@anotherandrew, testing my own mbin instance for a while before committing to moving over permanently.

Embedded systems engineer for hire. Hardware, software, HDL. When not working I’m devoting the rest of my time to my kids and their curiosities. GPG EAF7ACB0

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 29th, 2025

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  • I think mass media reporting makes it feel that way but it’s been my experience that it’s not true. I think the average American is doing their best to be a good person with what they’ve got. Their electoral system is broken in a similar way to the Canadian one: boiling down to a binary, two party decision that has no basis in reality, and a media that encourages extreme, polarizing positions.

    Even this last election doesn’t (in my mind) reflect the average American. Less than half the eligible population cast their ballots. That’s a separate issue (voter disillusionment) but to me it means that those who did vote aren’t actually representative of what the average American wants or feels.

    This all could be me being completely out of touch with the average American, but I don’t think it is based on my daily in-person interactions with them.


  • This is exactly how I feel. it’s like somewhere after 2000 people just gave up being civil, not just in politics although it feels like that’s where it’s become not just acceptable but almost required to demonize your opponent.

    I’m not quite old enough to really have first hand experience or interest in politics before 1995 or so, but a lot of people seem to mark the time around Reagan as an inflection point.


  • Calling anyone who doesn’t immediately agree with you a nazi doesn’t make it so. That’s just a weak excuse for not having to think critically, which is the very definition of an echo chamber. A left-leaning Canadian is a “left leaning nazi”? Are you calling all Canadians nazis? Did it make you feel brave to do that? Did your internet friends congratulate you on standing up to someone who doesn’t think just like you do? Give your fucking head a shake and go touch grass. What a joke.

    The internet is what you make it to be. I use it for information exchange; it appears you use it to feel safe, safe enough to make ridiculous accusations and pithy remarks to people you not only know nothing about, but don’t care to.

    Like I said: enjoy your echo chamber.




  • I agree: it’s extremely difficult to find what I would call the “middle 80%” since the only people who tend to get all the media attention are the extremes at both ends who are hell bent on maintaining their airtime with ever more insane stunts.

    I don’t understand how people can vote for someone who did such a piss poor job his first time around, but then again my province elected a drug dealer who ran with literally no election platform whatsoever and won, twice. It boggles the mind. Populism is a cancer.


  • Your original comment still shows up for me, but I struggle to understand how weak your positions must be if you simply cannot stand the thought anyone not being in total agreement with you to the point of dismissing complete strangers as being weirdos and telling them to fuck off.

    I mean seriously, how do you function in society with this kind of mentality?

    I’m definitely not conservative in the sense you must think I am, and even at its noisiest there is still only one voice in my head. Do you jump to conspiracy being the only possible explanation for everything you don’t agree with or is it just me which makes you feel this way?






  • It’s funny; I recommend Apple stuff for practically all the same reasons you don’t. The walled garden pisses me off sometimes but when I talk to friends using Android stuff and their gripes it really reinforces that I made the right decision for my family, just as you have for yours. What I find even more amusing is that I design embedded linux devices, all my servers/vms are Linux based and I really enjoy using Linux… just not supporting/using it as a primary UI.

    Not shitting on your choices at all, I know that many people really like/enjoy the Android side as much as I do the Apple side. Chacun à son goût and all that.






  • There was a recent thread on reddit about this, where I wrote this comment (copied here):

    I’ve been hosting my own email for a long time (almost 25 years).

    Today it’s better than it was, but there are some hurdles:

    • Microsoft has their own system, but it’s reasonably easy to get listed
    • Google does their own thing, and it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get anywhere
    • UCEPROTECTL3 is just a fucking extortion scam

    When I switched providers, I found out I was in a “bad IP neighbourhood”. Microsoft wanted a letter from my VPS provider saying that I am in control of the IP I wanted listed, and that was not too hard to get. Also, Microsoft’s blacklist management is sane - you can log in, see the status, raise issues and get a hold of people. A little frustrating, but workable.

    Google, on the other hand… You can’t participate in their spam system unless you have a minimum volume of email, which means little guys like me who send maybe 50-100 emails a day end up in gmail’s junk folders by default and there’s abso-fucking-lutely nothing you can do about it. There’s no one to report it to, there’s no way to fight it… they simply don’t care. And whether an email gets flagged as junk or not seems completely random. It has nothing to do with the content as far as I can tell. All you can do is contact people from your personal gmail and ask them to check spam/whitelist. It’s been years and I’m still waiting for the “eventually your domain will get whitelisted globally” bullshit to happen.

    That leaves UCEPROTECTL3. Fuck these guys sideways. They block entire ASes and no, you can’t get an exception made. You can pay them to get whitelisted which is why I call them an extortion scam. They’re the only blacklist I’m on and I’ll be fucked if I’ll pay them to get off it. Bunch of fucking pretentious scammers.

    Everything else is pretty easy: DNS, DMARC, DKIM, SPF… it’s hoops to jump through but not overly difficult. Ensuring you’ve got SMTPS set up and constraining the encryption protocols to get it tight takes some iterative work, but nothing too difficult.

    I totally understand why people give up. This is a huge problem with these gigantic monolithic companies – they hold way too much power over the internet and there’s no way to hold them accountable.


  • I’ve been selfhosting various things for almost 25 years now. Started with email/web, but now I’ve got the following (in no particular order):

    • email (postfix/dovecot)
    • web (nginx)
    • shared notes (obsidian, but also through dovecot)
    • calendar (davical)
    • telephony (asterisk)
    • replicated storage (syncthing)
    • media server (plex)
    • home automation (homeassistant, mosquitto, grafana, influxdb)
    • power monitoring (empora device on the breaker panel + a few smart outlets talking to homeassistant)
    • security cameras (securityspy)
    • irrigation (a controller of my own design, adding OpenSprinkler support this year)
    • offsite backups (duplicity + rclone)
    • project management/issue tracking (redmine)
    • social media (gnu-social + lemmy, but also testing mbin)
    • bookmark management (karakeep)
    • local copies of web stuff (yt-dlp, hamsterbase, singlefile)
    • VPN (openvpn)

    Virtualization is mostly docker containers, but also some ESXi/VMWare Fusion. I also have Obsidian in the mix but that’s not really a self-host but more of a way to organize/access my data. I have also been doing a (very!) little bit of experimentation with local LLMs, but it’s all on ARM, using either the GPU or the NPU available on the RK3588.

    This stuff either exists on an OVH VPS for the “internet facing” stuff or on an old Dell C6100 blade server. ESXi uses one blade and another blade runs Debian and talks to an old SATA/SAS disk shelf I got for $50 to see if I could make it work (it was super straightforward). I have a bunch of 2T and 4T “spinning rust” drives in two RAID6 arrays (mdadm) and then carve out storage for various things using LVM. I am experimenting with zfs on the VPS but am not a big fan of it. I used to run OpnSense on another blade since I couldn’t find a router which would properly shape gigabit internet traffic, but now I’m using an ER605 and it seems to be doing quite well. I have a tiny KeepConnect device which will physically cut power to the cable modem if it can’t see the internet which is very helpful since the biggest source of trouble for me has always been the damn internet service doing weird things when I’m not at home.

    I’ve even been working toward “self hosting” my own educational electronics stuff for my kids using https://microblocks.fun (the actual project is called smallvm) - think scratch running completely in the browser and executing code on a “vm” which is actually running on a microcontroller over BLE or serial.

    This sounds like a shitload of work and sometimes it can be, but one of the best parts of self hosting is that once it’s set up, it hardly ever has to be updated/changed. Security updates are the biggest reason of course, but a LOT of this is not on the open internet so I can be more lenient about keeping things up to date. I also try to keep everything that needs a database to use ONE database (postgres), which also makes it easier to back up or use data from several tools in a new way. Honestly it’s largely fire and forget these days. I add more space or replace drives as needed and try not to touch things otherwise. I keep a set of notes to help me remember not only the how but the WHY I set things up in a particular way, and those notes are accessible 100% offline. (After all, what good are notes on how things are set up if the thing you’ve stored them on isn’t working?)

    My infrastructure at home (C6100, SAS shelf, switch, etc.) consumes about 700W 24/7 which is not awesome but I figure the power bill saves a lot of service costs. The VPS runs me about $30/mo.