Sudden culture shock from a Norwegian:

Still open is the transition of heat and cars to electricity…

Almost all electricity used by Norwegian homes goes towards heating (including cooking and hot water), and charging cars. So counting heating separate from electricity suddenly makes the electric transition sound less impressive. (And the transition away from nuclear more baffling). It’s still impressive to see Germany really follow through on renewables though. 60% renewable electricity is still a lot

Is there a plan to transition away from burning fossil fuels for heating?

“10ft away from the screen”. I.e. sitting in a sofa playing on a TV, compared to sitting at a desk close to a monitor

Zim really is amazing, its the perfect balance with its simple plain text files in folders data structure, but powerful search and back linking. And I love linking to other files on the local file system.

How do you do the LUKS volume upload to cloud? Is it for syncing between devices or just backup? Personally I use (self hosted) NextCloud to sync my Zim between devices.

FlowLauncher looks neat, like KRunner for Windows. Thanks for sharing

Yeah the nodered flow on the target device is for handling shutdown(sleep) and status reporting back to HomeAssistant, so in HA the computer is a simple switch with on/off states

Oh neat!

I made a custom solution for WOL and remote shutdown using nodered and MQTT, but this is so cleaner than maintaining a custom solution

No they’re not, in fact Cosmic is almost ready for Alpha release (Sorry, couldn’t help myself)

You make a valid point.

One counterpoint does come to mind: Cost. The hardware to run it on ain’t cheap

(Im not up to date on the used market and the cut off point where old macs become unsupported and stop receiving software updates)

Had great success on Kubuntu. Set up the desktop to have two giant icons only: Firefox, and shutdown.

On Windows the constant popups for updating various components were causing much confusion Java, flash (back in the day), printer “drivers”, and of course windows itself would throw popups about updates requiring clicking buttons every time they used the computer, which was very infrequently, and cause them much confusion (“what does update mean” ?")

Meanwhile on Kubuntu all updates go “shhhh” in the background, and no more confusing “To shutdown, press Start”

This happens when a small project has 12 developers each scratching their own itch in their own time, not a team of 120 developers getting paid to work on the same itch 8 hours a day.

In the case of FreeCAD they’re actually starting to reign in and focus more now, and there are more contributors.

Instead of one super chunky battery, how about a laptop with replaceable batteries, in combination with a UPS?

UPS is so you can actually replace the laptop battery with a spare one , even during a power outage. Just run the laptop on AC from the UPS while changing batteries. Or see if you can find a UPS with a long lasting battery. Entry level ones only have like 15-30 minutes of battery life though, since they’re more intended for safe shutdowns or brownouts.

You might want to look up SMR vs CMR, and why it matters for NASes. The gist is that cheaper drives are SMR, which work fine mostly, but can time out during certain operations, like a ZFS rebuild after a drive failure.

Sorry don’t remember the details, just the conclusion that’s it’s safer to stay away from SMR for any kind of software RAID

EDIT: also, there was the SMR scandal a few years ago where WD quietly changed their bigger volume WD Red (“NAS”) drives to SMR without mentioning it anywhere in the speccs. Obviously a lot of people were not happy to find that their “NAS” branded hard drives were made with a technology that was not suitable for NAS workload. From memory i think it was discovered when someone investigated why their ZFS rebuild kept failing on their new drive.

Another option is subpaths: xyz.ddns.net/portainer

Just one open port, to your reverse proxy (nginx or other).

The client updating no-ip with your dynamic IP is independent of the reverse proxy software.

This sounds like a FOSS utopian future :)

There’s a few projects that have started towards this path with single-click deployable apps, you could even say HomeAssistant OS does this to some extent my managing the services for you.

I believe one of the biggest hurdle for a “self hosting appliance” is resilience to hardware failure. Noone wants to loose decades of family photos or legal documents due to a SSD going bad , or the cat spilling water on their “hosting box”. So automated reliable off-site backups and recovery procedures for both data and configs is key.

Databox from BBC / Nottingham University is also a very interesting concept worth looking in to:

A platform for managing secure access to data and enabling authorised third parties to provide the owner authenticated control and accountability.

Probably more what MangoKangoroo and B0rax talked about, that enterprises can opt out of this telemetry, due to compliance or Intellectual Property protection.

So only the commoners get mandatory full-scale surveillance, Ehm I mean “ai enhancement”

Why did they have their own builds of these projects in the first place? Did they have custom patches they maintained?

I hope you’re joking about rebooting to Windows for paint 😁

But just in case, and for the benefit of others: KolourPaint

It’s basically KDE Paint, and works great as a simple image editor

I’m in this picture and I don’t like it

Yeah Track&Graph is great. I also use it for tracking exercises and weight, and just use the built-in graphs to see the trend over time

They were too preoccupied on wether they could, they never stopped to question wether they should