So. I have a nice HA system setup at home, based on a VM with lots of sensors and offline control. All good.

It's getting to that time where I'm looking to simplify my Mother's apartment so that she can use voice to turn on the lights, TV, etc.

She's completely embedded in the Amazon / Alexa ecosystem...

As I've built up a non-cloud, offline self-hosted setup over the years, I've no idea where to start with a very simple, but obviously cloud-connected system for her to use Alexa.

What's the best way here? HA Green? Intel NUC?

I don't need any LLMs - she's got Alexa for that... so I think even a Pi would be fine.

Anyone recently done something similar?

We're not setup for hot weather, so we resort to all kinds of things to keep us and our homes cool.

Apart from ordering fans from Amazon, what else have you been doing to keep cool?

It seems that Fairphone will finally end the Fairphone 3 (and 3+) support in August after 7 years.

I am still using my FP3+ daily - the only thing that has gone wrong with it was that I wore out the USB connector with cheap charging cables... so a new bottom connector (and a spare battery, just in case) and I'm all good again...

... which means, I might not be buying another phone for another couple of years yet, let's see if it'll make 10 years with LineageOS, etc!

I'm sure there's other phones still chugging along...

I'm running a <cough, cough> years old instance of Volumio 2 on a Raspberry Pi 3

The security of this is terrible, but it sits in my bedroom with a local USB drive full of music and works absolutely fine with a Nanosound DAC audio preamp hat / board which makes it sound lovely... which I don't want to change (it handles a remote control with power on / off)

When Volumio 3 came along, I wasn't impressed, didn't see the software improving much... it was starting to be more of a pull towards their subscriptions

So, I've left it alone and feel like it might be worth a revisit.

So, how's Volumio 4? Or... should I consider another FOSS product ( has to work with the same hardware).

TL:DR; Has anyone here successfully migrated their data & workflow from Logseq to Silverbullet?

... wall of text follows ...

I've been using Logseq for a few years and it has been a life saver at work, trying to track the stuff going on - honestly, I'd have burned out if I hadn't found it.

However, I still haven't quite got all the things organised and I feel Logseq's development is taking a different track that I don't want to go down (db, collab, etc)

SilverBullet.md appears to be developing into the solution I'm looking for... although I don't want a server-client architecture, so I'm running it standalone at the moment.

But, the learning curve feels so steep it's tending to curve back on itself... or... I'm just too busy to focus on learning it.

I see how the file structure works, but I don't understand how the templates, journals, etc work (really simple.in Logseq)

It appears to be 1 person developing this with lots of helpers who all seem happy to chip in with some AI generated code in the forum, but no meaty documentation, examples, etc.

If you've read this far... is it worth sticking with? Is there an FAQ I've missed? Any pointers or encouragement...?

I'm not really a fan of posts just linking to youchoob, but I thought I'd add this here because it's a nice independant view of how Logseq MD and Logseq DB functionality is slightly different now... plus where the bugs are.

I think it's almost usable now... maybe for testing / playing with, but maybe not if your job depends on it (mine does).

Ok, this seemed like a simple one, but damned if Google / Youchoob will give me a straight answer...

I'm putting up a greenhouse in a clay soil garden, so I want a nice concrete foundation (ring, like for a house, not a slab)

What mix do I need for that base, assuming it'll be underground / water and I'll put a row of block on top for the base to screw in to?

And... if it's easier than dragging stuff through the house, can I get away with just bags of postcrete?

After being home for weeks, I went away for business, the 1st night away there was a brief powercut and the firewall (on a UPS) seemed to get stuck.

So, that's no DNS, DHCP, or connectivity between wifi and LAN... All due to (admittedly aging) hardware issue.

Since then my entire home system has had issues whilst it all settles down.

It made me think about getting some redundancy into the system to handle a single failure.

So,.can you give me any insights into High Availability like CARP (for pfSense), VM failover (on Incus?), mesh wifi, Home Assistant, etc?

Of course there are going to be single points, like ISP line, etc, but seems like something to test out.

So, just a light post, I upgraded my Pi4 last night and found the Linux firmware breaks a 32bit install.

I've been meaning to change to 64bit for months, but as it's my DMZ box for torrents, radicale, etc, then it's just finding the right time to convert an adhoc setup into my ansible scripts.

Luckily I had a SD backup from September to get it running again

So, what have you broken over the holidays?

I've been generally running various different ways of backing up files to my NAS (which then backs up to other locations...) - mostly syncthing for photos and large collections of files, but I tend to use rsync to push out config backups to the NAS once something's working.

But, the NAS is only powered up a few times a day (to save on electricity costs), which is fine for manual pushes, but makes scheduling backups a bit tricky.

It dawned on me that it might be better for the NAS to pull the files via rsync instead of pushing them.

Anyone tried this route and have any advice?

Just been supporting someone remotely and was waiting for them to turn on their laptop...

Whilst troubleshooting I ran uptime to see how long we'd been working on the problem and saw it was up for ~2 weeks...

Which made me think ... how do you tell how long a device (laptop) has been running, but since it's last suspend / hibernation?

I can find it from other clues such as journalctl -b -fu systemd-logind and look for Lid opened, but I was really looking for an smarter way...

Just a nice little challenge for anyone bored at this time of year :)

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/49194514