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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • To counter my own “easy to migrate” argument, DietPi includes a backup utility called ‘dietpi-backup’ (genius naming convention, I know!) which you can use to backup your whole system to another drive. And of course restore your whole setup on a clean install.

    Also very useful for rollbacks if needed. I have a 2.5in 5400rpm 1TB drive attached to my DietPi server which is just for backups - it backs up every night at 2am and it’s incremental too. I have 5 days of backups and it’s one command and a couple of ‘Enters’ to get it rolling back to an earlier config - really easy and useful when a recent kernel update broke my ethernet adapter (Debian’s fault - not DietPi!).


  • The biggest advantage for docker in the “home lab” environment is to be able to try out an app, but if you decide you don’t like it, removal is simply deleting the container and the data folder. That’s it. No trace left.

    Sadly you can’t say that for installed apps.

    But I agree, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Seems DietPi will be right up your street and look after things exactly how you want, simply 😁


  • Originally it was for the Pi, but can also be installed on x64 PC systems, either UEFI or BIOS, so basically runs on anything. It does run great on a Pi, it’s biggest advantage being that it logs to RAM, which massively saves on SD card wear. It’s also the only current distro which works reliably on the original Pi 1 nowadays (if you still have those hanging around!)

    And I get that everyone saying “Docker!” is a bit boring, but there is a reason for it - containerising everything does make it a lot easier to manage and migrate everything to another system or revert back a single component to a different version. And you just backup a config file and your data folder for each container and you can recreate your system so easily. If you install directly, you have to worry about databases, file paths, permissions… but as you said, there’s nothing wrong with just installing stuff. Especially if it’s only a few programs.

    I run 26 docker containers. Installing all those on a system would be a mess…





  • If the old tablet is Android, Fotoo is perfect. Yes it costs, but one off fee and worth it. Can pull from so many different sources.

    Personally, I still use Google Photos. Both my wife and I have us, the kids and pets all autotagged into an album for all the pictures taken on our phones and Fotoo randomly shows these on the Nexus 7 tablet I have taped into a wooden frame.




  • Have to disagree as I’ve tried pretty much all of them. The most popular “tiny10” and “tiny11” by NetDev (not mentioned above) is actually a bit of an arse with stuff broken. Same with the others. You shouldn’t need to skim through a Telegram group to figure out how you create a new user account… (Amolierated, I’m looking at you).

    However, the one where it all just works is Ghost Spectre Superlite (Windows 11 version, though I’m sure the 10 version is similar). It is proper clever with its app that allows you to add the features you need and install the updates you want, or not if you prefer. They released a tweak to get CoPilot working too which just worked. And all in a tiny image with neat tweaks plus all the bloat gone. And the only one where my laptop instantly resumes and works perfectly with Modern Sleep.

    Even has an extended WinPE boot environment with extra apps for hard drive partitioning, data recovery, etc. Worth a look.





  • Colourblind isn’t the complete absense of colour, e.g. everything looks black and white. With deuteranomaly, you are the actual textbook definition of colourblindness… There are different levels of it, but all can still perceive colour - it’s just whether the difference in colour of the spectrum is detected correctly.

    Deuteranomaly (/ie) is the reduction in reactivity of the red-colour receptors. That means your perception of orange/red/brown is less than those with normal vision.

    For those with normal vision, this is a great chart. But, if you’re colourblind, it’ll be more confusing for you, sorry!