running on a dedicated machine would be great.

Every mini PC I find is always lacking in some regard. ECC memory is non-negotiable, as is an SFP+ port or the ability to add a low-profile PCIe NIC, and I’m done buying off-brand Chinese crop on Amazon.

If someone with a good reputation makes a reasonably-priced mini PC with ECC memory and at least some way to accept a 10Gb DAC, I’ll probably buy two.

I really wouldn’t write off the Shield completely. It’s a few years old, but it works really well. My TVs are all disconnected from my network, and each has a Shield attached. The Shield can stream 4k HDR from Jellyfin, play ad-free YouTube with SmartTubeNext, and handles remote game streaming at 4k/60 with Sunshine/Moonlight. It’s really a versatile little box.

You act like this is a negative thing that they’re choosing to ignore. If anything, this will make them even more supportive of him; most of them would do the same if they could get away with it.

I appreciate the suggestion, but that looks like a Java library. Interpreted languages make me feel dirty. Java makes me feel even dirtier. If it’s not C, C++, or ASM, is it really worth using?

I’m okay with the “human-readability,” but I’ve never been happy with the “machine-readibility” of XML. Usually I just want to pull a few values from an API return, yet every XML library assumes I want the entire file in a data structure that I can iterate through. It’s a waste of resources and a pain in the ass.

Even though it’s not the “right” way, most of the time I just use regex to grab whatever exists between an opening and closing tag. If I’m saving/loading data from my own software, I just use a serialization library.

It really depends on how far back you want to look.

If the US was to suddenly stop projecting its interests internationally, then as others have mentioned, then likely the world work become somewhat more socialized. European countries would probably step up and try to keep China in check, but without the US contributing to these efforts, it would cause a significant strain on their military resources.

If the US was to take an isolationist policy 100 years ago, then there is a good chance that WW2 would have been won by the Axis. The Allied forces likely would have put up a good fight, but I’m not sure they would have emerged victorious against the combined Axis forces. The war in the Pacific would have raged on much longer, and without nuclear weapons, there would have been an extreme loss of life invading Japan. At the very least, WW2 would have lasted much much longer than it did. Depending on the outcome, plenty of countries might currently be speaking German and debating if they should tear down 80-year-old statues of Hitler.

A lot of boomers are really particular about well-manicured yards, pristine gardens, etc. Squirrels do not help with this.

I love seeing little divots where our squirrels bury nuts. If they eat some of our plants, then I put a cage around it or plant new ones. Seeing the little guys play and eat the food we put out for them far outweighs any minor landscaping problems they cause.

The problem isn’t that Harris is being held to a higher standard. The problem is that Americans think of elections the same way they think of a sporting match. It’s “my team is going to win!” not “I’m going to vote for the candidate that is best aligned with my beliefs.” A huge number of the people who are voting Republican are doing so because the Republican party is their “team,” and damn it, their team is going to win even if it kills them.

Many years ago, I was discussing politics with a coworker (always a bad idea, but whatever). It went something like this:

“So, you don’t think the less-fortunate should be able to afford medical care?” “No, of course not, everyone should be able to see a doctor.”

“You don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry?” “I’m not gay, but they can do whatever makes them happy.”

“You support the war in Iraq, then?” “I support our troops, but the war is kind of a waste.”

“We definitely should legalize weed, right?” “Um, I’d smoke it if I didn’t get drug tested.”

“So why are you voting Republican, then?” “My family is Republican; we always do.”

I can’t speak to the AI voice generation part of this, but you might be interested in the Domesday Duplicator for digitizing your audio, especially if some or it is slightly degraded.

https://github.com/harrypm/DomesdayDuplicator

The project was originally designed for laserdisc, but it’s been expanded to support VHS and cassette tape. Traditionally, you would play your tape on a cassette player, then the built in analog circuitry would convert the magnetic signals into audio, amplify them, and feed them to a sound card on your PC, which then converts the analog signal to a digital audio stream.

With the Domesdsy Duplicator, you record the raw magnetic signal from the read head and directly digitize it into a bitstream that you can then process as needed. For DIY archiving from an analog source, it’s one of the best options for signal fidelity, and it will give you the truest representation of what’s actually on the tape.

I think I’m misunderstanding how LDAP works. It’s probably obvious, but I’ve never used it.

If my switch is expecting a username and password for login, how does it go from expecting a web login to “the LDAP server recognizes this person, and they have permissions to access network devices, so I’ll let them in.”?

Also, to be clear, I’m referring to the process of logging in and configuring the switch itself, not L2 switching or L3 routing.

Like several people here, I’ve also been interested in setting up an SSO solution for my home network, but I’m struggling to understand how it would actually work.

Lets say I set up an LDAP server. I log into my PC, and now my PC “knows” my identity from the LDAP server. Then I navigate to the web UI for one of my network switches. How does SSO work in this case? The way I see it, there are two possible solutions.

• The switch has some built-in authentication mechanism that can authenticate with the LDAP server or something like Keycloak. I don’t see how this would work as it relies upon every single device on the network supporting a particular authentication mechanism.
• I log into and authenticate with an HTTP forwarding server that then supplies the username/password to the switch. This seems clunky but could be reasonably secure as long as the username/password is sufficiently complex.

I generally understand how SSO works within a curated ecosystem like a Windows-based corporate network that uses primarily Microsoft software for everything. I have various Linux systems, Windows, a bunch of random software that needs authentication, and probably 10 different brands of networking equipment. What’s the solution here?

Personally, I’d be happy with a web browser that doesn’t make me jump through hoops to access a HTTPS site with certificate errors on a local IP address.

I don’t care if 192.168.1.1 is using a self-signed certificate. I just want to configure my fucking router.

As someone who has written a ridiculous amount of code that deals with date and time, I support this 100%.

I’m a big fan of ZFS, and I use it extensively. For a single hard drive, though, wouldn’t ext4 and a few NFS shares make a lot more sense?

Sounds like a solid plan. I’m glad I could help.

I understand what you’re saying. As far as using your school account to sign in to Microsoft Office, the fact that you use a school account should not make a difference in terms of privacy. If you’re using Outlook and Teams for school, just don’t use them for personal things, and you should be fine. If you’re using the web versions through a web browser, then you have nothing at all to worry about. If you actually install the apps, you still likely have nothing to worry about, although I would make sure they’re at least signed out and closed when you’re not using them. You don’t want to accidentally send a message to your school’s Teams group when you’re drunk and watching YouTube videos at 3am.

As far as “enrolling in your school’s environment,” I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean by that. I know that some companies will install corporate nanny-ware on systems that they issue out to their employees (you’ve probably heard about CrowdStrike), but if you’re using a personal laptop for school, that’s not going to happen unless you hand it over to the school’s IT department and say “please fuck up my computer.”

Most likely the “cloud” file you see in your documents is a Microsoft OneDrive account that comes included with your school’s Office subscription. You can use it as a backup for schoolwork, ignore it completely, or just uninstall OneDrive. I like keeping my important stuff on local storage, but if you want a place to back up a project, go ahead and use it. Maybe don’t copy your porn stash over to your OneDrive account.

I am a strong advocate for keeping things separate on your computer. Not necessarily from a privacy standpoint, but more so just to keep everything tidy and easy to manage. If I was just using Teams and Outlook, maybe logging into an online portal, I’d probably just do exactly that without a second thought. If you find that you’re installing a lot of different applications for your studies, like I mentioned before, you might consider setting up a VM. A VM (Virtual Machine) essentially acts as a second computer within your own. You would install a hypervisor (I’d recommend VirtualBox for you), and inside the hypervisor, you can create separate “virtual” computers. You install your operating system, boot up the virtual machine, and use it just like you would a whole separate PC. When you’re done, you shut it down, and when you no longer need it, just delete the VM, and your PC isn’t cluttered with a bunch of stuff you don’t need. The “hard drive” for your VM lives in a single file, and once that file is deleted, it’s as if your virtual machine never existed. One way to think of it is like building a house inside a room in your own house. You still have a bedroom, a kitchen, bathrooms, and a living room. Only in this “virtual” house, you can paint the walls, throw parties, trash the carpet, invite hobos to live on your couch, whatever you want. When the house gets too trashed to live in any more, you just hit “delete” and it disappears; the actual house you live in is still in pristine condition.

So just as a summary, my opinion is just use your computer normally. Log into whatever school resources you need and don’t worry. If you need to install a whole bunch of school-related stuff that you don’t want cluttering up your PC, set up a VM.

It’s probably also worth noting that your school almost certainly isn’t trying to damage your computer or catch you doing something you want to keep private. They’re providing resources (a free Office subscription, for example) that they think might help facilitate your studies. You can use those resources, or not, but your computer is still your personal property, and your school isn’t trying to infringe on that.

You may need to elaborate a bit more on what your are trying to achieve; it looks like your post is missing a bit of backstory. It sounds like your concern is keeping your personal business and school activities separate, though.

• Switching away from Google is overall a good thing for privacy, but if your goal is privacy from your school, not from Google itself, it makes no difference who you want to use for email.
• Creating an additional account on your PC is not detrimental to privacy; in fact, some might argue that having a separate account for separate tasks is actually a good thing. I have multiple accounts on my servers, depending on what/who needs to log in. It doesn’t hurt to do the same on a desktop PC or laptop.
• Simply accessing school resources on your PC isn’t going to send the school your personal information, browser history, pirated movies, whatever. Clear your browser cookies between sessions if you’re concerned. Better yet, just set your browser to automatically clear cookies when you close the window, and make sure you exit the browser when you’re done with school work.
• Do you really need to use your school e-mail for anything other than school? I have a work email, but I only use it for things that are directly related to my job.

What you’re saying doesn’t really make a lot of sense. A lot of people here are probably happy to help you out, but you’ll need to be a bit more clear on what your goal is. I get the impression that you’re concerned about your school having some kind of privileged access to your computer because you check your school email and work on school assignments using personal computing resources. That’s not something you need to worry about; it’s really not how technology works. Logging into your school’s online portal doesn’t give them access to your files any more than buying something on Amazon.com lets Jeff Bezos browse your system.

If you’re really, REALLY concerned about privacy, just set up a VM using VirtualBox (it’s free and easy) for school stuff and continue to use your computer as you would normally. If you’re already comfortable re-installing Windows, then you absolutely will be able to set up a simple Windows VM. To be clear, I wouldn’t consider this necessary, but if you want to do it for peace of mind, then you have nothing to lose.

This situation becomes vastly different if you have a company or school-issued computer. In that case, then I wouldn’t use it for anything other than strictly business (or school)-related activities. Given the fact that you’re able to reformat and add/remove accounts, though, it doesn’t sound like you’re using a computer managed by an IT department.

On a side note, if your school did some how manage to gain access to your personal computer without your permission, find information that was detrimental to you, and somehow use it against you, I would ask you two things:

• What the hell kind of school are you going to?
• Do you like money? Because you and your lawyer are going to get a lot of it.

I’m fortunate enough to be a homeowner, but I rented places for most of my adult live. My current home doesn’t have central AC, and none of my rentals did either.

Everywhere I’ve lived, the mounting hardware that comes with portable ACs just didn’t work for me. What I found that did work is to throw away the existing window mount and build your own. I’ll take two pieces of plywood, cut them to the space that exists in my window (at one point this was a sliding door), and sandwich a sheet of insulation foam in the middle. Then drill holes for your AC tubes and screw on the mounts that came with your AC.

Also, if at all possible, avoid the single-hose portable units. You’re wasting cold air. A dual-hose unit uses outdoor air to cool the unit itself, and the hot exhaust gets expelled through the second tube. Do make sure you have a screen on the inlet, though, unless you want to be cleaning out bugs from inside your AC. I have used window units, single-hose portable, and dual-hose portable units. At least in my experience, the window units work best, the dual-hose units are a close second, and the single-hose units are crap.

As far as HA integration, I recently went through the process of finding a new AC that works with HA. What I found is that everything available either requires internet access and works with proprietary “cloud” access or just doesn’t have any sort of remote connection. Some of the “cloud” solutions have decent integration with HA, but I have a hard-and-fast rule that none of my IoT devices access anything outside my home network. What worked for me is buying a “dumb” portable AC with a remote control and using a Wifi-connected universal remote to provide access to HA.

I’ve been an electronics hobbyist for years, and I still don’t own a 3D printer. You can buy premade enclosures in almost every size you can imagine. Then just drill holes to mount IO ports.

I do want to get a 3D printer exactly for this reason, but I’ve just never gotten around to buying one. They are certainly not a necessity if you want to build your own stuff.