A digital solder gun with a properly sized tip and a magnifying glass with helping hands (flexible clips) helps immensely. I had to hand solder a surface mount resistor that looked about the size of the tip of a pencil. It wasn’t pretty but I got it done.

Ideally, sure use a password generator - but I wouldn’t worry about the security of a password generator like the one I linked.

1. There’s no linking of the password you generated to whichever account you are creating.
2. There’s no guarantee from the web operator’s perspective that you are actually using the generated passwords for anything at all.

Again, use bitwarden’s generator - or equivalent - for passphrases, but in the absence of that correcthorsebatterystaple.com is good enough for a non-shared password.

The other thing to keep in mind with PiHole - some things are just going to break with it’s default blocking, namely the Google suggested results.

i know, I know - just don’t use google, but android phones/parents have a hard time not just braindead going to Google for results.

It’s not the end of the world - I’ve trained myself to just keep scrolling to actual results.

Another feature for PiHole is local DNS - if you want, you can set up custom dnsmasq entries for self hosted/internal services.

The brand/type of wifi router is more of a technical requirements discussion than privacy discussion.

For instance, I live in a two story townhome rental with the modem in the basement - so I picked up an Orbi mesh system to bounce wifi up to the second floor. I also have a fairly complex network with IoT VLAN, DMZ (for remote VPN) and other network segments - again the orbi doing different VLANs per SSID was a deciding factor.

I’ve also only used the Orbi as an access point, relying on a dedicated firewall/router for that stuff.

If you’re looking at a flat network (e.g. everything on one segment - the typical home user setup), pretty much any WiFi router from Best Buy or equivalent will do the job. Check your current devices to see if you can take advantage of WiFi 7 technology - otherwise save a few bucks and go WiFi 6.

For security purposes, change the default SSID (the wireless name) to something unique - and change the password to something from correcthorsebatterystaple.net. You don’t need the default jumble of letters and numbers to be secure.

Lastly, getting to your privacy concerns, look at the DHCP settings - that’s what hands out IP addresses to your devices so they can reach the internet. Change the DNS servers to something other than your ISP. This looks like a good starting point.

The big things are to make sure you don’t expose your router management to the Internet (the default shouldn’t do that) and to make sure you periodically check for firmware updates.

If you want to up your game, you could look at spinning up a self-hosted DNS server like Pi-Hole - but that can be a bit more advanced to get setup and troubleshoot if something goes wrong.

I have been doing that for the past 10 years or so and I love it. I went from having something like a Roku plugged in to now just running Linux on a mini PC.

The only annoying part has been trying to find a good wireless keyboard/ mouse combo that uses rechargeable batteries. Logitech discontinued the expensive one that I used to have.

I would consider using your Synology for what it’s good at - storage.

My homelab has a Synology DS1618 and servers are Lenovo M90q systems. They have enough compute to get the job done, and use the Synology NFS mount for storage.

Yeah, for the integrated CI/CD, give GitLab a shot - it saves on spinning up a Jenkins or ConcourseCI server.

CI/CD can be useful for triggering automation after merge requests are approved, building infrastructure from code, etc.

I’ll come out with an anti-recommendation: Don’t do GitLab.

They used to be quite good, but lately (as in the past two years or so) they’ve been putting things behind a licensing paywall.

Now if your company wants to pay for GitLab, then maybe consider it? But I’d probably look at some of the other options people have mentioned in this thread.

I’m a few months into using CachyOS on my zephyrus gaming laptop and it’s been a joy.

I actually ran into my first issue yesterday and had to boot into the windows drive for the first time in what feels like forever - I needed a Windows only display editor program for Nextion screens.

I tried the installer on bottles and playonlinux, But I couldn’t get the program to load. I will try again today so that if I have to load it up in the future I don’t have to switch back to Windows, but on the off chance anybody knows how to fix it I’m all ears.

Oh snap, are you the developer of Viewtube? If so, first off - great job. I do the infrastructure side of IT for my day job but aside from some basic go, I couldn’t code something like this to save my life.

I wish I had the chops to contribute to the project.

This. My first serious network upgrade was splitting out the router/firewall, Wifi, and switching to a Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite, 8 port Netgear managed switch, and a Ubiquiti AP Pro.

It ended up being around the price of a night hawk, but I had way better control over the firewall/NAT rules and it made future upgrades less painful as I could just target the switching vs WiFi for a change.

As a side note, nearly all wifi routers that I’ve come across can act as just a access point. My current setup is using the Orbi mesh wifi system to get a decent signal to my attic bedroom.

I’m playing something every night before bed as my calm/reset time.

Just finished up Yakuza: Like A Dragon - that ending hits hard. I’ll probably go for something different next.

I still use my gaming laptop - but mostly just for Last Epoch multiplayer/BG3. I don’t like the controller experience for either game, and i have a better voice setup for multiplayer chat on my PC.

I wish someone would actually drop the full leak somewhere. It would be interesting to read this myself.

That’s what I think I’ll be doing with my weekend. I recently (probably back in January) discovered Ventoy - it makes things much faster for testing different OSes when I don’t have to flash ISOs very time.

Here’s a recommendations for what I use in my three node Proxmox homelab:

TCNEWCL KVM Switch 4 Port, HDMI KVM Switcher https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089ZW5PW5

It would give you some room to grow, supports HDMI for video, and comes with a fancy remote clicker to swap between PCs. I have a mech keyboard plugged in along with a mouse (although the mouse isn’t super useful for my applications.

Heck, you could do a pre-stage play where you delegate to localhost an ansible.builtin.get_url to download the compose file before doing the rest.

I think that mitigation requires two things for it to work.

1. You need to use a a Type 2 hypervisor (like Virtualbox, VMware Workstation/Fusion).
2. That VM needs to be configured in NAT mode.

The two primary ways you can configure a network for a local virtual machine are NAT and Bridged.

Bridged mode places your VM effectively on the same network as your host OS, meaning that any DHCP server that exists on your network (rogue or otherwise) will give your virtual machine and IP.

In NAT mode, the virtualization platform itself includes a DHCP server to dole out IPs, and handle the routing between your virtual machine and your host OS’s network.

The thought process is that if you trust your laptop, the DHCP address handed out for NAT mode will not have the VPN breaking DHCP option and your VPN inside the VM will not have it’s route table screwed with.

After beating Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, I decided to revisit the previous game, Yakuza: Like A Dragon. I first tried playing YLAD a few years ago on my gaming PC, but the incredibly long, unskippable cut scenes were super frustrating. Infinite Wealth had some of that same problem, but the story clicked with me a bit more and I’ve fallen in love with the mix of heartfelt quirky gameplay.

Plus, the Steam Deck makes the long cut scenes way easier to deal with when you can just pause and sleep your console if you need a break.

I actually use my Steam Deck for programming, with the vast majority of my time spent in desktop mode. The updates are a pain to deal with, but I’ve got an Ansible playbook that can get me back to normal fairly easily.

Adding to the Nazi comment - substack is basically a long form blog format, very similar (AFAICT) to Medium.