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I use kimai. It’s gotten much more stable over the past couple years and there is a mobile app. (I think it’s a couple bucks now, but works pretty well)

It runs in docker so it’s pretty easy to set up.

I have one customer who is pretty nuts about bills and this is the only way to track and invoice all that nonsense.

Yup! Even units with one exhaust need 2 fans. Many standalone models even have a small 3rd fan near the condensate reservoir to re-introduce moisture, collected when chilling air, back into the exhaust so they don’t have to be drained as much.

The nice thing about inverter units is they only run the pump and fans as hard as it needs to obtain its objective. Once there, it can spin down and get much quieter. I used to have floor units and hated sleeping with those. All through the night you would get fan noise and a huge CLUNK as the compressor kicks on or off. We upgraded this year and the ramp-up is so much easier to sleep through. There is still fan noise, but much quieter and becomes white noise after a while.

While it does pull in hot air from outside, it is not cooled, but rather heated. AC units are divided with a cool side that lowers temp in a room and a hot side that extracts heat.

Warm air is used by the condenser (a radiator that collects the heat from the room) and sent back outside hotter than it sucked in.

The air on the cold side of the AC unit is recirculated into the room.

Doesn’t really apply to your setup, but I just got a u-shaped window AC from midea and it works well with home assistant. I didn’t expect it, but it also has an outside temp sensor I can read. I’ve been graphing outside temp all summer. Purple is the AC, blue is openweathermap. Ignore humidity, that is for a tropical/moss tank.

They have an indoor unit with the same wifi capability, linky so that one might work.

EDIT: you’re right, Midea compatibility isn’t standard in home assistant, nor advertised , but I added it with a custom integration. It’s been working great this summer.

1. data stays local for the most part. Every file you send to the cloud becomes property of the cloud. Yeah, you get access, but so does the hosting provider, their 3rd party resources, and typical government compliances. Hard drives are cheap and fast enough.

2. not quite answering this right, but I very much enjoy learning and evolving. But technology changes and sometimes implementing new software like caddy/traefik on existing setups is a PITA! I suppose if I went back in time, I would tell myself to do it the hard way and save a headache later. I wouldn’t have listened to me though.

3. Portainer is so nice, but has quirks. It’s no replacement for the command line, but wow, does it save time. The console is nerdy, but when time is on the line, find a good GUI.

Ah, thanks for the info!

Didn’t the Lemmy teams sort of fix that CSAM thing ages ago?

I remember a wave of lockdowns and hush hush related to that, soon followed by an update to Pictrs with a bunch of new docker compose settings.

My server got pooched in the update and it took me almost a month to fix partly because I had little free time.

Highly recommend SSD if just for Lemmy. Man, the syncing can take a while. I have HDD with a m.2 cache and it can still take a while. Personally, I’d go for something a little more powerful, but it’s all fun and educational.

It’s changing settings to only allow one way sync and disable deletion. The sync folder basically becomes an automatic archive destination.

They are soooo close to having this cool tool, but many feature requests have been shot down because it’s not a true sync. I get it, but it sucks too.

I use syncthing for backups including some phone files, but I’m not sure this would be good.

Syncthing devs clearly don’t want this app used as a sync-and-archive tool so all phones would have all copies and any phone can permanently delete any file. I wouldn’t trust that.

(Yes, there is a roundabout way, I do it too, but it is prone to errors and sync issues)

I second immich and backup. immich can archive as you want, and Syncthing can make backups of files.

Sweet! My first computer was a 333mhz PowerPC Mac! Still have that behemoth. Man, I learned video editing and 3d modelind on that thing and totally changed my career path.

Now 25 years later it’s decendant (roughly?) is a SoC running a wireless hub!

Can confirm. Neighbors house had an attic fire with knob & tube wiring.

… Just like the stuff still in my place today. Eek! Landlord won’t upgrade unless there is a problem. In my house, the breakers are all 20amp and that’s a lot to run on, best guess, 70 year old wires.

Oh, and do not assume anything is wired as expected. Test after. I’ve found a couple plugs “upgraded” to 3-prong by jumping the load and ground together. That made for a fun firework show when my metal fan touched something metal. Even the landlord was impressed by that stupidity.

A cheaper solution is to take a copper wire and connect the ground screw of the socket to a water pipe. It does the job and is better than nothing.

I use kimai.

It’s grown over the past few years and lots of bugs squished. Could use a little developer help regarding custom invoice templates, but I like the direction it’s headed.

There is a convenient app that works pretty well. I think it’s a couple bucks now, but nothing outrageous.

Why not dockerize Foundry and run all on the Synology?

Though I did convert my home assistant docker to HAOS on a Pi for extra features way back in the day. Not sure you have to now.

Oh nice! I knew hot swapping was supported on many other devices but not PCIe itself. Feels wrong to rip a card out while the system is powered up.

Nope. I actually did that unintentionally on a PC I built. I only used one power wire when the GPU needed 2 so it couldn’t use all the power it needed when running 100%. My understanding was PCI doesn’t support disconnecting devices so the system expects all components it starts up with to be available all the time. Lose one and the system goes down.

I imagine there is money to be made. The big hurdle is initial development of the customer’s deployment app and the proxy/security location. But once those two work, a one time purchase or subscription could start bringing in revenue.

I foresee scalability and bandwidth to be a hurdle if you have 35,000 users running on average 10 apps. This setup would automatically double needed bandwidth by delivering content on the web and communication through VPN. Spitballing, but caching (if possible) would help, video like jellyfin would hurt pretty bad, but then again that sort of isn’t selfhosting anymore.

Oh, and it’d have to be cheaper then just buying a VPS. It’s a potential business, but trapped in a tight box of competition. Keep in mind your #1 client, those who rely on corporate solutions, would need a reason to switch and understand what they are doing. My parents aren’t going to jump ship from their walled garden because AI stole their eclipse photos.

I find Home assistant has all these points with the exception of accessibility; I only have one account so I never encountered this scenario.

The trace feature is amazing to visualize the logic.

I do wish it had a test run feature so you can simulate different examples and data to see is the automation behaves as expected. I had one finicky automation that would fudge up after midnight.

Hmmmm. We’ve had single click LAMP installs way back in the early 00’s. Heck, web servers were a single check box in OSX. It’s just gotten really complicated since then.

Data centers work great because tech and staff work together in proximity to keep things smooth. To decentralized a data center …

I’d start with a VPN; without which, you’d have too many unknowns. I’d have local user space (probably a VM or docker environment) linked to a remote auto-magically configured proxy server and network infrastructure. (A lot of people do this anyway with wire guard or the like) Complete automation is the key here.

Users would install apps from docker (preconfigured) and the environment automatically establishes the VPN and sends port data and settings to the proxy service. DNS/fail2ban/security is set up, and goes live in a minute or two. Of course that wouldn’t work for things like Pihole or adguard.

User is responsible for disk/CPU, service provider for networking, well except ISP stuff. But anything average-user-easy will have to be mostly prepackaged for ease of use.

Oh, and if there are things that go wrong, clear explanations are essential. Things like “could not bind 0.0.0.0:80” could be “Hey dimwit, you already used port 80 for XXXX program. Pick something else!”

Or, you know, a script could do that.

I don’t think self hosting is average person territory at all.

I noticed 2 services out of dozens weren’t working last week and restarted their docker containers when I got home. Working again! Easy.

Nope. They only work on local LAN. Turns out IPv6 wasn’t working so I had a heck of a time tracking that down.

Home assistant kept giving me errors about my reverse proxy not being trusted, but all the settings were correct. Tried adding IPv6 addresses too, but never got that working. The only thing that worked was change the network interface from Ethernet to wireless.

There are a LOT of gremlins in selfhosting. It’s a fun hobby and rewarding, but definitely not for everyone.