If Gentoo can be both Chad and Schizo, Slack should definitely be in the Chad category too.

I mean, it’s Torvalds’ distro of choice iirc, which should count for something.

Yeah, good point. The “app setup” is built into android and iOS as far as I can tell (generating matter credentials, etc.). Better than 3rd party IMHO but not ideal, and a nonstarter for a lot of folks. Hopefully HA will come out with their own onboarding process at some point.

Fair enough; I have a dedicated SSID which is VLAN’d off from the rest of my network with no Internet access. Only my HA server can talk to those devices.

+1 for ThirdReality. They’re a little pricey but I’ve generally had good luck with them.

I’ve also had pretty good luck with cheap Matter-over-wifi bulbs. Pairing them can be a little finicky and needs to go through an Android or iOS process, but after pairing you can block Internet access for them and they work great local-only.

There’s a bug in some wifi matter bulbs where they crash, especially when going from off to a desired brightness/color state (as in, “light on” works but “light to 50%, 3000K” will crash the bulb).

I don’t think you understand what local control of smart devices means…

Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat would ask for various airplane specs (“what is the service ceiling of an F-4E?,” “what is the ferry range of a MiG-15?”), and you had to flip through a booklet to find the answer.

You could copy the book, but it was fairly long so I guess the friction kept you in check.

VNC? You have your choice of servers, and clients are ubiquitous.

A big gotcha is that you need to be careful with encryption/security, as in classic UNIX style VNC does one thing (remote desktops). It’s easy to forward over ssh though.

You can also use VNC to share, which is not what you want; this depends on the type of server/settings. But you can definitely create a new virtual X11 session and access it remotely.

Yeah, one of the issues I was having with running VPN on router is that you need a somewhat beefy router if you want to use your full bandwidth—my router maxes out at about 90Mbps with WireGuard, even though it can NAT around 1Gbps (which is our service).

I implemented two workarounds, one was to use my access point as a VPN router since it had a beefier CPU, and the other was to just use an ARM SBC with Linux to handle that task. (I ended up with the latter, as the former ended up maxing out at around 400Mbps, and introduced some additional headaches.)

I also have an SSID that doesn’t get VPN’d, though my DNS is always VPN’d.

As for accessing JellyFin, etc., I think we have somewhat different setups. My self hosted services are by default accessible without a VPN (SSID is on a VLAN with e.g. 192.168.0.0/24, servers are on 192.168.1.0/24, router routes between them). For the blanket VPN’d SSID I have a routing rule that routes over the main, not VPN, table, so local services can be accessed.

So: local traffic has a rule to route without VPN, reddit routes with a specific VPN, and general traffic routes with a different VPN.

There are lots of VLANs involved in my setup, and I’m sure it’s overly complicated and has gaping security issues, but it’s just a home network and it’s kinda fun :(

I have this set up on my router. My wifi is blanket tunneled through a VPN. For annoying sites that restrict access like reddit, my router routes through a specific VPN server that doesn’t (yet) get blocked (I don’t post/comment/browse, but occasionally find a post that answers a question). That way it works on my whole home network, regardless of device.

Same could be done for YouTube presumably, but maybe a little more complicated (reddit seems to work with a single /32 address).

Plus, it’s fun to set up—MikroTik router, Mullvad, and an ARM SBC doing the VPN duties for me, but myriad ways to get it working for other configurations.

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But once you got that XFree86 config dialed in, life was awesome.

(Ok looks like Xorg has been around for 21 years, so maybe you were running it instead.)

Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.

My .zshrc is basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I have apt aliased to brew so I can feel more at home.

Stock terminal works fine—I use xterm on Linux, so I’m used to relying on tmux for nice features anyway.

Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have xscreensaver installed!)

Slack got me through college on an ancient (even at the time) ThinkPad 600e. Good times!

I had a suite of scripts to log in to the university Linux cluster, download the kernel source and out-of-tree modules (required for the PCMCIA WiFi adapter), compile it, and rsync it back to my laptop.

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

I’m a ~/tmp man myself.

Maybe not a service in the typical sense, but setting up your router+server to route your home network traffic through a VPN is a fun project.

My router (MikroTik) supports WireGuard, so I can use it with Mullvad for the whole house—but wg is demanding and it’s a slow router, so while it can NAT at ~1Gbps, it can’t do WireGuard at more than ~90Mbps. So, I set up WireGuard/Mullvad on a little SBC with a fast processor, and have my router use that instead. Using policy based routing and/or mangling, I can have different VLANs/subnets/individual hosts selectively routed through the VPN.

It’s a fun exercise, not sure I implemented it in a smart way, but it works :)

I assume you’re referring to the cuckpdate chair.

Whenever I have a Linux box without Internet I just USB tether an Android phone—if the phone is on WiFi then it uses that (not cell), so it’s basically just a WiFi adapter that’s almost universally supported. (I think it NATs, so in some circumstances won’t work, but good enough for most emergency use cases.)