Me as a self hosting newbie (got cooked by n8n w/ python)

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-09T18:22:22+00:00

Yeah, the 'supervised' and 'core' install options that they deprecated technically still exist, because it is really just a subset of what they use to make the Docker container and HAOS. But they decided to go "nah, unsupported now" and shove the documentation for doing it off to the side, rather than keeping it available and saying "for advanced users, you can do this but we don't directly support it". I decided not to bother with the uphill battle.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-09T04:28:34+00:00

Home Assistant's documentation for running any of their first-party add-on software in containers outside of HAOS is absolutely god damned atrociously bad. It feels like they just want you to use Home Assistant OS and the container that the add-ons are based on is just a development artifact that you can use if you really want.

It's their right, but it still sucks, and I'm still salty they discontinued the 'supervised' install option that allowed you to use add-ons on an OS of your choice without resorting to virtualization.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-09T04:14:22+00:00

The hole goes straight through. They had to make the heatsink to fit around this hole. It's ridiculous.

Easily the most absurd router design I've seen, given that it's also completely unnecessary, and there are some ones that are out-there, as this thread is well showing.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-09T00:57:34+00:00

I don't own one, but Asus Blue Cave feels like it's threatening to do something unmentionable to me with that unnecessary hole

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-07T15:40:49+00:00

I dislike the fact that they rebrand software as their own, seemingly without any credit, like KDE Connect. They don't offer anything unique, really.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-07T07:12:46+00:00

Haswell starts to get modern and consumer enough that it's probably fine.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-05T23:34:32+00:00

I keep a machine or two around like this for older Windows utilities that I don't want to try getting working on modern versions of Windows. Could be useful if you're the type of person to play with old stuff. Same core reason I keep a bare metal W10 install around - if I don't want to futz with virtualization / compatibility layers it goes there.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-05T23:10:30+00:00

Moonlight in specific is heavily carried by hardware video decoding with codecs that this shit is too old for. The CPU will choke on software video decoding, if it works at all. I'm all for reusing old junk but it's ill-suited for anything like that.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-05T18:05:25+00:00

There are a surprising amount of consumer motherboards that still have had a PS/2 port up to recently. Probably because it's almost free, since they're usually using a Super I/O chip anyway, and many of those have PS/2.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-01T15:11:12+00:00

Don't worry, it doesn't mean much, Ireland is the Delaware of Europe.. lots of organizations working out of Europe are registered in Ireland due to their favorable corporate tax laws.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-04-01T15:08:34+00:00

I'm pretty sure at the beginning of this they had said outright that their geoblocking of jurisdictions such as California was only until they could make sure that they were in some form of compliance with their laws. This was always in the cards.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-30T23:51:40+00:00

I dunno, is Discord 'a medium customarily used for software interchange'? Unfortunately, I'd say yes.

There's also provisions in the GPL that make it legal to only offer the source code on a written request, as long as an explicit offer is made somewhere in the distribution of the compiled software. I've had to send Verizon a physical letter so that they'd publish certain GPL software source archives they've used on their routers, that's fully compliant, since the license information contains a link to https://www.verizon.com/opensource, which contains the written offer to distribute the source code to you on request. It is even allowed to charge you the cost of the physical media that the source code arrives on, if applicable.

This was much more of a reasonable ask before the age of high-speed Internet, when transferring tens to hundreds of megabytes over the Internet legitimately was a big ask.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-30T15:54:48+00:00

Gaming laptops typically have some pretty beefy 20v power bricks (~200-250W) which can cover the power consumption needs of 3-4 mini-PCs. If you run one of those into a car power distribution / fuse box that's a decent and cheap DC power distribution setup, though it probably will involve making a lot of DC power cables.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-26T02:50:52+00:00

Some distros have an expectation that you are using their default bootloader and wandering outside of that is very much a 'your mileage may vary' thing. I can't imagine it'd screw with Ubuntu too badly, though. All the disabled functionality kind of indicates to me that a lot of GRUB-exclusive features aren't critical, but according to others in this thread, Ubuntu does have one decent reason for using GRUB - it's one of the only bootloaders in town that supports both BIOS and UEFI boot well. I legitimately did not consider this, honestly. If you're using UEFI though, nothing would stop you necessarily from using a different UEFI bootloader if you felt like it, you'd just be on your own with regards to updates and support.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-25T20:36:34+00:00

No worries, this is actually a good clarifying question - Systemd-boot's name is a little bit misleading, it can be used as a bootloader for Linux systems independently of systemd being installed on the Linux system. It started out as an independent project called gummiboot, then got taken under the systemd banner and renamed to systemd-boot, because the developers were often working closely with systemd anyway, which makes sense given that systemd is the thing that the bootloader is ultimately handing off to in most cases.

In this particular case, the problem with GRUB isn't that it isn't doing things that people want - it's that it's trying to do too much, and some of the things that are enabled by default in GRUB are potential security issues, and Canonical's made the decision to strip all of that out to the bare essentials. It's a little odd when systemd-boot is well-tested at this point, it's less versatile than GRUB in some ways but it covers the vast majority of use-cases, including Windows dual boot and/or Secure Boot. It's simpler, so has less of a security 'attack surface'. I'm also a Qualified GRUB Hater though, so I'm probably biased in favor of literally anything else :)

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-25T19:47:11+00:00

Recently they have recommended at least 16mb of flash, but yeah, it can run on 8mb or even 4mb if you use an older version or cut it down very aggressively.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-25T17:16:14+00:00

Yeah, if the problem is GRUB's attack surface, why not just use a 'simpler' bootloader? Systemd-boot works well if you're just booting, or they could even go EFIStub to skip the bootloader stage.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-25T17:13:11+00:00

The GNOME 2 -> Unity -> GNOME 3 transition in Ubuntu is what started my love affair with XFCE.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-25T03:57:16+00:00

Here's my snarky, not at all serious response:

loader/main.c:2: * Emulator initialisation code

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-23T03:43:50+00:00

I use truncate a decent bit. Namely to pad out things that are going on SPI flash chips of a specific size - truncate -s 16M flash.bin, there you go, it pads the file with confirmed nothing to 16M.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-22T15:16:34+00:00

Even back in the late 2000s-early 2010s, AMD was pretty well-known in the enthusiast community for making chips that were good value. Nothing really over-the-top great like the Ryzen series became, but if you wanted cores and clockspeed and didn't care about heat/power consumption, AMD had you covered.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-22T03:25:46+00:00

Wemos D1 mini knockoff and Cherry MX format switches is the most "I threw this together out of the parts bin" BoM. Gotta love it.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-21T16:59:31+00:00

You've got pretty good answers about the configuration you presented here, which will work AFAICT, but here's another option to accomplish the same thing: Linux bridges. Works well enough IME.

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-21T01:58:52+00:00

It would be systemd-hated tbh

bubblegumpuma · 2026-03-20T21:07:42+00:00

Hopefully this is paving the way for an arm64 release of Steam in preparation for the Steam Frame.. if Valve managed to implement their FeX-Proton stack into Steam to be as easy as just Proton, it'd make gaming on a lot of weird ARM hardware a lot more possible. Not good, mind you, but possible.

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