Hi Folks,

I've used Ticktick as a SaaS task manager app for years now. There was a time when I had tried almost every productivity app under the sun and Ticktick had the best features and app and a WAY better pricing structure than alternatives like Todoist. Nevertheless, I had growing concerns about privacy and control of my own data as I need to be able to trust my to-do app with information about my life that I don't want repeated to every advertiser on the internet. Bearing in mind the state of the internet in general, I've been slowly cutting away all my SaaS dependencies and it may be close to time for me to say goodby to an app that kept me sane for over a decade of my life. I'd like to move to a self-hosted solution, first for myself and eventually I'll migrate my family to a shared project on the new solution.

What do you use to stay organized? Why do you like it?

Can you recommend something for my needs?

• Some sort of custom lists logic where I can filter with some sort of typed or gui-button filter to see and save specific views of my tasks/cards, for example "overdue+project:yard+tag:do_it_later"

• Must be source available, but I prefer open-source especially the less shareware-y less crippled versions. There's a lot of subscription/shareware/FOSS+sub kind of stuff in this space and I'd rather use whatever the neckbeard & fedora FOSS purists use.

• I'm mostly used to the getting things done (GTD) methodology with task managers that use lists, but I am not opposed to using a tool that uses Kanban boards or something else.

• I'm partial to something that I can grow into (more of a accessible but powerful project management tool and less of a simple todo app) but I only need to account for 2-3 users and a few thousand tasks a year with minimal media attachments.

• I prefer something I can deploy via docker though I wouldn't completely rule out a bare-metal install if the feature set justified it.

• Must have support for recurring tasks natively or via a plugin.

• Bonus points for native android(graphene)/ios apps, but access via webapp is acceptable

  I've tried a lot of the NextCloud based solutions. I've tried Vikunja (which is pretty good and AGPL), and I'm currently messing with Planka which is good, but isn't open-source which really isn't where I'm trying to go with this. Kanboard is under the MIT license, but seems to have a steeper learning curve.

I'm looking forward to hearing what the community uses!

Seems like it might be time to build my next router before they become unaffordable. I've done some research, but I'd like to get the pulse of the community since other self-hosters may have a similar use care.

Should I use PFsense or OpenWRT? Should I use purpose built or minipc hardware?

This is for a home network (symmetric gigabit fiber). A few of the devices have 2.5LAN ports and it would be nice to make use of that speed locally. Primary uses include streaming Disney+ and YouTube, web browsing, and self-hosting a few services I connect to via wireguard. Sometimes I play games, but not competitively, so an extra ms of ping isn't going to throw me into a rage. I do use a remote desktop feature like steam link to play gamed on my home office PC from my bedroom. Ping is currently acceptable according to the system with occasional slowdowns when my family is slamming the WiFi.

I will need to provide WiFi access. If my existing router(s) have an AP mode, I imagine I can just plug them in via ethernet?

What kind of wireless AP hardware do I need if I want connections to transfer between a basement and attic AP with minimal interruption?

For the router itself, I see people using what look like barebones routers and others using a minipc with dual LAN. What do you use and what advantages/disadvantages have you experienced as a result.

Can I set up a wireguard VPN server in either pfSense or OpenWRT?

Are there any enshittification risks or open-source purity concerns with either choice?

Is there a significant difference in popularity between pfsense and openwrt?

I will happily accept hardware recommendations for 2.5GB capable router hardware for a home network with 1GB fiber. It needs to be able to handle inbound and outbound wireguard connections. I'm overwhelmed by the many options between all the minipcs and purpose built hardware. Location is USA.

I appreciate any insight you may have. I'm a Linux guy, but networking has always been my weak point so I'm asking for help.

I like the idea of something like Notion but I have no idea how I would preserve my data or ever migrate it. I imagine you have to have some pretty complex stuff going on to have rich text, images, databases, macros and whatever else all in a file or notebook. Getting it out in some sort of format may not be too hard, but how would you ever migrate that to new software?

Am I over thinking this?

I know Obsidian stores everything in plaintext, but how would something like Notion or Affine (a self-hosted one) compare.

In the earliest days of my internet experience, I remember being able to do a web search for a phone number and sometimes actually find something useful. That said, this niche has long been dominated by some of the fakest, most scammy, bullshit sites on the web. From calling themselves "free" when they are not, to the fake "searching", "sifting through results", "correlating records" wait screens that are much like the deceptive, manipulative, and nontransparent airline industry, to the mentally manipulative exclamation point in the red warning triangle to tease you that there might be criminal records.

Why is this area of the web so scammy?

Who made it like this?

Has anyone tried to fix it?

Is there a any site out there that can actually do a reverse lookup and isn't a cesspool of popups, pay gates, and fake loading screens?

Hi Friends,

I've been replaying Homefront lately. Its a great game, but has a very short storyline.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/55100/Homefront/

What I like most:

• intense firefights, giant explosions
• good storyline
• genuinely horrifying atmosphere with mass graves, rubble everywhere, a horrifying police state with North Koreans occupying the US. It's not hard to feel like a resistance fighter protecting your homeland
• linear gameplay with a balance of brute force and tactics, skewed towards making things go boom
• not set too far in the future, no giant humanoid mech robots
• abundant ammo
• runs on Linux with no stupid sign-ins or subscriptions beyond Steam

I've done some poking around online and it sounds like Ghost Recon: Wildlands hits a few of those points and might suit me.

I can search for alternatives myself, but I'm really looking for some recommendations from real people

Hardware requirements shouldn't be an issue, and I don't object to slightly older games either, especially if they're just old enough that I can scoop up the game and DLC in one bundle.

Other games I liked:

• Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
• Blood and Bacon
• Crysis

I appreciate any recommendations you give me.

I have a few sneaky tiptoeing but loveable miscreants as part of my family and I would like to keep them out of my office. I'm sure some of you can relate.

My problem is that most of the locks I'm finding are big, heavy, super-secure deadbolts. I don't care about the actual security, I just want a simple interior lock that I can open with a pin/NFC/fingerprint and also log entry and exits in HA. Does anyone know of a lock that's more "lightweight" than the common options. After all, if they make it into my office there will be evidence all over in the form of fingerprints on the window of my PC case! :-D. I just need a mild deterrent.

The wife already nixed a motion sensor turning all the lights red and triggering horror movie sounds.

Hi Folks, I'm new to this and wanted to buy a pair of devices for me and my father. For me, it's an emergency preparedness thing (and texting at festivals and such where cell coverage is saturated). I'm not sure what all he would use his for, but I figure it would be a cool fallback for Home Assistant to get messages out if the network and backups go down. My questions are as follows:

• With intermediate Linux skills and entry level radio skills (messed around with a FlipperZer0 for a bit) how difficult would you anticipate it being to send emails or messages received on a PC to myself via radio?
• I'm seeing the Heltec and the Wiotracker names a lot. If I grab one of their small radios, is it likely to be suitable for a project like this?
• Second, and unrelated. I wouldn't mind having a few GPS trackers on my bicycles so I have at least a chance of recovering them if they get snatched. Are any of you cyclists? Are there any particular devices, accessories, mounts, or software that you find bridges the radio and bicycling worlds well?

Thanks for any guidance you can provide.

I've been using Linux for a over a decade, but haven't used anything Gnomey in a while. I gave PopOS another try the other day because I needed a simple distro to put on a home PC for my partner to use. This is the most usable Gnome distro I have ever found!

I won't be switching myself anytime soon, but I really like the way the tiles on Cosmic expand to always keep the screen full. I know KDE can tile using shortcuts, but have ant of you come across something on KDE that autoresizes the tiles like Pop does?

My partner and I have accumulated a lot of memes and a lot of family photos over the years. I would like to host these so they are accessible via various devices. I'm doing the memes first and once I figure out the software better I'll move on to vacation photos. I had no problem getting Immich and Photoprism up and running. Both are very impressive programs, but both also are missing the ability to search/filter/sort by star rating. A lot of my memes and vacation photos are rated in their metadata as I never delete anything, I just rate the worthwhile ones higher so I can filter the junk out if we're showing someone the album. My visitors don't need to see all 10 distant dolphin pictures, just the good one where it's jumping out of the water. :D

Immich sees and can edit star ratings, though there is no search/filter/sort functionality and Photoprism doesn't seem to work with star ratings at all and uses the star the way Immich and Google photos use the heart.

My question is this:

Can anyone recommend a hosted alternative that implements star ratings completely and has an app or built in web server making it usable on desktop Linux, iOS, and Google-free GrapheneOS? It looks like Immich is slowly moving this direction and I can already see that this will be the best long term solution, at least for the family photos, but I want to set up something in the short term, especially since I have no idea what their feature timelines look like or how accurate they are.

I see a lot of HA users using the Ring Keypad to arm/disarm their alarm over Z-Wave. I'm suspicious of Amazon, probably overly so. I just tore out a Ring doorbell. Having said that, if this thing can work entirely free of cloud dependencies, it may still work for me.

Can the ring keypad phone home or exfiltrate telemetry data about my network? Does it connect to this Amazon sidewalk network they've created?

I don't want to give Amazon any window into my home.

I have 10-15 years of Linux experience for personal use and I have a few years of IT support work in the cloud but I still have some gaps in my tech knowledge, especially in regards to networking. I recently lost my job to AI and I'm interested in what comes next. I won't touch windows. I don't want to install it, image it, use it, support it, etc.

Is it possible to get into an IT career without ever acknowledging the existence of windows?

I have a developmentally disabled family member who would love all the content on my Jellyfin server. I worry that they would also click each and every option in the settings and they may struggle if navigating to the content is too complex. Picture someone who does not understand how Facebook works, but has created 20+ profiles and has 5-10 google accounts because their favorite YouTube got banned and they don't understand that it's not something wrong with the account. :-D LG WebOS is probably too cluttered and chaotic for them and they wouldn't be able to tell the sponsored/pushed content apart from our self-hosted stuff and would probably just add Prime video and try to rent the same movies they already own over and over again. :-/ I have a Shield on my partner and I's main TV and while it is way more logical and easy to use than LGs webOS or any of the stuff like that, it might be too much.

What I'm looking for is some kind of streaming stick or Jellyfin capable solution that is as simple and easy to use as possible.

Can anyone recommend a very simple easy to use streaming stick that can do Jellyfin and accept Chromecast streams? I know that second half isn't self-hosted, but this is how I'm weening my family off big-streaming and big tech, one step at a time.

I made a bad HTML site back in the early 2000s (2002-06) and decided to move it from angelfire to neocities. I'm enjoying all the awesome smallweb content. I really miss nich sites tied to real people and their hobbies, interests, preferences.

Enjoy the cringe: https://modelrailroadland.neocities.org/

We aren't too fond of cameras around here and there's almost always someone home so it's not really a necessity for us. Having said that, we've had a few cams for a while now and most important is the doorbell.

I'm certain for 95% of you I don't have to explain why I want the Amazon/Ring bell gone.

I run HA and have deployed Frigate separately to start messing with IP cams.

Here is my question? I understand that you can take the feed from the Reolink bell/cams and import it into Frigate from which I will send it over to my home assistant. For those of you who already do this, how offline is it? Did you need to set up any kind of reolink account to adjust settings or do the initial login? Does the camera try to call home occasionally? Is it fully offline?

I learned my lesson with Amazon. I want to control this doorbell myself and I'd to avoid video, audio, or logs exiting my network without me knowing.

How has the Reolink - Frigate - Home Assistant trio panned out for you?

Why do the roads SW of Cancun make such weird patterns. It's almost like a ladder or just long roads to nowhere with single houses on either side. I have seen this in other central/south American countries as well. What political/legal/geographical/etc factors make it turn out like this?

I >>KNOW<< there is someone out there who can understand and explain this satisfactorily. I just need to find the right community, group, etc.

Flashback to my mother buying entire brown cardboard shipping boxes of cereal out of the back storeroom of the grocery store and storing it in her basement pantry 😀❤️

For those of you who have the luxury of buying in bulk, what do you buy in bulk when it's cheap? Do you do it because it's always going up in price, because it's seasonally expensive, or because it's a staple item that you always need. To what extreme do you go with your bulk purchase?

Examples from my own life,

• toothpaste and mouthwash, buy when cheap store extra tubes, usually no more than 5-10
• cleaning supplies, chemicals and towels. Enough to keep a backups closet stocked.
• pasta, probably have enough for a couple of months
• coffee, ten to fifteen bags
• shoes, buy multiples if I find ones I like
• consumable hobby items like bike intertubes

The basic idea is to identify the items I will almost certainly decide to buy then snag them up when they're at their cheapest to achieve long term frugality.

I understand this could be posted in a hardware forum or I could use a stats comparison tool (and I've poked around a fair bit as is), but I'm curious, specifically from the self-hosted, roll-your-own NAS perspective, does the Minisforum n5 Pro seem like a decent machine for self-hosting? Any impressions? What percebtage of this is the marketing hype-train and what percentage would still be good if it shipped unbranded in a cardboard box. What would you expect this to cost?

https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro

Currently I'm running one of the DS-Series Synology NAS but I want to remove the Synology dependency because I don't fully trust them to deliver and not remove features. I would rather give the TrueNaAS thing a try (or something in that direction) now so I'm prepared to jump ship when I need to. I'm lucky enough to be able to buy a decent NAS and hang onto it for a while, but I want to come in below the point where an extra $100 doesn't really get me much anymore.

I am specifically interested in the hardware because I don't plan to use the default OS.

Hello Self-Hosters,

What is the best practice for backing up data from docker as a self-hoster looking for ease of maintenance and foolproof backups? (pick only one :D )

Assume directories with user data are mapped to a NAS share via NFS and backups are handled separately.

My bigger concern here is how do you handle all the other stuff that is stored locally on the server, like caches, databases, etc. The backup target will eventually be the NAS and then from there it'll be double-backed up to externals.

1. Is it better to run #cp /var/lib/docker/volumes/* /backupLocation every once in a while, or is it preferable to define mountpoints for everything inside of /home/user/Containers and then use a script to sync it to wherever you keep backups? What pros and cons have you seen or experienced with these approaches?

2. How do you test your backups? I'm thinking about digging up an old PC to use to test backups. I assume I can just edit the ip addresses in the docker compose, mount my NFS dirs, and failover to see if it runs.

3. I started documenting my system in my notes and making a checklist for what I need to backup and where it's stored. Currently trying to figure out if I want to move some directories for consistency. Can I just do docker-compose down edit the mountpoints in docker-compose.yml and run docker-compose up to get a working system?

My own city, which is not Indianapolis, has a few sections of trail that locals tend to avoid because they're congested with homeless camps and while I've never had an issue, there is a perception of danger and it doesn't make for a relaxing ride. I go in the day and in a group, but not alone at night.

I am planning a daytime ride in Indianapolis along the Monon Trail from Carmel to Downtown, then circling back using the White River. Are there any sketchy or outright dangerous sections of trail I should know about?

The city glows bright red on crime maps, but so does almost every downtown in every US city over 500,000 people.

I've looked at what's available online. A lot of what I could find was either generalized or dated so I'm still looking for additional perspectives.

https://pacersbikeshare.org/ (Indianapolis, Indiana)

Muscle Bike $2 + $0.20/min Electric Bike $5 + $0.25/min

That's $14 for an hour long ride and $26 or even $40 for a long ride and a short ride.

https://www.carmel.in.gov/our-city/experience/attractions/bike-carmel/bike-share-program

Similarly located, more walkable urbanism focused but less urban Carmel, Indiana has a more reasonable rate:

Muscle Bike $1.50 per half hour to rent with a cap of $24 for up to a 24-hour period.

Can anyone explain to me why this difference is so large? Over the years I've come across some expensive bike shares and some very affordable ones. The only other thing worth noting is that residents of Marion County, which Indianapolis is in, can ride a certain amount free and at a discount after that. I thought bike shares were perfect for visitors or travelers who may not have a car at their destination.

Would you consider the Pacers Bike Share in Indianapolis Expensive?

For this price, if I was in Indy for a week, I'd buy a Craigslist bike and donate it to some random kid when I left. $40 of gas would take me across the state.