Have you uh… actually been to China?

Yes. Almost a dozen times.

Or talked to anyone from China (in real life)?

Yes.

Without fail, anyone with the means is actively trying to leave.

Have you thought about why? Ask them to describe the US. They’ve been told an astonishing amount of propaganda about the US that is all incredibly untrue. I’m telling you. Actually talk to these people that you’re “in contact” with about how they view the US. They believe that every US Citizen is a millionaire. They think we have good healthcare. They think we all live in great houses. They think we all work a few hours a week and get paid a lot for it… It’s never ending. So I mean, yeah. If you get told there are places like that in the world of course you would want to leave your home country.

Email is like, the worst possible option. Check out Apprise. Super easy to setup Telegram or Discord notifications via webhooks. Takes like a minute.

I’ve come to notice that the rest of the world is already beginning to leave us behind. The realization came with the TikTok ban. Soon as I heard that TikTok could be banned, I started looking for alternatives because I was pretty sure it was going to happen. I stumbled upon XHS by accident and about a month before everyone else. I was absolutely fucking blown away by China. It’s unlike we’ve been told in almost all respects…

I really came to realize that other countries are leaving us in their dust and it’s only a matter of time before we’re not the Apex predator anymore, and frankly I can hardly blame them.

The FBI defines terrorism as the unlawful use of force and violence against people or property to intimidate or coerce a government or civilian population.

Simply using force and violence against people to intimidate with no other purpose or objective is the legal definition of terrorism…

They’re terrorists…

They murder, cheat, steal, traffick, kidnap, extort, and do whatever else they have to do to “just make money.”

I quite literally don’t have the mental fortitude to fight with your incompetence. It absolutely amazes me that we live in a day and a time when people like you don’t understand what renaming something is. It makes me want to fucking cry–how we could have fallen so far as a civilization…

See my analogy about the school principal. I pray you’re smart enough to connect the dots, but I’m not holding out hope.

I can’t find reference to this, and Google’s saying that it’s their choice here:

Of course it’s their choice. In the same way that it’s your choice whether or not to pay taxes. That doesn’t mean there’s no consequences if you don’t.

A country can specify use of an official name internally.

Which is not renaming. That’s not what that word means.

But a leader could tell the government that he runs to use it.

Yes, this is exactly what I’ve said. Trump spent tens of millions telling his own Government to change the designation of a location that we don’t own, and people suck his dick like he did something amazing. He quite literally wasted everyone’s time and money for nothing.

Even in the US, private organizations are not legally-required to call it “Gulf of America”.

This is incorrect. Google, a private organization is legally required to call it the Gulf of America because they’re a defense contractor.

It’s not that unusual for names to differ across countries.

This isn’t a difference in language. It’s been called the Gulf of Mexico globally since 1550. So for 475 years every single country in the world has called it by its proper name, and now, for no reason whatsoever, we call it something different. The sheer ignorance and stupidity of it is positively baffling–most of all because people pretend like it’s not a big deal.

This is why I hate you people. Like truly hate you. Because you’re so incredibly fucking stupid. Trump didn’t even rename the damn thing. Not only does he not have that power, but it’s not an asset owned by the US. But even if we did own it, he still couldn’t do it. What he did was change US official policy to reflect that the Gulf of Mexico should now federally be referred to as the Gulf of America.

You don’t even understand what it is that he did. It’s tantamount to getting a phone call by your kids Principal saying “hey, I renamed your kid to Samantha” and you being like “well, that’s not legal… why are you so goddamn stupid?” and people being like “LOL THE PRINCIPAL ALREADY RENAMED HER, YOU CAN’T ARGUE WITH REALITY! TEEE HEE!” when in “reality” the only thing the Principal did was update your kids name in the schools computer software because it’s not possible for someone to rename shit that they don’t own…

That’s not even a statement I can respond to

Yeah. I figured you couldn’t.

You just showed proof that Trump provided lower gas prices than other presidents.

I even specifically took the time to tell you how to read the chart, and it’s blatantly obvious that you not only didn’t read me telling you that higher numbers are better for the ratios, but you don’t understand it, either.

Intelligence is trying to catch you, but you’re just too damn fast, aren’t you?

Reminds me of the ‘gulf of America.’ No, it’s not an egomaniac move. Changing the water nationality changes the tax rate on oil aka gas prices. Trump has historically maintained favor with gas prices.

You completely lost me.

1. Trump cannot rename the Gulf of Mexico. It’s not land that the US owns. It’s international waters.
2. The “nationality” didn’t change. So your little tirade about taxes is not only supreme bullshit, but it’s not even in the same universe as correct.
3. Trump has historically had higher gas prices than almost any other President.

The proof is in the pudding;

The price of gasoline means absolute dick at the end of the day. The ratio of median household income to the price of gasoline is what’s important. The closer to 0 = more expensive. These numbers are skewed by 1 year and stop in 2024, unfortunately. So that means that COVID is showing during 2021 of Biden’s Presidency. But if you take Biden out to account for COVID you’ll see that the only other President, during which the price of fuel was extremely expensive, was Bush 2 and that’s because we went to War in Iraq which is reflected in Obama’s term…

There’s absolutely zero validity to your statement whatsoever.

Now to guess which ones will still be maintained in 5 years 😆

If you figure it out, lemme know. lol

Here ya go: https://selfh.st/apps/

Will cover about 90% of your bases there. You can even look up proprietary software and it will show you self-hostable alternatives.

My goto would be wireguard, is that still a good option?

Yes.

Private cloud/File server

https://selfh.st/apps/?tag=File+Sharing

Is a local video streaming app actually useful for a rare watcher of movies etc, or can they be streamed directly from the file server?

You can do it any number of ways. I have it setup a pretty cool way, I think. I leave my PC on all the time. I also have a home NAS with all my media files on it. I host Jellyfin server on my PC and in the Jellyfin settings link to the network location of the files (\\nas\media\tv, etc). Works great, especially for transcoding because I run the server on my Windows PC, it gets access to my GPU for transcoding. Really great setup I like to think. Only drawback being you have to leave your PC on all the time, which doesn’t bother me.

Is Docker the way to go for everything? or just install on the machine directly?

There are alternatives to docker, like LXC but they’re not as widely used as Docker. So unfortunately…

Another option for you could be Hyper-V if you don’t mind using your PC to run containers. I like it better than running docker containers.

That’s not how that works. Kroger is reasonably responsible now for ensuring that their suppliers aren’t run by cartels. If they don’t do due diligence, they can get into legal trouble now.

Quite literally the only thing Trump has ever done that I’m okay with.

Matching 500 episodes (e.g. Looney Tunes and Disney shorts) manually isnt fun.

With tools like TinyMediaManager, why in the absolute fuck would you do it manually?

At this point, it sounds like you’re just bad at media management more than anything. 1080p h265 video is at most between 1.5-2GB per video. That means with even a modest network connection speed (500Mbps lets say) you can realistically download 5TB of data over 24 hours… You can redownload your entire media library in less than 4-5 days if you wanted to.

So why spend ~$700 on 2 20TB drives, one to be used only as redundancy, when you can simply redownload everything you previously had (if you wanted to) for free? It’ll just take a little bit of time.

Complete waste of money.

It becomes a whole different thing when you yourself are a creator of any kind.

Clearly this isn’t the type of media I was referencing…

PITA = pain in the ass.

I never said it was hard. Just a real pain in the ass. Like iptables vs UFW. They’re the same thing, but one is easy and a pain in the ass and the other is just easy… So I opt to make my life easier. lol

Data hoarding random bullshit will never make sense to me. You’re literally paying to keep media you didn’t pay for because you need the 4k version of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 even though it was a shit movie…

Grab the YIFY, if it’s good, then get the 2160p version… No reason to datahoard like that. It’s frankly just stupid considering you’re paying to store this media.

It’s not important data. Why would I spend another $200+ for another 20TB drive to have redundancy for 1 and 0 I don’t care about…

I continuous backup important files/configurations to my NAS. That’s about it.

IMO people who redundant/backup their media are insane… It’s such an incredible waste of space. Having a robust media library is nice, but there’s no reason you can’t just start over if you have data corruption or something. I have TB and TB of media that I can redownload in a weekend if something happens (if I even want). No reason to waste backup space, IMO.

Traefik is a PITA.

Caddy all the way. If you build it with Docker support (or grab the prebuilt), you can use docker container names to reverse proxy using names instead of any IP addresses or ports. It’s nice because if the IP updates, so does caddy. All automatically.

Here’s what my caddyfile looks like;

{
        acme_dns cloudflare {key}
}

domain.dev {
        encode zstd gzip
        root * /var/www/html/domain.dev/
        php_fastcgi unix//run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock
        tls {
                dns cloudflare {key}
        }
}
*.domain.dev {
        encode zstd gzip
        tls {
                dns cloudflare {key}
        }
        @docker host docker.domain.dev
        handle @docker {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy {portainer}
        }
        @test host test.domain.dev
        handle @test {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:10000
        }
        @images host i.domain.dev
        handle @images {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:9002
        }
        @proxy host proxy.domain.dev
        handle @proxy {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy proxy
        }
        @portal host portal.domain.dev
        handle @portal {
                encode zstd gzip
                reverse_proxy portal
        }
        @ping host ping.domain.dev
        handle @ping {
                encode zstd gzip
                respond "pong!"
        }
}

DNS hosted by cloudflare but because caddy handles ACME certs, all the subdomains automatically get SSL.

I rawdog storage. I RAID0 and forget. huehue.