If it tries to start but doesn’t do anything it’s pretty much a lost cause then as the drive gets power but fails to initialize. In theory a simple broken solder joint somewhere might cause that and that might be fixable, but that requires at least somewhat decent soldering station and some experience. Or maybe you could get a donor board and swap out memory chips from the old one, but that’s even more tricky. Hopefully it’s not too expensive lesson.

I’ve had some luck with portable drives by removing the drive from enclosure and attaching it directly to sata-bus instead of USB. Also, as a general rule for anyone who might stumble on this, whenever attempting recovery at first create an image (I use ddrescue) and work with that. That way you’ll minimize risk of causing even more damage.

A while ago we “fixed” couple of hard drives with my brother. All of them had a single faulty diode, apparently it was a known failure point on those drives and brother found instructions online how to bypass that diode. Obviously that doesn’t really fix the drives, but a small piece of wire and some soldering was enough to get drives spinning again long enough that he could copy data over to new drives.

You can get refurbished hard drives for around 300$/20TB (quickly searched estimation). So, 15 drives plus maybe another 5 for raid reundancy takes you back 6k$. Server to hold those drives 1-2k$ (used), UPS, internet connection and other bits’n’bobs and your total is very roughly around 8k$ (or €, as I threw the estimations on a pretty big ballpark).

Damn right. I paid for the device, it’s mine and I can use it solely to take pictures of my bare ass should I choose so. There’s of course, and for a reason, limitations on how I can use those pictures, but those apply to any device capable of taking a photo of anything. But I can still use pictures of my ass as a wallpaper in my own home if I want to.

European comission has their own mastodon server at ec.social-network.europa.eu. Why in the fuck they’re still advertising/doing anything on twitter?

because it’s fun to gamble as to how many seconds it will take to pull up the start menu this time.

I also like how it randomly brings up some random website first instead of an installed application I’m looking for. Corporate policy says windows, so I get paid to deal with it, but it helps only so much.

Self hosting is not just one thing. You are system adminstrator, network engineer, security specialist, service architect and many other things, specially if you expose anything to anyone outside your very private network. And to get anything even running on that complex mess requires some knowledge on a lot of things. Making them run securely with proper backups requires even more knowledge on things.

Sure, you can just throw some docker images on your old desktop and be happy, even forward ports from the public internet to your things if you like. But that exposes your stuff to quite a lot of dangers and if you just click buttons without any understanding you’ll soon be a part of a botnet or lose your data or lose money if someone decides to mess around with your home automation or something else.

I get what you’re saying, not all of us are very polite and answers can be pretty harsh, but more often than not the generic idea behind those answers is not trying to be an asshole or gatekeep anything. It’s just that there’s a skillset you need to build things safely and if it’s clear from the start that someone looking for answers is way over their head it’s better for everyone to get them take a step back and learn instead of trying to create a meaningful answer since there’s too many variables or it’d just take immense effort to write down comprehensive guide on what to do, why and how for everything from the ground up.

I know for a fact that in my area there’s a bunch of surveillance cameras, home automation stuff and even some farm equipment directly open to the public network just because someone just plugged things in without any idea on the whole picture. Sometimes the correct answer is ‘stop shooting yourself on the foot and learn the basics first, then come back’.

I’ve done quite a bit of freelance work and visited various office spaces with multiple companies in a single building. It was pretty common just to call to the building reception and tell them that I’m working for this-and-that-company upcoming weekend for their network stuff and I’d need access to network cabinets and whatnot and they’d have keys ready for me with very little (if any) verification if I’m actually doing what I’m supposed to or if I am who I claim to be. Some of the locations just handed me keys with access to practically everything, including shared server rooms hosting their CCTV setup, key managing servers and all.

So, just get a name tag with a local operator logo and clothes to match and ask nicely. You’ll get access to a lot more than you think.

If I browse a piece of software from play store and click ‘install’ it’s “installing” and if I do the very same with F-droid it’s suddenly “sideloading”. Fundamentally every language is just made up, but on this occasion the newly coined term is used to obfuscate things and attempting to paint things something they are not.

I can claim all day that grass is blue and sky is green, but no one will take me seriously. Same thing should happen with ‘sideloading’ vs 'installing. Or if you really insist, sideloading might be something like injecting code to a system in a way which is not normally possible, like how some rootkits for devices work. But ‘sideloading’ is very different from ‘installing’ and installing anything on a general purpose computer doesn’t include any particular tool (like play store). I can install things on my workstation with ‘apt-get install’ or from source via ‘make install’, but the end result is still that a piece of software was installed.

Give users that choice

That’s the one thing they want to get rid of. Security and other bullshit is just a theater around it to get validation for even bigger walls for their garden.

Whole thing is well worth a read, but just from the title alone I was ready to write a long rant about the term ‘sideloading’. Gladly that’s covered on the text too:

It bears reminding that “sideload” is a made-up term. Putting software on your computer is simply called “installing”, regardless of whether that computer is in your pocket or on your desk.

other techies I’ve worked with had humanities degrees

My sister, who’s been an occupational therapist, personal assistant and on other ‘soft’ jobs recently got hired as a helpdesk employee just for that reason. Apparently it’s easier to teach a humanist to reset M365 passwords and do simple troubleshooting than teach a techie on how to deal with humans (which is a major part of being an on-call support for anything).

7 digits, on a very blue state, in a major city, all expenses covered and only a few months. Basically enough money for me for the rest of my life and then some to leave for my kids. Then I’ll consider being their as-white-as-we’re-made poster boy in some social media for a while.

Another happy Hetzner customer here. ~10 years so far, both for business and for personal use. 1€/month won’t happen, but they’re not that expensive either.

They are ‘customers’ not ‘civilians’. Totally different thing, pinky swear.

DNS PTR records belong to the entity who owns the IP addresses, you can’t make reverse records for arbitary addresses like you can with forward zones. I haven’t heard about any residential ISP which would give access to PTR records and even on business lines that’s usually a premium.

What you could do is to get a VPN service which gives you these options, if there is one, I don’t know. Most likely you’re looking for a VPS for that and tunnel traffic with some kind of VPN-setup to your local instance. And at that point you might as well run the whole thing on VPS unless you happen to need a ton of storage or some other reason makes pure VPS server too expensive.

Depends heavily on what you need/want. My current installation doesn’t have anything extra, mail and calendar with “standard” file storage (with sync agents on desktop/laptop) is well enough on what I use it for as my photos are in Immich instance.

Nextcloud offers practically everything you ask for besides the family tree and even that might be available as a plugin (or “App” as Nextcloud calls tem). Or if you’re willing to split photos in a different app, Immich works great.

VPN, Tor (and similar, like I2P), every imaginable P2P network, proxies, all non-http protocols (smtp, ftp, nntp, xmpp and other instant messengers and so on) can all transfer any kind of data, porn included. And a ton of other things. Heck, I’m quite sure there’s a minecraft mod where you can assemble JPG-images out of the blocks and view them that way. And then you can use stuff like uuencode where you can use anything that can move plain text to transfer binary data.

There’s no way to block all of that unless you shut the whole internet down. And even then you can still trade good old playboy-magazines with your friends. VPN in itself has very little to do with the actual problem, beyond that someone apparently noticed that their current “save-the-children” iteration had pretty large holes in it.

If they were really after kids watching porn (or even porn in general) it would be technically somewhat simple to force ISPs to provide filters on their end as a subscription service. I’m pretty sure I’ve even heard that kind of services in the past. Make it even opt-out if you really want to.

That way ISPs would just ban everything from pornhub and others unless you spesifically want it allowed or even provide a portal where you could block reddit, twitter, tumblr or whatever you wish on your account. That kind of technology already exists and it’s used on many corporate setups.

There’s obviously ways around that, but there’s no technical way to block every possible way to move bits between computers. Even if they would shut down the whole internet there’s still ways to build mesh-networks or even buy USB-drives from a shady alley.

But as we all know, it’s not about porn and not about children.