I had forgotten how much I miss that style of website. Well written too.

Sometimes it’s handy to be able to share larger files with just a link, but for the most part it’s just syncing folders on my desktop and laptop, and giving me access to those files my iphone. I don’t generally use it for off-system storage.

There is a paper on exactly that:
Front Nutr. 2025 Dec 1;12:1682746. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2025.1682746
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12702719/

I didn’t read the whole thing, but it looks like, at least right now, they didn’t find anything major.

Mainly just Nextcloud. I have it setup pretty lean as most of it’s capabilities is just massive overkill for my needs. I mostly just have it handling file, calendar and contact syncing as well as it’s news reader.

I’ve largely ignored most of Proton’s offerings as it feels like they are trying to become Google 2.0. I lived through that once, that was enough. When Proton started they were very much “Don’t know who you are and don’t want to”. Now I’m not so sure what their ambitions are. Creepy vibes from them lately that remind me of Google.

Peertube uses bittorrent tech underneath to help distribute the load. Each viewer shares what they’ve downloaded to others viewing the same video at the same time. If 100 people are watching the same video at the roughly the same time the original host really only sends out 1 or 2 streams.

Things might get interesting if each of those 100 people want to watch a different video though. Pretty sure a server run by a popular youtuber like Mumbo Jumbo or even Justin Guitar would choke.

Well, since I’m not doing that, that would prevent me from having to install the apps that every damned company seems to insist I install rather than having a website. Kinda makes me wish for this nonsense to come to the US.

A point. However, how far do you need to go to reach an area, that doesn’t speak your native language commonly?

We recently moved a fair distance, not too far as things go here. Roughly 2000 km. English language spoken by almost everyone throughout the entire trip. Plus 15 random languages from tourists and immigrants from around the globe. I could have gone another 2000 km and I still would have had to dig to find a community that had a common language other than english.

I would have had to travel 2000 km the other way to reach an area where a single language other than English was spoken by more than 5% of the population.

Maybe 1000 km, I forget about Creole in Louisiana, though I’m not sure how common that language is in the State. I just remember running across the language frequently while driving trucks in that area for a living.

We are a truly massive nation that largely shares a single language. Most of us, rarely ever leave a 250 km radius from where we were born. Most of us don’t have passports and will never leave the US.

Hell, I’m well traveled. I’ve been to 45 on the 50 States, and in all my travels I’ve only needed another language once. In Larado, TX, which is right on the border with Mexico.

There are small enclaves that speak an alternative language, but they are few and far between.

Would it be to the students benefit to learn a second language, sure. But it’s unlikely that the student would ever use whatever random language they were required to learn. Spanish and perhaps Arabic might occasionally be helpful, but not necessarily, depending on what part of the country (or trade) you’re they are in.

If you had asked me six months ago, it would have been a spa day, hands down. Six years of 70 hour weeks wear you down.

Right now, though, I’d take the active experience. Been job hunting for the last 2 months and wouldn’t mind a fun day.

Around me, the only language spoken with any frequency other than English is Spanish. In a half dozen different varieties. Even that wasn’t all that common until, maybe, 10 years ago. About midway through President Trump’s first administration.

Most schools encourage kids to take a language, but they are kinda a use it, or lose it thing. Unless you just happen to be part of a community or household that speaks a language other than English, you are unlikely to need it.

Basically what you want is to turn the linux laptop into a router. Thats doable. I believe Ars did an article on a similar build a couple years ago.

And here it is: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/the-ars-guide-to-building-a-linux-router-from-scratch/

It’s an old build based on an almost 10 year old version of Ubuntu, but quickly glancing through it, I didn’t see anything completely out of date. Version numbers will have changed and perhaps some package names will have changed but it will give you a starting point for further research. You won’t want to cargo cult this build.

I think the main difference is that your internet would be coming in from the wifi interface and going out the ethernet interface rather than the other way around.

Well, I’ve been using Ubuntu for the last 20 years (god, it hurts to say that) and only started playing with NixOS, 3 years ago.

Between the two I like NixOS better, but if I had to choose only one it would probably be Ubuntu. When things break, I know how to fix it. Usually without having to spend 2 hours of reading and trying to understand the documentation.

Well, yes I looked at tailscale too, but that would prevent me from using my normal commercial VPN

You can split your devices traffic, Tailscale traffic through Tailscale, everything else through your masking VPN.

I’m trying to get the best of 2 worlds: using the VPN to hide my IP from services that i visit and my ISP, and a secure connection to my home server.

For that, what I would do is put the masking VPN (like PIA or whatever) on your router (not all routers can do this) and then have Tailscale on the devices or individual services. In theory, everything would still be able to talk to each other (even if your mobile device is not behind the router), but everything that is behind the router would enter and exit their traffic wherever you have the masking VPN set to. Downside of doing this is that EVERYTHING that is behind that router is also behind that VPN which can cause problems with some services, like banking and streaming.

It would also mean that the only way you could host a public service is to have an external VPS acting as a reverse proxy. Cloudflare might also have something that could work around this setup, but I’m not familiar with their offerings.

This setup also doesn’t mask your traffic (origin and destination) from your mobile provider (just your home ISP), but that is a harder nut to crack as they can see, real time, where you are physically, and depending on your device, may have deeper device access anyways. I’m thinking prepaid phones and phones bought from the carrier (at least here in the US) or if your carrier has “asked” you to install an app to manage your account. My assumption is that my mobile provider can see anything I do while I have my phone or tablet with me, and just work around that.

You might want to ask in !privacy@lemmy.ml and !privacy@lemmy.world, as this is more up their alley.

Publicly acknowledged as real? Maybe 2 years. Fairly good evidence something was out there, maybe 30- 40 years. The evidence has been good enough to say something is out there, but it was never good enough to say it was more than highly probable. I remember being shocked when there was a Senate hearing about it a while back.

The idea that aliens might exist goes back a long time though. Here in the US, first major incident I remember was Roswell, back in the 1940’s. There were depictions of strange things going back a lot longer though, vast majority of which can be explained by our modern understanding of science. Some though, not so much.

And yes, it is a distraction, but at this point I’d have to ask “From what?”. Is this (aliens) important? Doesn’t seem like it at the moment, there are bigger problems. Like the administration ignoring orders of both congress and judges. The Epstine files are one example , DHS’s behavior is another.

So does this mean that the open secret that aliens (from space) exist and have probably been to earth is no longer solely the domain of what was once charitably called the tinfoil hat society? Or does everyone still laugh at them? Asking for a friend…

I can touch type most keys, though probably not with proper form. I have to look at some of the less common keys to find them with my fingers.

My schools did have formal typing classes but I wasn’t exactly a star student. I think my typing speed at it’s fastest was around 60 wpm, though I more commonly float around 40 wpm

I just had to deal with this. Moving two households from Alabama to Minnesota, with myself, my wife and her mother (all 3 of whom are pack rats) and more than 1 one way truck and a car hauler was not in the budget.

What I did was rent a storage unit just large enough to match the volume of the truck I was going to rent. Anything that could fit in the storage unit could be kept. Everything else had to go. Anticipating trouble, especially from my MIL, I divided the storage unit into halfs using gaffer’s tape and one half (me and my wife’s) was again divided into half with one section reserved for me and the other for my wife.

Me and my wife downsized fairly problem-free. I got down to about 10 plastic footlockers and let my wife have the rest of my section. Our half was full, but not horribly so even after the furniture we wanted to keep. My MIL however was another story.

She kept saying we were trying to force her to give away everything she owned. She calmed down and started downsizing seriously when we finally packed up her house to move it to the storage unit and we completely filled U-haul’s largest truck, Tetris Style, with not even enough room left for a rolled up poster, and my MIL still had another half truck’s worth of boxes that she had, till that point, claimed she couldn’t bear parting with. I put my foot down and told her that, while I was willing to make multiple trips (neither of them were comfortable with the idea of drive the U-Haul) she would have to pay the full cost of moving everything that wouldn’t fit into the 1st truck and estimated that it would cost an additional $4K per trip, all in. That got her.

We wound up renting a second storage unit for interim use as she decided what would go on the truck and what she would have to sell, give away or toss. I think we may have single-handedly crashed the second hand market in our old town with everything we three donated. In the end, it was noisy, stressful and there were times when my MIL didn’t want to talk to me or my wife, but we eventually got it down to a single truck, and 3 cars, but damn, were they packed.

Hosting for the public, it’s honestly going to depend on how many users you are going to have. Pretty much anything that is light on bandwidth should be doable. Websites, blogs, wikis. XMPP chat servers might work. Matrix might work as well. Adding to your seeding idea, you might seed torrents for any Linux distros you happen to like or build torrent seeds for projects with larger download sizes. I seem to recall a project that would enable you to seed peertube channels as well, though I can’t find the project right now.

If it’s just you and maybe a few family and friends,say over a mesh VPN, what ever you want, though video streaming may be a bit much for that bandwidth. Any other type of personal media should be very doable. Books, music, that sort of thing.

Not really. There are gps trackers that have a cell modem, used for tracking animals for research, but they are probably very expensive. Both to purchase and operate.

Lack of trust, for the most part. I’ve been screwed over a few too many times for me to rely entirely on someone else. Whether it’s Audible claiming I never bought an audiobook I knew damned good and well I did buy or seeing someone else getting their life made difficult by Google, Apple or Microsoft, or “friends” and family making life difficult, I’ve learned the hard way over the years I can’t rely fully on anything not under my control.

What would you advise i do?

If you can afford to and if what you are looking for is even available (for non-DRM’d download) through legal channels, I advise purchasing the content legally. (Yes, I know what community I’m commenting in… :D ) Doing so supports the artists that make the content.

Otherwise, I would check and see if what you are looking for is on Youtube or in Anna’s Archive. You can download things from Youtube using either yt-dlp (give it a Youtube link) or spotdl (give it a Spotify link and it will download the song, album or playlist from Youtube and tag the songs using Spotify or Musicbrainz metadata). The current addresses to Anna’s Archive can be found on their Wikipedia page.

I also like Usenet, currently, for a lot of the more esoteric, hard to find elsewhere things (like TV shows that don’t have DVD releases and aren’t on Youtube). Just a heads up if you go this route, the Usenet provider “Eternal September”, while free, does not provide access to the groups where binaries (things like video, music, epubs, and pdfs) are posted. They only provide access to the discussion side of Usenet, which has been largely dead for the last 10-15 years. Generally, Usenet access is fairly cheap, as are the nzb trackers needed to download binaries from Usenet.

Torrents don’t require a VPN, however, torrenting does broadcast your IP address for all the world to see if they decide to look. A VPN is used to obfuscate your IP address to minimize the odds of trouble with your ISP, the rightholders (who might sue) or depending on where your are, law enforcement. Just don’t ever use the “free” VPNs that are out there. They tend to be honeypots or malware vectors.

People not seeding things has made bittorrent pretty much useless for anything not currently popular. The only thing I use bittorrent for nowadays is speeding up the download of larger downloads, like Linux install disks. Works well for that. But if there’s not at least 15 seeders for the file your looking for, you may never actually be able to finish downloading the thing.

what did you do when starting out?

I’m getting to be an old fart. I was using Napster (early predecessor to bittorrent, now long dead), IRC and random ftp and gopher sites on a dialup modem in the late 90’s and into the mid 2000’s. Dial-up BBS’s were fading out into obscurity, and I hadn’t really heard of Usenet (even though that was during it’s hayday) and Bittorrent hadn’t been invented yet.