Nice!

Upgrade went smoothly on docker, with some neat new additions. There’s new filter options in the query log. There’s a bunch of new metrics under Settings > System (enable ‘advanced’ in the top right). And overall there seems to be many more settings available under System > All Settings. For example you can easily set the TTL for blocked responses (this was a setting burried in config files before, I was looking for it like 2 weeks ago).

If you don’t use/set a password in pihole, or you set one via .env variables; you’ll probably have to reset it with the command:

sudo docker exec <container_name> sudo pihole setpassword <your password here>

(empty for no password)

/edit; seems that was a temporary solution.

These env variables have changed:

Was: webpassword=<your password>

DNS1=<upstream1>

DNS2=<upstream2>

Now: FTLCONF_dns_upstream=<upstream1;upstream2>

FTLCONF_webserver_api_password=<your password here>

I run Borg nightly, backing up the majority of the data on my boot disk, incl docker volumes and config + a few extra folders.

Each individual archive is around 550gb, but because of the de-duplication and compression it’s only ~800mb of new data each day taking around 3min to complete the backup.

Borgs de-duplication is honestly incredible. I keep 7 daily backups, 3 weekly, 11 monthly, then one for each year beyond that. The 21 historical backups I have right now RAW would be 10.98tb of data. After de-duplication and compression it only takes up 407.98gb on disk.

With that kind of space savings, I see no reason not to keep such frequent backups. Hell, the whole archive takes up less space than one copy of the original data.

That’s between you and your landlord. Mine was fine with it as it doesn’t actually modify any of the wiring.

I’m in a rental too. It’s non-invasive; just gotta pop the panel cover off, clip the transformers over the wires without disconnecting them, and put the cover back. It can all be removed just as easily.

A fridge can create a fairly low overall temp, but with something like a PC generating a ton of heat inside, it can’t keep up. The fridge just can’t move the heat fast enough and becomes an insulated box trapping the heat instead.

A lot of people aren’t even aware of the concern. That’s why I bring it up.

Paying an electrician to add a breaker is much cheaper than replacing the PC. Tho that’s up to OC if they want to pursue that. I’m just putting the info out there for them to consider.

If you want to expand from just monitoring a couple sockets to monitoring the whole house; I’d recommend Iotawatt. I’ve been using one of these to monitor every circuit in my house for a few years now.

You can use the built in webpages shown below to view it’s internal graphs, or setup an exporter to feed the data into external DBs like influxDB+Graphana or Emoncms.

breaker to my room likes to trip if I am gaming and someone in the house decides to microwave something

… Why the hell is your pc on the same breaker as the kitchen??

The kitchen plugs should have their own dedicated breaker in most modern electrical codes (at least in North America). The voltage drop your pc experiences everytime a high-load item like a microwave or kettle is turned on, on the same circuit, is really rough on your PSU.

At least you have a UPS which presumably performs some power conditioning, but still. Not great.

That’s true; once everything inside is brought down to temp, they use very little power to stay cold.

My regular fridge uses ~500-800wh a day (depending on how much it got opened). My chest freezer though, uses ~200wh/day pretty consistently.

OS updates I only bother with every 6-12mo, though I also use debian which doesn’t push major updates all that regularly.

As far as software goes; pretty much everything is in a docker container with watchtower automatically pulling new updates to those nightly at 4am. It sends me email notifications, so It’ll tell me if an update fails; combined with uptime-kuma notifying me if any of my services is unavailable for whatever reason.

The rest I’ll usually do with the OS updates. Just because an update was released, doesn’t mean you’ve gotta drop everything and install it right this moment.

Sure,

That’s why Trump won’t even take Trudeaus calls. He just wants to negotiate.

Fuck America, enact a full trade embargo. Nothing in, nothing out; including oil and electricity.

Good. Fuck America, we don’t need your shit.

Supposedly docker volumes are faster than plain bind mounts; but I’ve not really noticed a difference.

They also allow you to use docker commands to backup and restore volumes.

Finally you can specify storage drivers, which let you do things like mount a network share (ssh, samba, nfs, etc) or a cloud storage solution directly to the container.

Personally I just use bind mounts for pretty much every bit of persistent data. I prefer to keep my compose files alongside the container data organized to my standards in an easy to find folder. I also like being able to navigate those files without having to use docker commands, and regularly back them up with borg.

Gotta focus on the now; If I look too far into the future I just spiral into a deep depression.

I keep a fairly close eye on my DNS traffic; it still does crash reporting through Crashlytics (which I just block), but that’s about it.

I just paid the whole 4$ for the pro version and to support an otherwise free app I’ve quite enjoyed.

No ads/tracking anymore.

Devs gotta eat.

For more manual stuff; Ssh and X-Plore File Explorer.

Internal, sd card, ssh, ftp(s), google drive, dropbox, and a bunch of other cloud providers; treats it all like one big file system that I can casually copy/move files between.

For just syncing files between folders: FolderSync. The ‘downloads’ folder on my phone is setup as a 2-way sync with a folder on my server. Drop a file in either side, click sync, file is in both places. I use this to keep most of the files on my phone backed up, not just syncing the download folder.

Gemini ‘messaged’ me in google messages introducing itself a couple months ago. Just appeared like a normal text conversation with any other contact, but as soon as you click on it you’re presented with a wall of T&Cs.

Deleted the ‘conversation’ and it’s stayed gone; though there’s an option for it in settings.

The only other place I’ve see it is an on-screen reminder every time I use Google Assistant. (usually just triggering home automatons)

That sounds like storage failure.

I actually ran into something similar with the RPI 2 weeks ago. It was running incredibly slow, certain file directories refused to load, DNS resolution was failing 1/3 of the time and was super slow when it did work…

Pretty sure the 6 year old sd card finally gave up.

Having a script automatically write a bootable backup of the SD card to an SSH server once a week makes that recovery super easy. Literally just write the last backup to a new card, swap them out, and all’s well again.

I’m not sure I’d trust the results at all if they said 100% of people polled voted the same way…