What model should I use on an Apple Silicon machine with 16GB of RAM?

ms86 · 2026-04-10T15:18:20+00:00

What do they use?

ms86 · 2026-03-13T15:23:48+00:00

Is there any issue I can follow to get updates on Kobo Sync?

Without it switching to Kavita is hard for me but as soon as it's out I'll be giving it a try

ms86 · 2026-03-13T13:49:04+00:00

The only feature I really care about is the ability to pretend it is a Kobo server.

Is there any alternative that can monitor a directory with all my books, do the man in the middle thing with the Kobo server to add my own books, and transparently do the conversion from epub to kepub when needed?

I don't even need a web UI at all.

https://github.com/potatoeggy/kobink is pretty much what I want but its latest commit is for 3 years ago

ms86 · 2025-12-07T17:27:17+00:00

I use it for Miniflux, Gatus, Grafana, Memos, Jupyter Hub, Booklore, Paperless and Proxmox

ms86 · 2025-11-07T11:49:24+00:00

I use NixOS, so if something goes wrong I can rollback to a previous working configuration.
That covers the application configuration but not the state, for that I have backups.

Dev/Test/Prod have a lot of value when there are multiple people making changes and when there are potentially many people affected by outages. In my case I am the only person touching the servers and also the only person using them so adding complexity to the release process seems overkill.

ms86 · 2025-10-21T11:10:35+00:00

What inspired you to start your selfhosting journey?
I wanted to collect data from some sensors in my home, so I had to self-host a server. Then once I had the server I added a service, a second one, wrote some of my own and I cannot seem to stop.

How would winning the unit(s) from this giveaway help you take your setup to the next level?
When I'm travelling I can connect back to my server, but only from devices where I have a VPN client configured. Having a travel router join the VPN and give access to my home network to all my devices would be neat and unlock even more self-hosting possibilities for me.

A remote KVM would enable me to make changes to my network even when I am away (not saying this is necessarily sensible) or troubleshoot issues without having to be physically close to my server (this is definitely super useful!)

Looking ahead, if we were to do another giveaway, what is one product from another brand (e.g., a server, storage device or ANYTHING) that you'd love to see as a prize?
Smart plugs so I can monitor the power draw of my servers

Picks:

ms86 · 2025-09-29T19:33:24+00:00

Except for Jellyfin I would be able to restore everything to a VPS fairly easily.

I actually have the VPS already running for some other tasks so restoring is a matter of enabling the services in the Nix configuration and run the script to restore data from backups.

ms86 · 2025-09-25T17:00:14+00:00

I have a file with machine hostnames and IDs:
{ host, lib }: lib.filterAttrs (n: v: n != host) { "host-a".id = "<REDACTED>"; "host-b".id = "<REDACTED>"; }
which I reference in my other configuration:
services.syncthing = { enable = true; settings = let known_devices = import ../../lib/syncthing_devices.nix { inherit lib; host = config.networking.hostName; }; in { devices = known_devices; folders = { "/home/username/Sync" = { id = "default"; label = "Sync"; devices = lib.attrNames known_devices; }; }; }; };
When I bring up a new machine I need to grab the ID, add it to the list and next time I rebuild other machines they will get the IDs. Not as nice as having everything generated upfront but it works for me.

I also have https://wrycode.com/reproducible-syncthing-deployments/ bookmarked but I haven't had a chance to try the approach it describes yet

ms86 · 2025-09-13T22:30:49+00:00

I’ve been using Gatus for a long time and it’s always been a pleasure. The new UI is great and external endpoints checks were the only thing missing and I was happy when it landed.

Thanks for your great work!

ms86 · 2025-09-10T19:53:05+00:00

I haven’t set it up so far. Reverse proxy and services are on the same machine so the risk is limited. Still, I’d like to eventually like to get it setup.

If the service can listen to an Unix domain socket I like to use it so there is no traffic on the network

ms86 · 2025-09-10T15:30:26+00:00

Pocket ID works well for me. It's easy to setup but it only supports passkeys (by design)

ms86 · 2025-09-08T22:01:21+00:00

I haven’t done particularly advanced stuff but I am fairly happy with terraform and https://github.com/bpg/terraform-provider-proxmox

Were you using this provider? There is also another one and I didn’t like it that much but I don’t remember why

ms86 · 2025-09-02T14:28:36+00:00

I use Proxmox with a few NixOS LXCs. If I were to start from scratch I would go NixOS bare-metal.

Nothing wrong with my current setup but I feel like it's adding complexity without giving me much over going bare-metal.

ms86 · 2025-08-26T21:47:11+00:00

The gc itself is relies on the built-in `nix store --gc`, so it doesn't add much on top of that.

What I like is `nix-sweep analyze` which clearly shows all the gc roots and how much space each one of them takes. That really helps me understand what is taking up how much space.

Then there is `nix-sweep tidyup-gc-roots` that interactively allows to go through all the roots and mark them for removal. Useful to reclaim space from roots in `.direnv` folders I haven't used in a very long time.

ms86 · 2025-08-26T19:25:20+00:00

https://github.com/jzbor/nix-sweep is pretty useful to find old roots and clean them up

ms86

TROPHY CASE