I’ve been trying to quit for 18 years now. I’ve tried gum, patches, toothpicks, welbutron (or something like that), but this time it’s going a bit better. We switched to cheap disposable vapes (Kadobar was what was near the house) which is totally not ‘quitting’ but when picking a flavor, Pick a bad one. I’ve found I don’t like it, it’s way too sweet and that keeps me from wanting to smoke it too much at a time, but when that need arises (bad meeting, car trouble, bad anxiety) it does deliver nicotine which keeps me from buying a pack.

As a side effect, I went from spending around $400-450/month on cigarettes, to around $16080/month (my wife went with one she likes, but she’s quit before and I think she could do it anytime).

Edit: I’m bad a math

This totally isn’t what you’re asking for, but I absolutely love the 8bitdo adapter 2 thing (https://www.8bitdo.com/usb-wireless-adapter-2/) pair your DS4 controller to it and then just plug in the dongle. I haven’t found anything it doesn’t work on, but mainly I pop it between a pi3, pi400, and my LMDE desktop.

So handy.

Huge steam library, RTX 3060, currently playing either 7D2D, or vanilla WOW over on Warmane (excited for the upcoming move to TBC which is around 17 years old or so).

I’ve played around a bit with Remotely (https://github.com/immense/Remotely) from what I’ve seen it’s great for when a family member needs some remote support, it also has persistent agents for some stuff. Personally for remote administration I LOVE Apache Guacamole, it’s super handy being able to use RDP/SSH/vnc/etc from a browser.

Edit: after reading the post it may not be what you’re looking for. I don’t think either of those would be good from an FPS standpoint.

Thank you good sir, now I have coffee on my robe!

Its painful sometimes, but good to know I’m not the only one questioning my sanity.

They also have electric ones. They use a UV bulb and some titanium compound that releases CO2 when hit by UV, pretty neat and work decently once you interrupt the breeding cycle. Dynatrap is the popular brand I think.

Just wanted to say thanks for some awesome software! I want to say I use it for centralizing my bookmarks across devices, but if I’m being honest it’s main use has been bookmarking Microsoft Learn articles. It’s insanely useful being able to save an article, add tags, then when MS changes their docs, I can prove to myself that it really was different last week.

Join us. We have cookies (well at least until the end of our sessions)!

I host way more than I probably should, but everyone should have some stuff like immich, vaultwarden, and nextcloud. I also like to host gitea and 30+ other things (check out netboot.xyz, it isn’t something everyone needs but why wouldn’t you want to be able to boot off the network), but that’s just what some people do as a hobby I guess lol.

I know everyone has their own opinions of them but I’m a fan for what they are. Right now I have 3 of them that I’ve gathered over the years (one with ESXi hosting my firewall, one with TrueNas for backups, and one with ProxMox for a few LXCs).

Overall, they are great little boxes, I had three of them in my living room for years when I was renting and they were pretty much completely silent after boot. The dual core celeron that comes with it works, but can be upgraded to a Xeon e3-1265l v2 (quad core + HT) for $25-50. RAM I think maxes at 16GB, but if you want a box to run a dozen light services or so, its not a bad box (insanely quiet and pretty power efficient).

Mine is definitely a hobby… possibly a borderline addiction. I am an IT person by day and then selfhost a bit at home. Most of my equipment is good old eBay specials (R720xd, R610), or just accumulated over the years (a few HP Microservers, RAID enclosures, etc).

The uptime is decent but my ISP isn’t great, plus one of the servers has been having issues so until I find a few hours to focus on it, it is not something I would consider “acting like a paid IT”.

Not to make myself sound like a bad IT person, but my homelab is held together with hope and scripts to recover when it goes down. One day I’ll cluster some lower power proxmox systems with portainer and ensure everything important has a way to fail over and backed up offsite (no, I’ll probably just take a nap if I get a free afternoon lol).

Sometimes people in these communities don’t realize how they come off, tone is hard over text, and I’m just as bad in person (thankfully I work remote most days).

Late to the party and after reading through some of these setups I may have to expand mine soon (it never ends does it?), here is what I have right now.

Unraid (Dell R720XD, dual Xeon E5-2670 v2, 64GB RAM, 12 x 6TB in 12 disk array with 2 parity disks, 800GB SSD cache pool)

-NextCloud

-Plex

-Emby

-Gitea

-Backrest

-MariaDB

-Netbootxyz

-Trillium

-Traccar

-Vaultwarden

-Adguard-Home

-Unifi

-Homebox

-Nessus

-Headscale

-Collabora

-*arrs

-Jupterlab

-Mealie

-SearXNG

-IT-Tools

-EmulatorJS

-Youtube-DL-Material

Proxmox (old Intel server S2600WT2, dual Xeon E5-2620 V2, 768GB RAM, 5 x 2TB disks):

-Zap2XML

-Immich

-Mumble

-NextPVR

-Stirling-PDF

-WebTop

-Frigate

-MCServer (gameserver)

-SDTDServer (gameserver)

-SFServer (gameserver)

There are some other things floating around in my homelab that aren’t really ‘selfhosted’ things, just important to the home network:

3 HP Microserver Gen8’s

-x1 with ESXi hosting pfSense

-x2 with TrueNas Scale for backups

R610 with ESXi for a few remote desktops and Home Assistant (which I’m sure I’ll move to docker at some point).

I’m still using my PRS-505 I bought in 2009, it’s amazing and l don’t think I’ll ever give it up.

Oh man, that would suck. I do not ever use an external USB port for that exact reason! Aside from a few desktops and laptops around the house all my equipment has an internal USB port for the purpose of a boot drive (I always assumed that was the reason).

All production stuff needs backups. Personally I try to keep boot device backups saved to another device as an image so if one goes down, I can clone it to a USB real quick and restore the blink to the lights; ideally I should also keep them off site, but I don’t like to use cloud providers (tin foil hat and all).

I have a few servers that have been booting from USB for years. Two of my old freenas boxes (now just hosting backups of data from unraid), have been booting off the same USB sticks for almost 10 years now. In addition to the freenas boxes I use internal USB drives on Unraid, ProxMox, and ESXi hosts (had to try them all).

Its a risk, but having a cloned USB as a backup can mitigate it a bit.

I used to frequent a thrift shop that gave books away for free, I saw a copy of Cloud Atlas and thought it would be a good read (it was). I accidentally for the dust cover a little then looked at the title page, signed first edition. Not worth much, but cool nonetheless.

Don’t give up too easily friend. I’ve been slowly moving some of my hone systems away from Window’s, and much like you, I’ve spent close to 20 years as a Windows admin. I have the advantage of using Linux on my always ancient laptops over the years and it is my personal opinion that Debian is the way to go.

Give LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) a go, it is very familiar to navigate coming from Windows and isn’t going to have constant updates breaking stuff (looking at you Arch).

First thing after installing run apt-get update, then add the Nvidia drivers (add the source to your sources and install, if you need help, post back and we’ve got you!) and reboot.

My goal is to move to nice IP cams one day but for now I have analog cameras and a DVR in the closet hooked to a cheap monitor that’s paid for.

Try the app IPCamViewer by Robert Chou (here is a link to the lite version, I think there is an iOS one as well https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rcreations.ipcamviewer). It can view damn near any brand DVR, that at least let me view stuff remotely.

If you want to up it another level, if your old school DVR supports RTSP, you can probably feed that into something like Frigate for real time alerts and object detection.