I am forced to use WhatsApp for work. I would prefer to not have the WhatsApp app on my personal android phone. Is there any workarounds or alternative apps? Switching to a different chat network is not an option unfortunately.

So, according to my memory, I asked this question on Tildes "not that long ago."

Then I checked.

Chat, it was a LONG time ago. Excuse me while I crumble into dust.

Anyway, given that the Linux landscape looks very different than it did not that long ago in 2018, I figure we're due for another topic like this:

• Which Linux distro do you use, and, most importantly, why do you prefer it?

I don’t know if anyone is interest in mesh networks like MeshCore. I have been dabbling in it, and it’s an interesting concept of distributed LoRa radios making a community network.
There has been some recent drama with MeshCore where in a nutshell there has been a disagreement over control of the project and probably ultimately money.

If anyone else uses MeshCore (or meshtastic), what has your experience of it been? What are your thoughts about the future of the project with the drama? I don’t think it will be a big deal, I suspect it will blow over without a large fracture but it’s very much a guess rather than considered view.

I figure the title is good enough, but, I just want to upload/make a spreadsheet in an .ods format so others can view it. Not edit it, not have to sign in to view, but still has sorting options or whatnot. And in the .ods format.

I'm seeing a few options online, but it seems more that they offer viewing but not sorting (which is a huge aspect of spreadsheets), or no importing, or doesn't support .ods.

So I can keep searching and I'm sure something is out there, but does anyone already use a site for these requests?

I wanted some help with a homelab server I am in the beginning stages of designing. I am looking for a flexible and scalable media and cloud system for home use, and I thought this community would be a good place to source feedback and recommendations before taking any real next steps! I really want to check that I am approaching the architecture correctly and not making any bad assumptions. I am open to all feedback, so please let me know what you think!
I already run a simple home server and I have typical homelab FOSS apps, such as jellyfin, navidrome and audiobookshelf, but I am also interested in migrating away from cloud storage using nextcloud, immich, etc. In an ideal world, this setup would also allow me to leave windows on my main machine and use a windows vm for business related work that can’t be done on Linux. I will likely be the one primarily using the services, however I could expect up to 10 - 20 users eventually.

High level setup is with two machines:

• Proxmox Server
• TrueNAS Scale server
  • JBOD with either 90 bay or 45 bay storage
• 10G switch

This might be a stupid setup right off the bat, which is why I wanted to discuss it with you all! I have read a ton about using TrueNAS as a WM within Proxmox, but I just like the idea of different machines handling different tasks. The idea here would be to set up the TrueNAS server so it can be optimized for managing the storage pool to allow for easy growth. While the Proxmox server can handle all the VMs and connecting users, with higher IO, etc.

TrueNAS System Specs:

• AMD ryzen CPU and motherboard
• 64 or 128GB ram
• Mirror 500GB M.2 NVMe OS Drives
• GPU if necessary, but hopefully not needed
• Dual 10gb pcie card if the motherboard doesnt already come with them
• An hba for the JBOD something like the LSI SAS 9305-16e
• SLOG and L2ARC as necessary?

JBOD enclosure

• While I am interested in a 90-bay enclosure, I would only realistically be starting with two vdevs which is why I think a 45 bay enclosure wouldn’t be an issue.
• Im tentatively planning for an 11 wide Raidz2 vdev configuration. This would hopefully scale to 8 vdevs with 2 hot spares or 4 vdevs with 1 hot spare.
• All drives would be HDDs

Proxmox Server Specs:

I am less familiar with the specs I will need for a good Proxmox server, but here is what I am thinking.

• AMD epyc and motherboard if I can get my hands on a less expensive one. Otherwise I was thinking a higher end AMD ryzen cpu
• 128 or 256GB ram
• Mirror 500GB M.2 NVMe OS Drives
• Somewhere between 2 and 8 TBs of SSD storage. Depending on the number of drives, I think this would be a single drive, mirror or raidz1.
  • This storage will be used for all the vm configuration and storage, except for something like Nextcloud where the main storage will go onto the TrueNAS mount.
  • I would also use this for temporal storage such as downloading a file before transferring it to the TrueNAS mount.
• A dedicated GPU primarily for transcoding media streams, but also for testing and experimenting with different AI models.
• Dual 10gb pcie card

Questions:

• I know Proxmox can do zfs right out of the box so I know I don’t need the TrueNAS server, but splitting it this way just seems more flexible. Is this a realistic setup or would it just be better to let Proxmox do everything?
  • Does anyone have experience creating NFS shares in TrueNAS for mounting in Proxmox? I would be interested in thoughts on performance, and stability among any other insights.
• Do any of the system specs I listed seem out of line? Where and how do you think things should be scaled up or down?
• If I ever did expand to a second JBOD shelf, assuming the first one was full first, is it be possible to create new vdevs that spanned across the shelfs without losing data?
• Is SLOG and/or L2ARC necessary for this setup? What capacity and configuration would be best?
• What else have I missed?

Lastly, a quick blurb:

I have been building PCs for a while and undertook building a home server a few years ago. I loved the experience of learning Linux (the server is running Ubuntu), picking up docker, and learning more about the FOSS community has been a joy! Part of this project is to learn along the way but also have a setup that I can build towards over time! Proxmox, TrueNAS and zfs would all be new to me so I really see it as an opportunity to explore. I want a solid media and cloud server setup, while also giving myself the freedom to explore new operating systems and general hypervisor functionality.

I'm wanting to automate a thing on my android phone.

I would like to activate and deactivate alarms based on calendar events (by keywords in their name or description).

I need you to do me a favor: please keep an open mind and reserve judgement until after you've thoroughly digested the ideas I'm presenting here. These are not my ideas, and I have no connection to this project. I hope to do them justice in representing them accurately and as clearly as I understand it all.

Please don't be dismissive. Please don't jump to conclusions. I would not be posting about this if I did not believe it has tremendous potential to reshape the digital economy, and therefore everything that governs how civilization progresses in the next century. Dramatic, much? Yes, but I hope I have your attention.

I'm not posting this as a plain link, because the website looks incredibly sus. Just trust me for a few minutes. Links are at the end.

(No generative AI was used to write this post.)

What is PrizeForge?

PrizeForge is a financial service that can be best thought of as "Representative Crowdfunding" (my term, not theirs). Like direct crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter), it lets people pool their money to support expensive projects that would otherwise be impossible to fund. Similar to Patreon, it can also be an effective tip jar for much smaller things that would otherwise go unrewarded.

The innovation is two-fold: first, contributors never move alone. As a contributor, you set a ceiling on your weekly payment. This is the "enrollment" amount. However, the actual amount of money disbursed each weekly cycle is the amount that is successfully "matched" with other contributors. In the simplest example, if I wanted to enroll for Tildes at $20/week, and one other user enrolled at $5/week, the disbursement would be the sum of the matched funds: $5 + $5. In this way, nobody ever pays an unfair proportion of the total, and small donations become an integral part of funding allocation. Additionally, like how philanthrophists often match charitable donations to meet a fundraising objective, matching provides a powerful incentive for individuals to contribute by making individual contributions feel more significant, since any money you part with can be doubled by another contributor. The more you put in, the more others will too. (PrizeForge calls this algorithm "Elastic Fund Matching". The full algorithm gets considerably more complex, but they have a neat visualization on their site and videos.)

Second, unlike existing crowdfunding and patronage systems, creators and companies do not receive fund disbursements directly. Rather, representatives ("Delegates") send the money to the people and organizations that should receive funds to deliver value to the stream's contributors.

"Won't delegates just siphon funds to themselves?" you ask. Well, yes, that will 100% happen at some point. Corruption is a human problem that can't be solved with technology alone. PrizeForge aims to provide mechanisms to allow the community to be very dynamic, so contributors can easily switch to a new representative—for any reason. Additionally, tools for transparency in how the money moves would go a long way in keeping delegates accountable.

In the context of open-source software, delegates should be experienced power users who are well equipped to evaluate features and bugfixes, and then can award the prizes to developers according to their best judgement.

The use of a representative has many advantages over direct crowdfunding. Someone highly invested in a software product has valuable experience and would be more effective at setting priorities for features and bugfixes. An experienced and trusted delegate would save developers time having to parse the requests (...demands?) of individual users who may not be able to articulate what they really want. Also, if a developer or company stops doing what people want (providing value to the people who care), then funds can flow to competing alternatives in a very granular and dynamic way, as the delegates shift funding and/or new delegates arise.

If we could pick a delegate here for Tildes, would anybody really object to @cfabbro?

These trusted delegates already exist, everywhere! We just haven't been able to cooperate in the right ways to delegate our individual power, so they can truly move the needle on funding the projects we care about. PrizeForge is, I believe, the first truly sustainable funding model for community-owned and directed open-source.

Addendum

Watch this video first! Before you get scared away by the terrible scammy-looking website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO46oEdlkY8

The FAQ: https://prizeforge.com/faq

The company's github page: https://github.com/positron-solutions

Looks like just two people, with Psionikus doing all the promotion and running accounts. The company is incorporated in South Korea. They've got a bunch of emacs tooling, and I believe the PrizeForge concept originated out of a desire to improve the funding/development process of emacs, then the lem editor. They also apparently have a bit of beef with the FSF due to emacs politcs. Check out the last FAQ for a fun easter egg.

The sub-reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrizeForge/

The Hacker News comment that took me down the rabbithole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036360

Bonus thoughts:

• What's really crazy is that this is not a crypto or blockchain project. You can do a simplified version of the elastic fund matching with just money, pen & paper.
• This financing scheme is basically an idealized utopian voluntary tax system. I can imagine a granular delegate system being extremely effective at making politics incredibly boring. Imagine electing a local representative only to have potholes fixed in your area, using only the funds earmarked for fixing potholes. It would be so much simpler to keep them accountable. Either the roads are crap or they aren't! Where's the money, bub?! Why've you got a fancy new lawnmower?! I want my $2 back!
• If this reaches critical mass, it ends surveillance capitalism and digital feudalism. I don't want to live in Black Mirror, and this seems like the way out of that future.
• I would really love it if we can establish a funding stream for Tildes. I know I can donate to Tildes directly, but it would be a great test run to help PrizeForge get operational and build credibility. I only need one other crazy person. Isn't the internet great? (My credit card has not been stolen btw)
• The password login is still in development, so you have to login via Google SSO. I absolutely hate using Google SSO but I get it from a developer perspective. Proper auth is hard and companies like Tailscale took the same path and still don't support password login. (My google hasn't been hacked either fwiw)

Hello Tildes!

There's an open-source app I would like to work on and contribute code to, but it uses a toolchain that I'm not terribly familiar with (Deno), and I'm not a huge fan of letting tools like this have full access to my system and files.

Do any of you use a system to containerize different development environments for software development? I could definitely use a standard Docker/Podman container to run the app, but I'm not aware of a good system where you can edit a program's source in an IDE, make changes, build the app, open a local port, and save your new code, all within a sandboxed environment.

If anyone uses a system like this or something related, I would love to hear about it and share ideas.