Daniel Quinn

This is pretty slick, but doesn’t this just mean the bots hammer your server looping forever? How much processing do you do of those forms for example?

You might be interested in this project where someone has hooked up a low-power system to Mastodon and is tooting through it stories about the experience. The project author may also be worth contacting.

What exactly are you self-hosting that’s gobbling up that much data? I’ve been self-hosting my website for decades and haven’t used that much over all that time let alone in one month.

Most of my bandwidth consumption is from torrents and downloading Steam games, but even that doesn’t get me to even 1tb/month.

You can’t really make them go idle, save by restarting them with a do-nothing command like tail -f /dev/null. What you probably want to do is scale a service down to 0. This leaves the declaration that you want to have an image deployed as a container, “but for right now, don’t stand any containers up”.

If you’re running a Kubernetes cluster, then this is pretty straightforward: just edit the deployment config for the service in question to set scale: 0. If you’re using Docker Compose, I believe the value to set is called replicas and the default is 1.

As for a limit to the number of running containers, I don’t think it exists unless you’re running an orchestrator like AWS EKS that sets an artificial limit of… 15 per node? I think? Generally you’re limited only by the resources availabale, which means it’s a good idea to make sure that you’re setting limits on the amount of RAM/CPU a container can use.

Syncthing on Android will be discontinued, and there’s a fork already, which as I said above, I use.

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I guess it’s been a while then. Syncthing works perfectly for me, with the official latest version in Arch, the older version in Debian, the flatpak on Ubuntu, and the forked version on Android, syncing all my Joplin data all over the place.

I don’t much care for the file format though. The appeal of Git Journal is strong.

Joplin + Syncthing has been great for me. Sync across multiple devices with no third party in between. However the “sharing” in this context is limited to other installations of the entire db. To my knowledge, there’s no way to say “sync these notes with my wife, and these others with my phone only” etc.

Each Pi 4 has 8GB of RAM. With six devices, that’s 48GB to play with. More than enough for my needs.

Actually, as a web guy, I find the ARM architecture to be more than sufficient. Most of the stuff I build is memory heavy and CPU light, so the Pi is great for this stuff.

They’re fanless and low-power, which was the primary draw to going this route. I run a Kubernetes cluster on them, including a few personal websites (Nginx+Python+Django), PostgreSQL, Sonarr, Calibre, SSH (occasionally) and every once in a while, an OpenArena server :-)

Seven Raspberry Pi 4’s and one Pi Zero, mounted on some tile “shelves” inside some IKEA furniture.

Monolith has the same problem here. I think the best resolution might be some sort of browser-plugin based solution where you could say “archive this” and have it push the result somewhere.

I wonder if I could combine a dumb plugin with Monolith to do that… A weekend project perhaps.

Monolith can be particularly handy for this. I used it in a recent project to archive the outgoing links from my own site. Coincidentally, if anyone is interested in that, it’s called django-cool-urls.

So my first impression is that the requirement to copy-paste that elaborate SQL to get the schema is clever but not sufficiently intuitive. Rather than saying “Run this query and paste the output”, you say “Run this script in your database” and print out a bunch of text that is not a query at all but a one-liner Bash script that relies on the existence of pbcopy – something that (a) doesn’t exist on many default installs (b) is a red flag for something that’s meant to be self-hosted (why am I talking to a pasteboard?), and (c) is totally unnecessary anyway.

Instead, you could just say: “Run this query and paste the result in this box” and print out the raw SQL only. Leave it up to the user to figure out how they want to run it.

Alternatively you can also do something like: “Run this on your machine and copy/paste the output”:

$ curl 'https://app.chartdb.io/superquery.sql' | psql --user USERNAME --host HOSTNAME DBNAME

In the case of the cloud service, it’s also not clear if the data is being stored on the server or client side in LocalStorage. I would think that the latter would be preferable.

This is a common problem with Free software, and honestly I think it’s our biggest one: we build stuff for ourselves and stop there. If we want our stuff to be adopted (which, for things that rely on network effects, we do) then we need to pay more attention to usability.

Here’s a suggestion for anyone starting a project they think they might share. Before you start writing any code, write the documentation. Then rewrite it from the perspective of the least tech-literate person you know who you’d still want to use the project. Only after you’ve worked out how easy it should be for this person to get started, then you can start writing the thing.

At the firewall level, port forwarding forwards traffic bound for one port to another machine on your network on an arbitrary port, but the UI built on top of it in your router may not include this.

If it’s not an option in your Fritzbox, your options are:

• Make the service running on your internal network listen on one of those high-number ports instead.
• Introduce another machine on the network that also performs NAT between your router and your machine
• Try to access the underlying firewall in your router to tweak the rules manually. Some routers have an admin console accessible via telnet or SSH that may allow this.
• Get a new router.

The first and last options on this list are probably the best.

Actually, I stepped away from the project 'cause I stopped using it altogether. I started the project to satisfy the British government with their ridiculous requirements for proof of my relationship with my wife so I could live here. Once I was settled though and didn’t need to be able to bring up flight itineraries from 5 years ago, it stopped being something I needed.

Well that, and lemme tell you, maintaining a popular Free software project is HARD. Everyone has an idea of where stuff should go, but most of the contributions come in piecemeal, so you’re left mostly acting as the one trying to wrangle different styles and architectures into something cohesive… while you’re also holding down a day job. It was stressful to say the least, and with a kid on the way, something had to give.

But every once in a while I consider installing paperless-ngx just to see how it’s come along, and how much has changed. I’m absolutely delighted that it’s been running and growing in my absence, and from the screenshots alone, I see that a lot of the ideas people had when I was helming made it in in the end.

Ha! I wrote it! Well the original anyway. It’s been forked a few times since I stepped away.

So yeah, I think it’s pretty cool 😆