Why do you prefer Discord? What do I miss?

I’ve had a discussion with someone about this. Apparently, there are people that enjoy the social contact. Some seem to like sitting in a Discord chat all day long and answering the same questions over and over again. Others like to “just ask” someone instead of looking for a solution themselves.

That there’s no clear structure of all the solutions provided via Discord and thus people have to ask the same things, nor a proper way of backing everything up in case Discord goes rogue seems to be blissfully ignored.

It’s probably part of the same phenomenon that, nowadays, people seem unable to write or read a few lines of documentation and instead create/watch 20 minutes on YouTube.

At least in Germany you vote for parties. These parties then create coalitions which water down most of the reasons why they were elected in the first place.

The guy in the EU council is supposed to be the highest leader of each country. In Germany that’s the Chancellor. Which is elected by those parties/coalitions. You as a normal person have no say in who it’s going to be.

Same for the EU commission. You have no real influence on who’s going.

Then those parties/coalitions create lists of candidates for becoming MEPs. You vote for those lists. There’s no way to vote for specific people to go to the EU parliament. And those lists are basically suggestions as people can be crossed out or exchanged on those lists even after the elections are over.

Nobody voted for the people sitting in lovely Brussels and making decisions that impact all member countries in all their different situations. It was good when it was still the EEC and meant to improve trading between member countries. And trading only. How we ended up with this monster of EU trying to dictate things like you can’t sell cucumbers which are curved more than X degrees, or banning incandescent and halogen light bulbs, and stuff like that… I don’t know. But I don’t like it.

Central to the agreement is the new agrifoods deal, known as an SPS agreement, which removes red tape on food and drink exports, removing some routine checks on animal and plant products completely. In return, the UK will accept some dynamic alignment on EU food standards and a role for the European court of justice in policing the deal.

Yeah but we’re not exactly living in the utopian society that we were promised. If anything brexit has proven to be as disastrous as everyone who opposed it predicted.

Have you looked at other European countries lately? They’re no utopian societies either. And things like the EU probably going to demand 34 billion Euros from Germany for not quite reaching the arbitrary climate goals the EU made up… make me very happy that the UK isn’t a part of those shenanigans anymore.

Which Pi did you try? Since the Pi4/CM4 (can even work with SAS drives) and especially with the Pi5 you can build some nicely performing NASes.

Not sure whether Cmacked still works…

There are some passively cooled (i.e. no spinning fan) SFF Desktops (HP, DELL, etc.) or you could get a Raspberry Pi 5 and stick it into a Geekworm case. Power consumption with these devices should hover around 5W, maybe slightly higher under load. The Desktops most probably support WoL. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t.

Same with audiobooks. The “classic” way is to have several MP3 files - 1 for each chapter. This allows them to be played even on dumb MP3 players.

However, the M4B format allows for more modern AAC and HE-AAC encoding and adds metadata such as chapters directly into the file. This results in the whole audiobook being contained in just one single file and with much better compression than MP3. But you’ll need a compatible player to listen to them.

(I’ve transcoded most of my audiobooks to M4B as a collection of 320kbps Stereo MP3s doesn’t make sense for just spoken content.)

To add to that: The “sharing” part is what’s prohibited in German law. (Remember: when torrenting you also upload chunks of the data to others.) The pure download is kind of a grey area and won’t be prosecuted.

The version I had played around with about 10 years ago could.

There’s also The Dude - although it’s a Windows-only application. But the visualisation is great.

I’m running SpotWeb to browse spots. It’s kind of a curated list of NZBs. So, most things you can find a spot for, are still actually available to download.

It was heavily used by the Dutch to distribute movies with baked-in (“ingebakken”) Dutch subtitles for older media players.

If you like to checkin manually to places, there’s PrivateSquare which will query places around you from Foursquare (so, 4sq will still see whereabout you are), but store the actual checkin in a local database.

If you want some automated tracking, I’m mostly happy with OwnTracks which logs to my DaWarIch instance. (I’ve previously used Traccar and php-owntracks-recorder.)

While I don’t see any battery usage from OwnTracks, my only gripe is that it can’t increase the amount of points logged when it detects movement because of Apple iOS limitations.

(For iOS, there’s also Geory which will log into a local database and CAN increase the logging by spawning a Live Activity. It gives me the most accurate logs so far. But they have to be exported manually to be stored elsewhere and the author wants to keep the app simple and doesn’t want to implement logging to external systems.)

I let CrowdSec determine that. I’m seeing /13, /12 and even /10 in my decisions list. All seem to be Amazon AWS ranges.

In the Traefik static configuration (usually traefik.yml), add this to load the CrowdSec plugin:

experimental:
  plugins:
    crowdsec-bouncer-traefik-plugin:
      moduleName: "github.com/maxlerebourg/crowdsec-bouncer-traefik-plugin"
      version: "v1.4.2"

(The name for the plugin is defined here as crowdsec-bouncer-traefik-plugin.)

Then, in your dynamic configuration, add this (I’ve used a separate file dynamic_conf/050-plugin-crowdsec-bouncer.yml):

http:
  middlewares:
    crowdsec-bouncer:
      plugin:
        crowdsec-bouncer-traefik-plugin:
          CrowdsecLapiKey: "...YOUR CROWDSEC LAPI KEY HERE..."
          Enabled: true

(The name for this new middleware defined here is crowdsec-bouncer. It uses the crowdsec-bouncer-traefik-plugin defined in the previous step. Make sure these names match.)

You can get the LAPI key by registering a new bouncer in CrowdSec.

And, finally, make sure all incoming traffic routes through the bouncer plugin. You can do this individually, or in general via the static config:

entryPoints:

  websecure:
    address: :443
    http:
      middlewares:
        - crowdsec-bouncer@file
        - secure-headers@file

The middlewares are processed top to bottom.

Any change to the static configuration requires a restart of Traefik to become active.

I’ve recently enabled banning whole subnets if more than 3 malicious actors from that subnet are on the blocklist. This is great for all those DigitalOcean droplets and other cheap hosters used by those people…

I had fail2ban running for several years before switching to CrowdSec late last year. They both work in a similar fashion and watch your logfiles for break in attempts. With the small difference that CrowdSec also lets you use blocklists from the “crowd” to block malicious actors before they even get to try their luck on your machine(s).

I’m using CrowdSec with Traefik and nftables. But there are some bouncer plugins for nginx and OpnSense, too.

I just followed their example configurations for Docker, Docker Compose and then started tinkering with the config until everything worked as desired.

Well, some people in the “inner circle” might have some idea about the direction they want to take. But I very much doubt that anyone outside of that circle knows anything substantial. And in the end, that website is called MacRumors for a reason. They splurt out various things to keep people speculating and engaging with their site - which earns them money. But that’s about it. I’ve removed them from my feed reader ages ago.

It’s a rumour. Nothing else. Not even Apple knows what they’ll release in 2 years.