idatum

> Unfortunately I refuse to participate in the Facebook ecosystem so I can’t comment on if Facebook Groups is a suitable replacement

I really resent having FB pushed on me. I don't have an account and don't plan to, even if it's to be a member of one FB group. My HOA tried that and I pushed back hard. There are many other options over FB. We just use email.

In the past few years whenever I re-watch 2001 when Dave is shutting down HAL, I see a spaceship capable data center. And HAL sings "Daisy.." finally at the foundational, bare metal layer.

If you are already running a VPS, the SSH -J option is useful if you don't want to expose your SSH to your home public address.

You create an SSH reverse tunnel (-R option) from a server in your home network to your remote VPS. This gives you a localhost port on your VPS to your server SSH port. Something like:

    ssh -NT -R 2222:localhost:22 vpsuser@yourvps.com

From your laptop, use your your VPS address and localhost port in the -J option. Something like:

    ssh -J vpsuser@yourvps.com:2222 homeuser@yourhome.com

I only allow ssh key auth and only my laptop is trusted by my home server. The home server doesn't need to trust the VPS "jump server".

This is my experience as well. I have a couple PINE64 devices, a Rock64 (Rockchip RK3328) and a RockPro64 (RK3399). And an N150 device.

Both ARM64 devices run headless, make use of GPIO, and have more than enough CPU. In fact, these are stable enough that I run BSDs on them and don't bother with Linux.

The Rock64 runs FreeBSD for SDR applications (e.g. ADS-B receiver). FreeBSD has stable USB support for RTL-SDR devices.

The RockPro64 runs NetBSD with ZFS with a PCIe SSD. NetBSD can handle ARM big.LITTLE well. I run several home lab workloads on this. Fun device.

I also have an N150 device running the latest Debian 13 as my main home lab server for home automation, Docker, MQTT broker, etc.

In short: SBCs are cheap enough that you can choose more than one, each for the right task, including IoT.

Forgot the most important part of pf.conf!

    # NAT64
    pass in inet6 from any to $nat64_prefix af-to inet from ($ext_if)

OpenBSD makes it easy to try IPv6 tunnelbroker.net with NAT64/DNS64 if your ISP only has IPv4 ("one more lab test away.." they say).

This has worked for me well for a couple years. I do use a VLAN to keep the IPv6-only network separate (homelab) from video streamers in the household.

In my pf.conf:

    # IPv6 tunnel
    block in log on $tun6_if all
    block in quick on $tun6_if inet6 from fd00::/8 to any
    antispoof quick for $tun6_if
    # allowed icmp6
    pass in quick log on $tun6_if inet6 proto icmp6 icmp6-type {
        unreach, toobig, timex, paramprob, echoreq
    }
    # MSS clamping 60 bytes less than HE 1480
    # 20 byte IPv4 tcp header + 40 byte IPv6 ip header
    match on $tun6_if all scrub (random-id max-mss 1420)

and in /var/unbound/etc/unbound.conf:

    # DNS64/NAT64
    module-config: "dns64 validator iterator"
    dns64-prefix: 64:ff9b::/96

Done. I don't have 464XLAT on Win11 but I do want to know if there's a hard coded IPv4 address anyway. I never had an issue.

I'll offer a recent example. Gigantic Brewing Company in Portland, OR: The Cat Ate My Stash & Pissed On the Christmas Tree

Style is IPA - American.

I love how people are passionate about fonts. Search for the 2017 Saturday Night Live skit with Ryan Gosling "Papyrus". It captures the obsession!

"It’s like they spent $300 million on the movie, and then.. They just used Papyrus."

Or OpenBSD, in my case a USG-3P. I would have otherwise tossed it but now it's a nice OpenBSD switch.

    OpenBSD 7.7 (GENERIC) #339: Sun Apr 13 17:52:27 MDT 2025
        deraadt@octeon.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/octeon/compile/GENERIC
    real mem = 536870912 (512MB)
    avail mem = 521142272 (497MB)

Only complaint I have with Unifi is so-so IPv6 support. I'd love to see a NAT64/DNS64 option configurable in their UI.

Can anyone comment on wafer-scale systems, multiple equivalent chips on an entire wafer?

Seems like where things are heading?

I'd love to see a non-programmable version. If I recall it would be something like the HP 10C. It's because I just want the RPN part along with math functions.

A good example: Taking your FCC ham license exam does not permit use of your phone or a programmable calculator. They would have allowed me to use it.

I had practiced for the exams with my old HP 11C. It was jarring to have to switch to a TI calculator during the test.

> actually love the cheeky style overall

Also towards the bottom of the site:

> Tell your friends and family about XSLT.

It's hard enough telling them to also get off Instagram and Whatsapp and switch to Signal to maintain privacy. I'm going to have a hard time explaining what XSLT is!

> also their lack of IPv6 on anything but their mobile network is annoying.

This gives me even less confidence after BCE took over ZiplyFiber, US PNW provider. There's a long running joke about IPv6 just one more lab test away from deployment.

Speaking of .NET, I've been successfully running .NET 9 on AMD64 FreeBSD. It's nice to have that choice.

I use NetBSD on a Pine64 RockPro64 and use USB3. It has been stable:

    awge0: flags=0x8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
            ec_capabilities=0x1<VLAN_MTU>
            ec_enabled=0x1<VLAN_MTU>
            address: 26:80:xx:xx:xx:xx
            media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT full-duplex)

Same.sysupgrade went flawlessly.

rtl_433 is awesome. You can even read your neighbors weather station and send that to Home Assistant using MQTT. It's worth investing in a decent antenna tuned to the ISM frequency (I use a center fed dipole, works great).

And of course there are cheap sensors you can find online for your own temperature probes.

This is the way: SOCKS5 via SSH

You do need some minimal technical understanding and some scripting.

Pick any cloud provider that can give you a VM with SSH access.

Read up on doing this on your local device or another device on your LAN:

    ssh -NT -g -D 10001 -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -o ConnectTimeout=5 -i your_ssh_private_key your_cloud_login@any_cloud_provider_ip

Change 10001 to whatever.

Now read up on how your browser points to a SOCKS5 proxy. For Firefox, I create a separate profile. For chromium based, I use the command line.

You are now virtually located to whatever region you chose for your VM.

I mentioned some scripting. It's simple enough that I have a /bin/sh script to spin up the VM, set up the SSH SOCKS5 proxy, launch the browser, then spin the VM down when the browser exits.

If I can find a Forth for a new chip I'm learning, I use it as a way to explore the chip with a REPL.

Micropython can be similar this way, but it's more constrictive.

In order to give Ente a try I self hosted it. It's working great. The initial interest was also E2E encryption.

The backing Minio store is on a VPS to keep it off-prem. The rest (front end UI etc) I host in my home and use the same VPS as a reverse proxy.

Right now I don't share with anyone else, but use it to get photos sync'd off my phone and shared with my own desktop/tablets.

I'm sticking with it and my family is interested in using as part of degoogle'ing. So I eventually will pay for it for a way to better share photo albums (i.e. too many photos to just share over Signal).

Or just use a different myhost, like "t-myhost" (i.e. myhost != hostname)?

> Some people rent VPSes. This helps keep their data safe.

This is exactly how I self-host Ente and it has been great.

Machine leaning for image detection has worked really well for me, especially facial recognition for family members (easy to find that photo to share).

I have the client on my Android mobile, Fire tablet (via F-Droid), and my Windows laptop.

My initial motivation was to replace "cloud" storage for getting photos copied off the phone as soon as possible.

Dang, I was almost motivated to figure out how to get Debian working on my old i5 Surface Laptop 1.

No way I'm tossing it since it works fine (even battery is decent still). But no way I'm spending time with Linux if Win10 will still get updates.

If I will really need another Windows device though, I'll just buy a cheap N100 device.

> Times are "Eastern Prevailing Time", which is Eastern Daylight Time right now.

I'm trying to recall when I last ever saw "Eastern Prevailing Time" used.

Can anyone share why it's used?

I see more use of ET over that (for Eastern US) or better yet UTC/GMT.

I use both a home server and a cloud VM, and they work together. I'm thankfully able to use FreeBSD 14 on my cloud VM (just a preference).

I push data from my home server for easy access on my cloud VM. For example, weather data from my weather station, images/time-lapses from my weather cam. I have no ports open to my home network. Basically just fun stuff without exposing my home network.

I use the cloud VM as an SSH "jump box" into my home network. My OpenBSD box sets up a remote SSH tunnel port. I can then use the SSH -J option to jump through the cloud VM into that home OpenBSD box (as well as chain "jumps" to other home servers).

    * This way I don't need any home server to trust a cloud VM.

    * This mostly is for checking on my Home Assistant instance.

    * I've also fixed some things remotely with an SSH session.

Do I need all this? Well, would be less fun without.

The test for me in defining social medial is whether its core is based a graph of connections. This is where you lose control in, for example, FB: Meta can infer many details about me without me ever posting anything, such as figuring out my home town based on relatives and school friends -- many other examples.

And this is why I no longer use any Meta products.

What I can do is help my family and friends understand the choices they are making (e.g. use Signal to talk to me). That rush they feel posting something has effects on people in their graph and now they at least understand that and pause.

Another example is ancestor "research" type sites, or DNA tests to find "your true ancestry". I had no choice a cousin of mine chose that as a hobby.

> If I'm understanding correctly, this will break whenever the IP address of your tunnel changes. You'll have to reestablish all of your connections.

The tunnel is on localhost only. The VM has a static IPv4/IPv6 with DNS.

Connecting the SSH tunnel from my home is stable as well as connecting to the VM remotely.

I do appreciate Tailscale and Wireguard. I was more responding to the fact that I don't have to trust any provider here, other than the one keeping my VM running.

Also, there's tmux for preserving sessions.

I still find SSH adequate for connecting to a home server remotely. I don't have the CGNAT terrible problem but I also don't do any port forwarding on my home router.

Instead, I have a VM running on a cloud provider that I SSH to from an OpenBSD box inside my home network. The SSH connection establishes a reverse SSH tunnel. This opens a port on the cloud VM to tunnel to my OpenBSD sshd port.

With the reverse proxy to my home OpenBSD box established, I can use the SSH jump box option, -J. I connect to the cloud VM and "jump" through the tunnel to the OpenBSD box at home. You can even specify multiple jumps if I need to connect to another machine in my home.

I can also set up a local tunnel through that jump for things like connecting to my Home Assistant server from my remote laptop or phone.

I only have to trust my cloud provider.

I am thankful my father-in-law gave me his HP-35 purchased in the early 1970s. With it came a metal case with a lock and a base you would bolt to your desk. It was a precious item back then.

Thankfully the power supply still works so I can take it out every so often and enjoy the history of it.

One more perspective:

I didn't spend the energy stressing over the initial wave of media hype surrounding the first published probability.

A few days of waiting for rational thought to prevail helps.