• 0 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • 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.





  • No chance.

    You concentrate on the TPM but ignore the CPU requirements…? If you have a CPU that is up to spec, you have a TPM - they’re built in the CPU. Most people just need to turn it on in the BIOS (or update their BIOS as motherboard manufacturers have turned on the TPM as “Windows 11 support”)

    The truth of it is, every “jump” OS, i.e. 95, XP, 7, 10 has run really poorly on >5 year old chips at the time of launching. And MS got panned at “how slow” is was. But it was also the norm to update your PC more often. Now speed increases have slowed and Moore’s Law has ended, it’s about security and performance hit of said security. The truth is, the kernel hardening and malware protection and encryption built into 11 to make it far less likely to get infected than 10 and 7 means it needs the hardware support to do it. Without it, it runs far slower or is less secure. Neither anyone wants.

    When 10 support ends in 2 years time, the lowest supported processor for 11 will be nearly 9 years old…








  • You misunderstood. The US is <10% of Samsung phone sales globally (I found retail sales online for their handset sales per country) . And they will know the stats of which of those phones ever used the magstripe feature. An educated guess of <1% of global users activating the mag stripe feature is a feature they can afford to cut, especially if it saves on cost.


  • Re. the Mag-Stripe. Bare in mind the US is <10% of the market for the Samsung phones. And then you’d need to break down of the Samsung phones sold in North America - how many of those were S-series vs. the others which don’t support the mag-stripe. Even if 50-50, that’s now <5% of phones which have mag-stripe support in a country that uses it. Then rough guess of 20% of users actually pay by phone? You’re now <1%. A small pale blue dot in the vast cosmic arena…

    SD cards - there’s also the point of user data security. Data stored on an SD card can’t be easily guarenteed safe by Knox. Yes, you can encrypt it, but remove that SD card and the card itself can’t protect the data from brute forcing encyption keys.