As far as I know it uses the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol. On a channel within the regular 2.4GHz wifi spectrum. So no license needed unless it collides with laws for point-to-point beams. All people communicating to each other obviously need to agree on a channel. It comes with some hierarchy where I’m at. There are local chapters who make up some config and who also operate nodes and exit nodes into the internet. These are necessary because Germany has stupid laws.

There’s Freifunk as well!

Yes. I think several clients have open feature requests. The Stalwart documentation has a list of projects. There is one command line client as of now. But I’m not switching to a cli mail client or proprietary software, so I’ve postponed it. We’ll see where this is going.

I welcome these modernization attempts. Though in theory I’d love to see someone revamp email in its entirety, add encryption, signatures, chat and crack down on spam and phishing. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen, but that’d be great, too.

Unfortunately JMAP isn’t supported (yet) by a lot of email clients. I don’t think there’s a good open-source email suite for computers available… But I’ve tried Stalwart as well and it’s really sleek and seems to come with good defaults.

Btw, the proper place to mount filesystems is either /media or /mnt. I wouldn’t create a directory called /Volumes in Linux. And pay attention, these are case-sensitive and most (not all) system directories have agreed on using lower-case letters only. And “volume” is kind of a Windows and MacOS-term anyway, I rarely see Linux-people refer to media and filesystems that way.

There’s always a possibility of someone posting arbitrary content when a platform allows user content or combines content from many sources. I mean we do have moderation here and illegal content is supposed to be removed or flagged. However as the operator of some internet service, you are ultimately responsible for what’s on your instance. So you definitely do need to make an effort to stay in control. Btw, there are possible compromises, such as using an allow-list of instances you federate with, so you don’t pull content from sources you don’t trust and didn’t approve.

Good question. I was planning to start fresh as well. At least at some point. I think I’m going to first add the devices and do a better job documenting what I have, what firmware I modified how and pay attention to naming things in a coordinated manner, set the areas… And then think about what automations I need, what blueprints are available and newer methods to achieve the same thing. And throw overboard all the testing relics, HACS integrations and ESPhome configs and automations I don’t need anymore and for some reason keep around for reference. And then I’m bad at UI. I think I’d have to watch some Youtube tutorials to see how other people structure it in a sane way. I heard the bubble cards are popular these days.

Wtf? I thought this wasn’t possible with the silicon in older ESPs. Is this a proprietary piece of software? I’d need access to the ESPhome component to use it in my house. (Edit: Ah I see, they use massive amounts of microcontrollers, so probably something basic like signal strength, not anything fancy like the modern Wifi-Sensing.)

I think they should be roughly in a similar range for selfhosting?! They’re both power-efficient. And probably have enough speed for the average task. There might be a few perks with the ThinkCentre Tiny. I haven’t looked it up but I think you should be able to fit an SSD and a harddrive and maybe swap the RAM if you need more. And they’re sometimes on sale somewhere and should be cheaper than a RasPI 5 plus required extras.

I’m a bit below 20W. But I custom-built the computer a long time ago with an energy-efficient mainboard and a PicoPSU. I think other options for people who don’t need a lot of harddisks or a graphics card include old laptops or Mini-PCs. Those should idle at somewhat like 10-15W. It stretches the definition of “desktop pc” a bit, but I guess you could place them on a desk as well 😉

Wouldn’t you or any other addon manager get hit by the same rate-limiting by Github that caused HACS to implement the API key thing?

https://github.com/OHF-voice/speech-to-phrase

This is what I use, and I believe a successor to one of the Rhasspy projects. That addon builds a database of sentences it needs and then does speech recognition on those only. It’s faster and doesn’t have the downsides you mentioned. And I tend to get that a lot in German language, Whisper always struggles with the composite words… speech-to-phrase It has other downsides, though. It doesn’t understand phrases it wasn’t configured for. So you need to pre-define what items you want it to add to the todo list. And you have to say the correct phrases, a sentence with the same meaning but a different grammer won’t be recognized.

There’s another community for this: !localllama@sh.itjust.works
Though we mostly discuss the news and specific questions there, beginner questions are a bit more rare.

I think you already got a lot of good answers here, LMStudio, OpenWebUI, LocalAI…
I’d like to add KoboldCpp that’s kind of made for gaming/dialogue, but it can do everything. And from my experience it’s very easy to set up and bundles everything into one program.

Fair enough. I mean I’d pay about 200€ a year in electricity to run 3 efficient computers. And my VPS is only 73€ and I never have to pay for replacement parts (SSDs, harddisks) which I had to replace at home. And then they have gigabit network, low latency, a proper IP address, it didn’t fail yet so their reliability >99.6% seems to be correct. And that’s all way better than what I have at home. So it’s a no-brainer to go for that. But your calculation might be different.

I mean ultimately there is no harm in trying. If you have 3 old computers laying around, you might as well try setting up a kubernetes cluster. I think it’s going to prove difficult to handle the IP addresses but I’m not an expert on high availability and gaming clients.

But doesn’t that require some software-defined networking or a special network setup? I’m pretty sure with the average home internet connection, you’ll fail over to the replica at your friend’s home. But that has an entirely different IP address and the game client will not handle that gracefully. It’s going to disconnect. And you need to do some DNS as well to always point at the active server and forbid caching. In a datacenter or enterprise setting, sure. you’ll just reroute the traffic and nobody will notice.

I’d rent one (small) VPS for $10 a month and split the bill. As far as I know that’s how most people do it. It’s going to have >99.6% uptime, a fast datacenter internet connection at some central location and runs on enterprise hardware… The Kubernetes approach adds a lot of complexity, you’ll have your games disconnect anyway once it fails over as you can’t migrate the IP addresses. And there will be some additional traffic between the locations to keep everything in sync. And 4x chance of some of the hardware failing and someone needs to fix it. Unless I’m mistaken about how Kubernetes works.

Probably the safe bet. Though I think my 8th gen Intel does AV1 decode as well. But it’s not hardware accelerated, so quite some cpu load and full hd is the limit, it can’t do 4k or anything fancy. And definitely no realtime av1 encoding.

Seems some people here advocate for a VPS, and I do it as well. I pay roughly 7€ a month for a small(ish) server with 4 cpu cores, 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. That allows me to host a few services there, for example some websites and matrix chat, which I don’t want to go down if there’s an issue at home. And it allows me to do reverse proxying there, so I have the entire chain under my control. But there’s many ways to do it, and several other tunneling solutions (boringproxy.io, nohost.me, pagekite, ngrok, …) that I heard of.

And a lot of home internet connections allow port-forwarding. Not sure what your provider does, but I can simply open ports in my router and make them accessible from the outside, no VPS or Cloudflare needed. That’d be the direct solution. (And what I use for my personal services on my NAS.) Just mind that discloses your internet connection’s IP address to visitors, so they’ll learn the name of your provider and your rough location.

I’m fairly sure what you mean is, traffic is decrypted in the middle and the re-encrypted before it gets sent your way. Otherwise they couldn’t do proxying or threat detection/mitigation.

Cloudflare is very popular, there should be plenty people around with experience. And Cloudflare is convenient and fairly easy to use. I wouldn’t call them “secure” though. I mean that depends on your definition of the word… But they terminate the encryption for you and handle certificates, so it’s practically a man-in-the-middle, as they process your data transfers in cleartext. But as far as I know their track-record is fine. I have some ethical issues because they centralize the internet and some of their stuff borders on snake-oil… But it’s a common solution if you can’t open ports in your home internet connection, need some caching in front of your services, something to block AI scrapers, or you need a web application firewall as a service.