Already done.

I mean, you have to use it to get software; and if you’re submitting patches to other people’s software; and I have inherited maintenance of a popular project that would just confuse a ton of people, including several distros, if I moved it. But I never create projects in github anymore. Sourcehut has been great.

Yes! Hyphens and “+” are also legal, and while most will accept a dash, many don’t allow ‘+’. But it’s explicitly allowed in the spec!

God, the French. My friend has two first names, two middle, and thankfully only one surname.

So she writes 4 names? Does she put her maiden and married names both in the “surname” field? Or middle and maiden together in the “middle name” field?

Then the first part is interpreted (in the US, anyway) as a middle name, not as part of the last name. I did run into a recently married woman who did that: dropped her middle name, moved her last to the middle, and used her spouse’s last name.

More commonly, places that don’t take hyphens tend to just run the two names together: Axel-Smith becomes AxelSmith.

Programmers can be really dumb.

I haven’t tried it yet, and I haven’t had a reason to look into it. My experience with Fi was that you pay $10 per Gb - it didn’t come out of your normal bank - and per-minute charges. When I was traveling, I used my company phone, or if on vacation, purely data with heavy up front-caching as much as I could at the hotel. I really don’t like surprise bill sizes.

But to be honest, I haven’t tried Mint internationally, so I can’t say.

Not so bad. I use gmail as a backup for some accounts in case something happens to my VPS or domain, and my Amazon account is still linked to it out of laziness, but otherwise I never use it.

Oh. Except that I have an Android phone, and that’s linked to my gmail, although I don’t use any Google apps or services beyond Play. So I suppose my phone would stop working. Everything’s backed up, though, so maybe it’d be a good thing; maybe it’d motivate me to pull the trigger on a Light Phone. I kinda want a Minimal Phone because my F&F uses Jami, but that’d still be an Android phone, so it wouldn’t work either.

Fi isn’t that great. We were on Fi for years; I switched to Mint, my wife stayed on Fi until I was sure it was going to work. So far, I pay less for more, no gotchas.

It was amazing when it first came out; now it has a lot of competition that beats it.

There are a frightening number of systems that don’t allow “-”, which isn’t even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, “I paid for money for my name; I’m not letting it go.” (Note: I wasn’t pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It’s not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.

Yeah, I use systemd for the self-host stuff, but you should be able to use docker-compose files with podman-compose with no, or only minor, changes. Theoretically. If you’re comfortable with compose, you may have more luck. I didn’t have a lot of experience with docker-compose, and so when there’s hiccups I tend to just give up and do it manually, because it works just fine that way, too, and it’s easier (for me).

This is great additional information, much of which I didn’t know!

I’m doing the backing-up-twice thing; it’d probably be better if I backed up once and rsync’d - it’d be less computationally intensive and save disk space used by multiple restic caches. OTOH, it’d also have more moving parts and be harder to manage, and IME things that I touch rarely need to be as simple as possible because I forget how to use them in between uses.

Anyway, great response!

I started with rootless podman when I set up All My Things, and I have never had an issue with either maintaining or running it. Most Docker instructions are transposable, except that podman doesn’t assume everything lives as dockerhub and you always have to specify the host. I’ve run into a couple of edge cases where arguments are not 1:1 and I’ve had to dig to figure out what the argument is on podman. I don’t know if I’m actually more secure, but I feel more secure, and I really like not having the docker service running as root in the background. All in all, I think my experience with rootless podman has been better than my experience with docker, but at this point, I’ve had far more experience with podman.

Podman-compose gives me indigestion, but docker-compose didn’t exist or wasn’t yet common back when I used docker; and by the time I was setting up a homelab, I’d already settled on podman. So I just don’t use it most of the time, and wire things up by hand when necessary. Again, I don’t know whether that’s just me, or if podman-compose is more flaky than docker-compose. Podman-compose is certainly much younger and less battle-tested. So is podman but, as I said, I’ve been happy with it.

I really like running containers as separate users without that daemon - I can’t even remember what about the daemon was causing me grief; I think it may have been the fact that it was always running and consuming resources, even when I wasn’t running a container, which isn’t a consideration for a homelab. However, I’d rather deeply know one tool than kind of know two that do the same thing, and since I run containers in several different situations, using podman everywhere allows me to exploit the intimacy I wouldn’t have if I were using docker in some places and podman in others.

2¢

I have no opinion about rsync.net. I’d check which services restic supports; there are several, and it is it supports rsync.net and that’s what you want to use, you’re golden. Or, use another backup tool that has encryption-by-default and does support rsync.net - there are a couple of options.

I would just never store any data that wasn’t meant for public consumption unencrypted on someone else’s servers. I make an exception for my VPS, but that’s only because I’m more paranoid about exposing my LAN that putting my email on a VPS.

restic, and other backup tools, are generally not always on. You run them; they back up. If you run them only one a month, that’s how often they run. The remote mounting is just a nice feature when you want to grab a single file from one of the backups.

What you’re describing is a classic backup use-case. I’m recommending the easiest, cheapest, most reliable offsite solution I’ve used. restic has been around for years, and has a lot of users and a lot of eyeballs look at it, and it’s OSS. There are even GUIs for it, if you’re not comfortable with the CLI. B2 is generally well-regarded, is fairly easy to figure out, and has also been around for ages. Together, they make a solid combo. I also backup with restic to a local disk and use that for accessing history - B2 is just, as you say, in case of a fire, or theft, I suppose.

I wouldn’t.

Use a proper backup tool for this, like restic. BackBlaze has reasonable rates, especially of you’re mostly write-only, and restic has built-in support for B2 and encrypts everything by default. It also supports compression, but you won’t get much out of that on media files. restic is also cross-platform and a single executable, so you can throw binaries for OSX, Linux, and Windows on a USB stick and know you can get to your backups from anywhere. It also allows you to mount a remote repository like a filesystem (on Linux, at least), and browse a backup and get at individual files without having to restore everything. It’s super handy if you screw up a single file or directory.

Location services in Android are in-phone, and they’re definitely accurate and reporting to Google. I only clarified that your cell provider probably can’t locate you using triangulation via your cell Signal. Turn data off, and you’re fine; otherwise, Google is tracking you - and from what I’ve read, even if you have location services turned off.

They can’t, tho. There are two reasons for this.

Geolocating with cell towers requires trilateration, and needs special hardware on the cell towers. Companies used to install this hardware for emergency services, but stopped doing so as soon as they legally could as it’s very expensive. Cell towers can’t do triangulation by themselves as it requires even more expensive hardware to measure angles; trilateration doesn’t work without special equipment because wave propegation delays between the cellular antenna and the computers recording the signal are big enough to utterly throw off any estimate.

An additional factor in making trilateration (or even triangulation, in rural cases where they did sometimes install triangulation antenna arrays on the towers) is that, since the UMTS standard, cell chips work really hard to minimize their radio signal strength. They find the closest antenna and then reduce their power until they can just barely talk to the tower; and except in certain cases they only talk to one tower at a time. This means that, at any given point, only one tower is responsible for handling traffic for the phone, and for triangulation you need 3. In addition to saving battery power, it saves the cell companies money, because of traffic congestion: a single tower can only handle so much traffic, and they have to put in more antennas and computers if the mobile density gets too high.

The reason phones can use cellular signal to improve accuracy is because each phone can do its own triangulation, although it’s still not great and can be impossible because of power attenuation (being able to see only one tower - or maybe two - at a time); this is why Google and Apple use WiFi signals to improve accuracy, and why in-phone triangulation isn’t good enough: in any sufficiently dense urban or suburban environment, the combined informal of all the WiFi routers the phone can see, and the cell towers it can hear, can be enough to give a good, accurate position without having to turn on the GPS chip, obtain a satellite fix (which may be impossible indoors) and suck down power. But this is all done inside and from the phone - this isn’t something cell carriers can do themselves most of the time. Your phone has to send its location out somewhere.

TL;DR: Cell carriers usually can’t locate you with any real accuracy, without the help of your phone actively reporting its calculated location. This is largely because it’s very expensive for carriers to install the necessary hardware to get any accuracy of more than hundreds of meters; they are loath to spend that money, and legislation requiring them to do so no longer exists, or is no longer enforced.

Source: me. I worked for several years in a company that made all of the expensive equipment - hardware and software - and sold it to The Big Three carriers in the US. We also paid lobbyists to ensure that there were laws requiring cell providers to be able to locate phones for emergency services. We sent a bunch of our people and equipment to NYC on 9/11 and helped locate phones. I have no doubt law enforcement also used the capability, but that was between the cops and the cell providers. I know companies stopped doing this because we owned all of the patents on the technology and ruthlessly and successfully prosecuted the only one or two competitors in the market, and yet we still were going out of business at the end as, one by one, cell companies found ways to argue out of buying, installing, and maintaining all of this equipment. In the end, the competitors we couldn’t beat were Google and Apple, and the cell phones themselves.

Oh! Thanks, that… makes sense, actually!

you can still a perfectly good ship without them.

That’s what I’ve heard! And then I keep seeing these builds with circuitry :-)

Looking forward to making it to space and giving it a try.

I figured it was for the storage capacity of the cargo car; I just wasn’t sure why you included an engine.

Thanks!

I see these (still working up to get into space from a new start) and I despair a little when I see how much circuitry people are using.

It’s a beautiful layout. I love the symmetry.