Dave

I have backups on a backup hard drive and also synced to B2, but I am thinking about backing up to some format to put in the cupboard.

The issue I see is that if I don't have a catastrophic failure and instead just accidentally delete some files one day while organising and don't realise, at some point the oldest backup state is removed and the files are gone.

The other thing is if I get hit by a bus and no one can work out how to decrypt a backup or whatever.

So I'm thinking of a plain old unencrypted copy of photos etc that anyone could find and use. Bonus points if I can just do a new CD or whatever each year with additions.

I have about 700GB of photos and videos which is the main content I'm concerned about. Do people use DVDs for this or is there something bigger? I am adding 60GB or more each year, would be nice to do one annual addition or something like that.

I was trying to get it to pause Pi-hole on request. I'm using Home Assistant Cloud (Nabu Casa) for speech to text, and have also got OpenAI plugged into it for if it doesn't recognise a command. The screen shot is from the debug logs that I eventually found after struggling to work out why it wasn't running my automation.

I'm using the new Home Assistant Voice Preview. Don't get me wrong, overall very happy with it for the price point, but for some reason the cloud speech recognition (I believe powered by Google) is very good at understanding me until I start trying to talk about ad blocking.

You may have seen my post trying to troubleshoot my server. It seems either the motherboard or CPU is dead, so hey, why not do an upgrade?

I use this server for a lot. It's used for a Jellyfin server, sometimes multiple streams at once. I think I'd like hardware transcoding, I want it to be really good at streaming Jellyfin, and preferably multiple streams at once without issue.

It's also going to be used for hosting Zusam, a kind of private forum for friends/family - a key thing is that this will also be transcoding videos and photos to downscale them (uses FFmpeg).

I also host Photoprism, which will be generating thumbnails and indexing photos.

In addition to this, I also host a bunch of other stuff, I think the key ones are Nextcloud AIO and PaperlessNGX (which does OCR) as these would be more demanding. Then another 10 or so services that aren't too demanding and have low usage so are unlikely to be an issue outside of making sure I have enough RAM.

I use it as a backup server as well. It receives borg backups from other devices and backs up itself to a backup HDD, and does cloud backups, but has a fast LAN connection and decent internet speed (300Mbps) and this is scheduled overnight so probably doesn't affect anything.

I also use it for playing games with the kids! Normally Stardew Valley but sometimes more demanding games.

Many of the hosted services have family members also using them. I want to make sure I can do things like the Photoprism indexing and Zusam video downscaling while not affecting the experience using Jellyfin or other services. It's all good if this happens by limiting cores for transcoding. It would be nice to be able to use it for more demanding gaming as well, but I understand if it's a bit hard to keep everything going nicely with a demanding game running that doesn't limit its multithreading.

Possibly related for compatibility purposes:

• all my hard drives are 3.5" HDD or 2.5" SSD SATA connections. I have 2 SSDs and 2 HDDs.
• I also have a Radeon rx5700xt graphics card. Would be nice to be able to keep using this.
• I'm currently running a full desktop environment (Linux Mint - Cinnamon) on it, for the purposes of playing the games. So needs to work well with Linux and also play nicely with wireless Xbone controllers.
• Case is Mid sized. Specifically this one.

And the current CPU is an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, in case you want to tell me what I have is fine and I don't need an upgrade 🥲

What are some good options for an upgrade?

Edit: Thanks for the suggestions. Lots of people showing me how I wasn't taking full advantage of the hardware I had, so I ended up going back to trouble shooting and in the end it was the motherboard that was the issue. I replaced that and it's now up and running again! Now to go back to all the info about hardware transcoding in Jellyfin that people have linked for me. Thanks for everything!

I decided to clean out my CPU fan as it was clogged, when I assembled everything again it won't turn on 🙁

It's an old desktop PC. There are no lights glowing on the motherboard at all, though there is none specifically labelled "power". Just CPU, RAM, BOOT. None of these light up, not even a flash when it starts.

I have reseated the RAM, CPU, power cables. Removed the GPU to check.

The cord leading in to the PSU works but I don't have a way to test the PSU itself or the out cables, but I have reseated them at each end.

This PC was working fine before. But with no lights on the motherboard I suspect either the mobo or PSU?

Mobo is asrock x570 PSU is silverstone 650w strider gold S series

Any help appreciated!

Edit: I made a new post asking for hardware recommendations.

Edit 2: I managed to get a light on the motherboard, going to buy some more thermal paste and keep tinkering to see if I can get it started!

Edit 3: I never got that light to go again. In the end the comments on the other post convinced me that I had all that I needed for what I wanted (no upgrade needed), so I changed tack to seeing how to fix it. I had suspicions about the power connection still, so I bought a cheap PSU and tested it, no change. Then I bought a new motherboard (also a pretty cheap one, the cheapest that had what I needed and was also in a local store) and in the end that was the issue. Everything is up and running again now! Thanks for all the help everyone, you can now settle your bets.

Over time I've been on the lookout for social media for family to use. I haven't really found anything suitable, key thing is that posting photos and videos needs to be user friendly. For example, Friendica all but requiring you to upload your video to YouTube and post the embedded video is just not gonna fly.

I've seen Zusam in the past, which looks like it could become something but I don't think it's ready for me to try to get extended family into. (It's worth mentioning here that certain extended family have shown interest in using something like this)

Recently I've had a look around at some Enterprise social solutions, and have had a play with HumHub. It has a much more familiar look, things are separated into spaces that are similar to Facebook groups, and while media uploads aren't perfect I think they will work well enough.

HumHub has modules, many of which cost a decent amount of money, because they target the enterprise market. However, the community version is open source and the base features and free modules seem to work well.

Does anyone have experience using it? Any warnings I should know about? Any similar software that does a better job?

I have kids ages 4-7 and they quite like watching a little snippet of something while they brush their teeth.

One thing they have been into recently is these stop motion videos on youtube on a channel called Peapea. However, it's obvious that M&Ms and Coke give them lots of money because it's all you see in many of the videos. But these are good videos, as the kids like them and while the full youtube videos are 30 mins long, within this there are lots of shorts only a few minutes long each. Perfect for bushing teeth. Also a bonus is those videos don't rely on sound, so they can watch and understand it without telling each other to brush queiter.

Does anyone have suggestions for anything similar that isn't plastered with Cocacola and is suitable for the 4-7 age range?

I'm looking at getting a gateway device to replace the ISP router that sits between the internet connection and the mesh WiFi.

I am running pi-hole on a (very old) raspberry pi, but I know some gateways get quite fancy so I'm wondering if it's possible to have pi-hole on the gateway itself, to run as DNS and DHCP servers?

Other things I'm looking for in a gateway are VPN as a client (preferably Wireguard) and PoE ports for cameras.

If it's possible to host something like pi-hole directly on the gateway then hardware recommendations are appreciated!

A suspected boat burglar has been arrested after jumping into the tide and leading police on a slow-motion chase in the Bay of Islands.

He refused to come ashore, instead rowing towards the ferry ramp then abandoning his dinghy and swimming towards Russell.

Officers, including a police dog, followed him in an inflatable boat.

The police spokesperson said the man had missed his calling: "He should have been a marathon swimmer."

Home loan borrowers can expect rates to fall throughout the rest of this year and next, commentators say.

The Reserve Bank cut the official cash rate by 25bps to 5.25 percent on Wednesday.

While it was a move that was forecast by several economists, it was a u-turn from the bank's position in May. Infometrics chief executive Brad Olsen described it as a "WTH moment" and "the biggest flip-flop ever".

Last weeks thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

New Zealand athletes have bagged more gold medals at Paris 2024 than at any other Olympic Games in history.

The 10 golds claimed across the two weeks of competition have smashed the previous record of eight won at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

The Kiwis also bagged seven silver and three bronze medals to take the total number to 20 and finish 11th on the medal table, between Germany and Canada.

That is the same number of medals won at Tokyo 2020, which was previously New Zealand's most successful Olympics in terms of numbers. Athletes took seven golds, six silvers and seven bronzes at that competition.