BigVault

I feel sorry for the people that are exposed to this shit by Google, especially those that are less tech savvy that aren’t blocking ads.
Educate as many people/loved ones as you can folks about this to protect them and to fuck Google.

Oh wow, how out of the loop am I. 😆

Hopefully it’s supported for years to come.

One of my earliest vr experiences was with the blue Acer mixed reality headsets and it did fine at the time. Cost far less than the mainstream headsets from HTC and Oculus too.

Haven’t even seen any new WMR headsets for years and thought it was already dead.

I don’t care how big or small it is, as long as it remains real.

I believe I’ve seen more organic conversation in the fediverse than I have on any other platform.

It’s either bots, ads or ad bots everywhere else.

Being tiny makes it less appealing to the megacorp cunts that would want to ruin it.

My HTPC is on windows 11, set to auto log-in and launch steam big picture. Disabled as much of the Microsoft BS as I can, including the nags to use Onedrive or sub to Office 365 every major update.

Using Unified Remote to control things with my phone and also Parsec/Moonlight for game streaming to other devices.

My media is served from my Unraid server to my devices both locally and remotely.

All working well so far. 👍

That’s this weekends project, moving to Jellyfin with all the discover together fuckery they’re pulling. Fuck Plex.

Currently using a Roku Streambar for all of our streaming needs but if they pull this crap, everything we consume will be downloaded, served on my Plex server and streamed using the gaming PC I have under our TV.

Getting beyond sick of these companies using every measure and device they can to shit ads into our eyes.

My Safari extension of choice for iOS YouTube ad blocking is vinegar.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303229

Combined with Banish extension to stop the annoying “open in our app” nonsense when browsing the web.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/banish-block-open-in-app/id1632848430

No, I don’t want privacy exploiting app syphoning my personal data when the website will do.

I’ve pinned the YouTube website to my Home Screen in Safari and combined with those extensions I have a lovely experience with them.

I’m going to fully assess what actual windows software I rely on any more and migrate all of my systems to a Linux based os this weekend I think.

The amount of games that I play that work on my Steam deck already confirms that I’ll be fine there.

I probably spin up a windows vm that I could remote into from my homelab if I’ve missed anything I do need to run.

I ended up recovering some of my music using Google takeout which in turn absolutely wrecked most of the tags on my songs.

I loved Google play music as a locker for my owned music and a a storefront to buy what I wanted. YouTube Music made me abandon it completely and move my owned music onto my plex server.

Why does Google have to ruin everything? Still bitter about Google Reader closing back in the day. That was the beginning of the end of me having confidence in their services and moving to self hosting as much as I can.

I much prefer written guides for anything that interests me over YouTube videos that are unnecessarily long. Plus the false attempts to get engagement (sometimes by making statements that are maliciously stupid) to appease the algorithm like:

What are your preferred ways to consume content? I prefer carrier pigeon, it’s easily the best. Let me know in the comments below if you have a preferred way, and don’t forget to like and subscribe.

Really annoying, like our sponsor….

Keep a log of anything you do successfully find that you may need later.

I’ve started bookmarking anything I do find genuinely useful as there’s a chance that the a similar search would yield different results that wouldn’t help at all.

I’ve also installed archivebox on one of my home lab pcs to grab a snapshot of any sites and pages that I want to keep (you never know if you’ll go back and it’s gone).

Retaining good information for yourself is just as important on the web now given all the bot spam and affiliate laden shit out there that Google and Bing seem to be promoting these days.

I liked my N-Gage and it’s good to see that sidetalkin’ is still up.

Hospital emergency rooms across the UK are likely to be declaring a major incident to deal with the rash of injuries caused by the force of facepalming and banging heads against desks throughout the tech sector.

The NHS is struggling enough as it is.

We have English (United Kingdom) as a localised install.

Not any more bloated then English (US) but if this English (World) install is even cleaner as Andi says, I’ll start using that instead for fresh installs.

Nice Tip.

Working really great for me. I originally just bought it to run Pihole on a dedicated machine and have a secondary pihole instance on my Unraid server in case either of them went down but leaving it sitting there with just PiVPN and Pihole duties seemed wasteful.

I’m getting even more out of it running some of the lighter containers on it with plenty of spare room to do more.

I’ve logged/uploaded my upgrade process here just so you can get some ideas on what I did.
https://imgur.com/a/ExcLdtt

It is bulkier than a raspberry pi, being around the size of a router but the low cost and being able to utilise hardware that I had sitting doing nothing made me go this route rather than just getting a pi.

If you want something small and cheap, it might be worth getting a used thin client PC.

I got a cheap £20 Igel thin client from eBay as raspberry pi’s were still far too expensive, plus I already had a spare 4GB ddr3 sodimm to drop into it and a 120gb wd green ssd that I’d stripped from its case and fitted internally into the thin client.

After upgrading it one ended up with a 1.2ghz AMD GX-412 cpu, 4gb DDR3, 120gb sata ssd and an external usb 3 1tb hard drive i also had laying around.

As a component of my homelab, it’s running Debian 12, docker with a few containers (pigallery 2, Libreddit, portainer, searXNG), it’s my backup Emby server and my main Pihole and PiVPN client.

Completely silent, sips power and still has capacity spare to run more containers and other projects that catch my interest.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Igel/ud/ud3/M340C/

I’ve got a Libreddit docker instance running on my home server and together with the libredirect browser extension, if I click on a Reddit link through a search or news article with a link to Reddit, my browser automatically goes to my Libreddit instance with the content on full display.

Now, whilst on my Libreddit instance the other day after being redirected from a news article I took a peek at r/all and the whole feed was pure shit, nothing like I’d seen before on Reddit.

For some reason, it was full of doordash posts, rateme style posts taking advantage of thirsty usersand shitty TikTok reposts.

They may well have won, but at the moment there is a glut of absolute shit on the front page of the platform. I’d guess quality content has taken a hit.

Gorgeous build. Enjoy that hotbox!