There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box.
This morning I made PhotoPrism self-booting. I am not certain that this is the write term so I will specify what I mean. PhotoPrism, when run via docker boots, when we tell it to boot, like any other app on our laptop. This morning, after a little time spent with AI I found the solution.
I used ChatGPT for this help but this is to give you an idea of how to enable docker containers to boot automatically rather than manually.
While walking and listening to podcasts I kept hearing about NixOS and how good it is for instantiating environments over and over again. What I didn’t hear about, so much, is that there is a steep learning curve, to get started with.
Installing the OS is easy. Download NixOS, flash it to a USB stick, reboot a computer onto the OS on that USB stick and begin installation of the OS.
The Raspberry Pi 5 is twice as powerful as previous Pis according to various sources. For the last 24 hours I have been using a Pi 5 running Ubuntu and the experience has been good. Despite being a small computer it feels as comfortable as some of the computers I have been using.
The Pi 5 feels comfortable I have loaded several webpages at once, in various tabs, tried importing images via photoprism, whilst writing this blog post and running VS Code.
Since getting the Raspberry Pi devices my shift has moved from following tutorial after tutorial to experimenting with setting up a number of server projects fron Home Assistant to Nextcloud to Photoprism and Immich to name a few. In the process I have instantiated and then pulled down plenty of instances before finally deciding to keep certain instances up and running for longer, to see whether I can use them. I also experimented with CUPS and set up a printer/scanner for remote use.
Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.
I have spent more than five minutes experimenting with Nextcloud through several iterations and I have finally set things up as I want them.
For 40 CHF you can buy a Tapo or Xiaomi webcam and it is almost ready to be used as a webcam. You take it out of the box, plug it in, add an SD card, download the app, pair it with the phone and let the phone connect it to wifi and then it detects motion, can take video, photos and more, with ease. In such an environment it’s easy to forget about what we called “Plug and pray” back in the day.
When walking and listening to the 2.5 Admins I heard about the concept of going from treating servers as pets to treating them as cattle. They discussed the habit of giving servers functional names, rather than emotional ones. The examples were similar to DR-1 for for Disaster Recovery one, prod 1 for production one and related names.
Servers as Cattle, Not Pets They spoke about the legacy habit of building a server up over a period of years to the modern habit of spinning up instances and containers that can easily be replicated within minutes, independent of hardware.
Yesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting patiently in the car. I wore my “recycled” shoes instead. I eventually regretted this because the ground that was frosty, also had deep puddles of water and I had to walk through them.
For up to three months I was running my own instance via Masto.host and the experience was good. Setting up an instance is easy. Within a few minutes you can set up your own instance, post and perform administrative tasks such as accept trending hashtags and more.
No DevOps and No Code Required Masto.host is great for non-technical people because it doesn’t require any specialist knowledge. You create a Masto.host account, and then you choose the cheapest server option.