stephenc

Want to know what is worse than GoDaddy? Network Solutions.

I like Ubuntu Server. It’s got a nice installer that is simple and straight to the point, and lots of documentation. I’m also very familiar with it if I need to troubleshoot.

That said, I don’t like snaps and every new version pushes them harder. I’m currently learning openSUSE to see if it can become my new go-to for servers.

I always run Linux servers headless, so how the distro does GUI (if an option) is not relevant to me in this scenario.

I have always been a laptop guy my whole life because the portability, flexibility and comfortability of them.

Decades ago, I would say that laptops didn’t really have these attributes. Back in the day, they were heavy, most had short battery life, and were very slow compared to a decent desktop. Laptops have come a long way in three decades. :)

Well this probably won’t help you at all then, but for me my solution was to buy “the one” instrument that I most enjoyed. Not that you can necessarily guarantee to know ahead of time which one that is. In my case I got a Waldorf Iridium, and that killed my GAS for synths. There’s just something about that synth for me that feels “just right” but also deep enough to not lock itself into a corner. Now every time I hear a new synth demo, I think, “That’s a cool idea! I bet I could get close to that sound with the Iridium.” And instead of thinking about buying something new, I instead use what I have to accomplish something similar. Or more likely, I start with imitating, but end up going into a different creative direction that I preferred anyway.

A similar piece of gear in my guitar arsenal is the Empress Zoia. Instead of getting GAS over new pedals, I instead hear the cool sounds and immediately start thinking about how I could replicate it with the Zoia. No need to buy a new pedal. Multi-FX pedals can be this way too – I hear similar experiences for owners of the Zoom MS-70CDR.

So partially its finding something that you mesh with personally, which no one but you can figure out, but it is also partially being sure it isn’t something that is too niche into a specific sound but instead an instrument or module that is flexible enough to be used for multiple purposes.

Anyway that’s been my experience. 'course my noobish opinion isn’t worth much.

This is my least favorite part of Seafile. If there were a competitive alternative that used a flat file storage backend then I’d switch to that in a heartbeat. But alas, I still have not found one, so I will continue into my 6th year of using Seafile…

Worth noting in 6 years I haven’t had any actual trouble with Seafile’s storage, and the few times I’ve needed to I’ve been able to export data to a normal file system using seaf-fsck even if Seafile isn’t running. I’m just not 100% comfortable with it anyway so I understand the apprehension. I’d rather use a standard filesystem and be able to use standard tooling on it.

And the clients are actually really great, competitive with the features of the best cloud storage clients.

I use Seafile… can give a partial recommendation

I bounced around a bunch of different apps after leaving Evernote myself some 6-7 years ago. Evernote was cool, but started getting worse. I can only imagine how bad it is now. I also learned that migrating away from Evernote’s walled garden is a bit difficult.

I don’t have any recommendations for ones with a web editor. I specifically wanted a local app for my notes, which Evernote seemed less interested in and more interested in pushing their web app. After Evernote I’ve been using a folder of plain-old Markdown files, synced to my home server, and using various editors for those Markdown files. Things I’ve tried include VSCode, Typora, and QOwnNotes.

Today I use Obsidian and haven’t hopped around for the last 2 years. I love Obsidian and have basically no complaints about it. Again no web editing, but if you just want local files (that can sync across devices) then Obsidian is excellent.

My dad used to name each machine after a different character from Transformers.

I do the same, except with Seafile. On my phone I use Keepass2Android which has built-in support for syncing a database over WebDAV. Works flawlessly.

I still like individual forums and use them on occasion. For me, the reason why Reddit was better is because of the UI. The default phpBB skin is awful for following a dialog in my opinion; Reddit’s much more compact threads free of annoying signature blocks and giant user profile panels is much nicer. Personally I’d be perfectly happy to go back to the days of individual forum accounts if the forums had nice UIs like Reddit or Lemmy. Even Flarum is an example of a traditional forum software with a decent UI. The big missing thing though is threaded conversation which I much prefer over a flat forum, something that Lemmy offers.

I just use a folder of photos and then use digiKam to manage them. But it’s just me, I don’t need to share photos with anyone else. I like digiKam but it doesn’t play great with concurrent users out of the box. I think there’s a way to use a shared database though.

I have the Pedaltrain Metro and use the Truetone CS6 power supply. Note that even that is maybe just a few millimeters too thick so I added an inch of clearance at the rear by adding feet. The available clearance on those boards is very thin. But I do like the end result.

Love mdadm, it’s simple and straightforward.

I am also pretty interested in btrfs. I recently redid my laptop and did btrfs for everything there. No btrfs on my server yet though. Ext4 is just really optimal for data recovery. Maybe if I redo my server sometime in the future I’ll start with btrfs.

My Grafana dashboard says 81 watts at the moment. This includes a slightly beefy Intel computer running Proxmox, with a Kubernetes cluster inside, a few other small ARM servers, and my networking stack which is a router, 1 switch, 1 AP, and a modem. Also the main server is full of spinning rust disks. I haven’t done much to optimize power consumption.

In addition to the other recommendations it can be helpful to try and reverse-engineer presets you like. See how they are laid out, how they are using modulation and envelopes. The software editor can help with this as it shows the values of every parameter all at once.

I’d love a desktop client. :P No web shenanigans, maybe GTK or something.

And talk about it on a self-hostable platform, no less.