Come on, just do it. Do it ! I have never had Whatsapp installed, ever ! Never had an issue staying in touch with my family, friends and doing business and chores.

My proposal: cancel YouTube premium, donate $1 to Smart Tube developer, donate $1 to Firefox. ublock origin doesn’t accept donations as far as I know.

Be careful before uploading your config files to a public location like GitHub, you don’t want to inadvertently publish some secrets like passwords, API keys and such. A copy to an external drive should do the trick just fine as a starting point.

Please note that Home Assistant is officially supported on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 with 2GB of RAM minimum Raspberry Pi - Home Assistant

If your older rpi is for instance a rpi 3 with 512MB of RAM, I’m not sure it’s going to cut it.

They don’t have to make alternative OS illegal, they can simply make it unusable.

It’s not necessarily done my pure evil intent, it just happens as a side effect of other decisions.

One example right now is how Google is locking down the Android platform by making side loading mode difficult in the name of security. But more generally with the example of Android, how Google set the standard by providing frameworks and development tools in their terms, that become the defacto standard without any kind of industry wide consultation, is a big problem. My banking app use to have its own implementation of the NFC payment, it worked perfectly fine with GrapheneOS, now they updated the app and decided to just integrate the Google Wallet instead of maintaining their own implementation of the feature. Now it can’t be used with GrapheneOS. In this example, Google is in full control, and I, can’t do anything about it even if I am savvy enough to use custom ROM on my phone. Google didn’t act evil, they provide some tools and service, the bank didn’t act evil, they are just make technical choices that make financial sense, but in the end it contributes to take away our rights. I can either decide NFC payment with my phone is not worth signing a contract with Google and give up the feature, or I can decide my privacy is not worth the hassle and move back to the Google “certified” version of Android.

In the end, if a corporation can make more money, they will cease the opportunity. And they will absolutely make it illegal for you to own things or make choices if they have enough political leverage. Just look at all the DMCA and other anti “piracy” laws out there! In the USA it’s a federal crime to break a digital lock even on a product you bought and paid for ! It is defacto illegal to do what you please with something you “own”.

The Data-Terminals and mainframe architecture of the time was a technical solution emerging from limitations of the time, bulky and pricey electronics. Also, computers at the time were used for special tasks.

Today, we can fit an ultra powerful computer in your pocket, no problem. You practically can’t survive without a smartphone (or computer), or yes you can survive, but you can’t be part of society without one.

Today’s trend to takeaway the computing power off the hands of normal citizens, when it’s so cheap and practical to have it, is not driving by technical limitations (or improvement of technology). It’s driven my the goal to extract every bit of money, ownership and finally freedom that we have have citizens.

Why would they give you the option to buy a top of the line 2000€ laptop and let you use it with Linux for everything you need until the heat-death of the universe when they can can extort you of 200€/month instead? Much more profitable. They can change the price whenever they want and you will have no choice but pay, because you can’t even find a single DDR3 RAM stick to buy anywhere! Why would they just let you use the heated sits in your car when they can extort you of a 60€/month subscription for it, on top of the 70k€ buying price ?

It’s not a technical trend, it’s an ideological one.

Additional stuff you may be interested in:

Caddy for reverse proxy (accessing your services with a nice URL instead of IP address and port numbers)

PiHole for DNS-level ad-blocking and other useful router functionality

Look for a backup solutions for your config files, maybe you can handle this at Proxmox level but I don’t have experience with that.

Do you have a good alternative to recommend? I also found that lidarr sorta sucks compared to sonarr and radarr

They can make “processing” profitable when their service is the only available option and they can charge whatever price they want for lackluster quality of service.

• what you use for your documentation

Markdown files

• how you organize it

What ?

• what information you include

The commands that worked and the stuff that didn’t work and the links to the source of information

• how you work documentation into your changes

I write as I go. I keep it as part of a git repository when relevant

They are at war against ownership (not raspberry pi org, but the general oligarchy). It’s the next step coming after “every software is a cloud service subscription”. We are heading towards the “you can’t own a computer, just rent one from the cloud”. In this day and age, computers are necessary, for everything, for education, public services, employment, entertainment. Once we have to pay taxes to the Lords in order to have access to our mean of substance, we are essentially in a new era of feudalism.

BTRFS has plenty of features for data integrity, auto-correction, scrubbing, snapshots. I haven’t studied in details the differences with ZFS, I just went with BTRFS because the setup is fairly simple, it’s flexible and it does what I need.

Personally, I use BTRFS in RAID10 config. I don’t need crazy performance and my NAS is pretty low power with only 8GB of RAM (use to be 4GB on my previous setup).

Nothing wrong with wanting a web interface, but for an experienced Linux user, there is no issue going without one.

Plain, good old Debian. It’s not that big of a deal to do all the config in console via SSH. You do it once and you’re done, so is the web interface that important?

It’s taught us to learn fast. Also, it’s made so that you can’t lean answers by heart, you need to understand what your doing to have a chance to solve the exams. You can’t succeed by being fast and mindless, you need to be optimal (maybe skip some questions strategically). I think it’s a good learning method for engineering, teachs you to be thorough and methodical.

I don’t see how I could possibly cheat during my engineering studies. Every exams was different from previous years, you had to detail the calculation steps, you had to be so fluent with using the formulas and fast at calculating in order to even have a chance to answer all questions. Most exams were calibrated so that only the top students have just enough time to finish.

Hi! I recently started with home automation myself. Despite already having a home server, I decided to get a dedicated Raspberry Pi 5 4GB to run home assistant by itself. OpenHAB should work just as well on the RPi5.

I’ve got Zigbee and Matter over Thread connectivity using 2x Aeotec Zi-Stick dongles, one flashed with OpenThread firmware, instructions on their forum. It was not the best solution to use the same dongle for both protocols as it’s recognized with the same device name in Home Assistant and I had to use my Linux skills to work around that. You can easily get 2 zigbee dongles from different brands, check ahead which ones provide an easy OpenThread flashing solution. I think the Sonoff dongle is another one of these.

Living the good life

I’ve recently started with home assistant on a pi as well. Today I have 2 zigbee relay for my lights from Sonoff, 2 zigbee fire alarms, 1 wifi plug from Shelly and 3 Ikea remotes working on Matter over Thread.

Basically, any protocol you want to support other than wifi and Bluetooth will need a dedicated radio device. Luckily they are all pretty well supposed with home assistant. I have 2 Aeotec Zi-stick, one for Zigbee, the other flashed with OpenThread firmware (that’s for Matter over Thread, it wasn’t a good idea to buy twice the same device, I had to work around this issue). I don’t have Z-wave devices today, as I noticed they tend to be more expensive that the zigbee equipment. The new IKEA smart devices are very competitive in terms of price, they all work on Matter over Thread protocol.

In the end, you don’t need to choose. You can support all these protocols on the same raspberry pi. It’s just a matter of adding the corresponding radio and integration in home assistant.