I'm not sure what kind of money you want to spend? The M2 Hat is ~$14 USD and a 2242 NVME SSD can be had for ~$30-$40 USD since you don't care as much about performance.

The USB to SATA adapter is going to run ~$10 USD and the SATA SSD drives are going to start ~$20 USD are go up from there depending on size, performance, etc.

If size of storage is an issue, the SATA SSD is probably the better route. I believe the NVME would be better performance since it utilizes the bus on the Pi more fully.

I would guess that for the money, most M2 drives and SATA SSD drives are going to be similar lifespans

Which Raspberry Pi do you have? There are some very reasonably priced M2 hats out there that you can boot from on the Pi 5, including the Raspberry Pi branded one.

What I wish existed was a self-hosted version of OurGroceries.

If you want self hosted, I'd second all the Grocy comments. I don't use it because it isn't simple enough for my family, but I did like it.

I once heard a consultant refer to it as "The Fog" because it's like a cloud that you're inside of. 🤮

I'm honestly not sure. I'm doing the same kind of research myself for a new home I'm building right now and happened to stumble across this guy's youtube channel. He does a lot of great smart home stuff. I haven't actually purchased one of them myself yet.

It's a year old video, but it still is pretty relevant I think.

Local Control Video Doorbells - Reolink, UniFi, Amcrest, Hikvision, Dahua. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XCu6L0xn4Y&t=904s

If you'd rather read than watch the video, he has a nice companion blog. https://www.thesmarthomehookup.com/local-control-video-doorbells-reolink-unifi-amcrest-hikvision-dahua/

And it's really not as good at being a space heater as an actual space heater. 🤣

It works great with my self-hosted NextCloud!

I've told my wife and family that if something happens to me, they need to start migrating all their stuff off my self-hosted services to cloud services because its a matter of time before something fails and nobody's around who knows or cares to fix it.

I used to have this problem. I started pulling a version number (like 27) instead of "latest" so that I could just pull minor releases when I did updates, and then I manually step up the version in the docker-config file for major versions when I'm ready for them. (I don't like to pull a major release version until there's been 1 or 2 maintenance releases since my nextcloud is fairly critical for my family)

Depending on your budget and location, a whole house backup generator can be relatively inexpensive. My family lives in a very rural area in the central US, so we have a backup whole house generator that runs on propane. I chose propane because those motors seem to have less maintenance, plus we have propane for the grill, etc, already on site.

Supposedly 220V is a little more efficient to step down than 110V? I've read a lot of articles about data mining where they run the mining rigs off of 220V in the USA instead of 110V and they gain something like 5% efficiency. They're doing it with entire shipping containers full of PCs though. On my single PC, I'm not sure I can tell the difference at all. But I'm an Electrical Engineer by trade, so it makes me feel better that I'm more power efficient and have my panel balanced. I was running the 220V for my server rack anyway, so it wasn't a lot of effort to pull one more circuit for my Desktop PC.

I've seen some things about maybe stick to a 6000 series for now until AMD gets their 7000 series drivers worked out? Do you have any experience with a 6000 series card?

I don't actually play any eSports. I should probably just try going without a Window partition. I rarely boot over to my windows 10 drive as is now. I think I almost like the idea of making the VM work more than the idea of actually using it.

I always tend to over size my power supplies. I ran my own wiring in my house, so I actually have access to 220V power there! I bought a LR-30 to C13 power cord a while back (https://www.amazon.com/NEMA-L6-30P-C13-Power-Cord/dp/B004WODG6A/) so I could run my PC on 220V. I'm not sure it actually saves me anything, but I like the idea of having my electrical panel balanced a little better.

My existing PC is old enough, it only has the SSD. I'm really looking forward to the NVMe drive after all the comments!

I am lucky enough to have wired my own house for data, so I have ethernet right at my PC Desk! (I also went a little overboard and wired for 220V power there) I've always preferred wired Keyboard/Mouse also, so hopefully those won't be an issue. I have wireless headphones from my existing PC, which I'm hoping to reuse. They already work well with my existing Linux PC.

I love the idea of upscaling graphics on an emulator! Maybe I can go play through FF6/FF3 again!

I have a Nextcloud server that I setup (before Immich was a thing. I'm also running it now, but not using it for photo backup). I have accounts for my immediate family and all of our phones are setup to use the Instant Upload feature to back up photos.

Thanks for the tip on the GPU! I live in an area where power is relatively cheap, so I'll probably go for the 3060. I really wish some of these would work better with AMD since their drivers seem to be more Linux-Friendly these days.

If I get something going, I'll share for sure!

My opinion is that your spouse will have to get rid of any other hobby related stuff. If you're a fisherman, she's going to have to find something to do with all the tackle, boat/s, gear.

I know a guy that was a woodworker who had a shop full of well over $20k worth of tools. Poor guy got cancer and died, and his wife had to try to get rid of all of it. Luckily she had some of his woodworking friends who helped her price and sell the stuff. (I got a pretty nice used planer out of the deal)

The free version of Otter.ai limits you to 30 minutes per conversation, 300 total monthly transcription minutes. "Pro" moves you up to 90 minutes per conversation with 1200 total minutes for $8.33/month (billed annually). "Business" is $20/month with 4 hours per conversation and 6000 total minutes. They have an "Enterprise" version, but it is one of those "call for a quote" things.

The Pro is somewhat reasonably prices, but the 90 minutes per meeting limit is a wall I would bounce up against pretty often. Hard to justify the $20/month for me when a couple years of service is about the same price as the GPU I've been wanting anyway. Plus, the GPU would be a business expense now, right? :)

Thank you! I'll make see if I can string together a few things to come up with my own homebrew version of these services. Honestly, for what they're charging I think I can justify a new dedicated GPU. I've got a few other dockers/services which could take advantage of it anyway, so maybe this is the excuse I've been needing to pull the trigger on that purchase.

Thanks for the heads up on Danswer!

Sure!

For work I attend a lot of meetings, both in person and online. The service takes a recording of the meeting/phone call/etc, transcribes it, identifies the people who were talking and then feeds it into a "ChatGPT" style AI. It then gives meeting notes automatically and lists action items assigned to each attendee along with other pertinent information, like due dates. You can also continue to "chat" with the AI regarding anything to do with the meeting. I often will asked it to expound on various topics, write emails to participants following up on items, give me pertinent information that was shared like emails, phone numbers, etc. You are also able to go back and listen to the meeting along with the transcription. If it was a video meeting, it records the video so you can see what was being presented at the same time. (I think there's some opportunity for OCRing power point slides too, but these services aren't doing that yet)

One specific example was a conversation I had with a customer regarding another company we worked with mutually. The customer went into great detail about their issue with the other company and asked if I could write an email to that company to try and help solve their problem. I fed the recording of the phone call into the AI and simply told it to "write the email referenced in the conversation" and it wrote out a pretty good email with a lot of detail that was shared by the customer in it. A couple of tweaks and I was able to copy and paste it right into my email software and send it.

There's some other features the software has that I personally don't find as useful, like automatic sharing of meeting minutes/notes. My two biggest issue with these services is that they are charging somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 US per month for an amount of "minutes" of meetings. Also, they are taking all of your meeting data and doing who knows what with it? They do meet all the European Union and California privacy standards according to their site, but we're all here on a decentralized self-hostable community, so I probably don't need to expand on my issues there :)

Even if there was just a good "ChatGPT" style AI I could self-host, I could probably transcribe the recordings somehow myself.

Loved the UPS article itself. If you wanted to level it up one more time, you could do something like this: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/automatic-transfer-switch-keeps-internet-online/

It is a automatic transfer switch, so that in the case of a UPS failure, the power can be transferred to a wall outlet fast enough that you shouldn't experience an outage.

I told my wife when I die, she's just going to have to throw it all away and start over.

We have separate email accounts and she knows how to get into my Keepass, so she should be able to get into whatever she needs to. I now have a daughter who is becoming interested in how these things work, so I'm hoping to slowly start training/handing off to her.

You can get someone knowledgeable like an electrician to just change the outlet itself to whatever is best.

"220 V" is the "nominal" voltage. All voltages fluctuate depending on all sorts of factors, but should stay within a certain range of nominal. In the USA most utilities follow the ANSI C84 Voltage standard. 220 V is what electricians refer to it as. Your utility probably calls it "240 V".

I came here looking for a replacement to the old engineering subreddit. I'm a professional electrical engineer with 18 years of experience working in the power industry, mainly in distribution engineering. I'm now an engineering/IT manager at a small REA in central Nebraska.

I'm mostly looking to see cool projects that people are working on, provide help where I can, and post about some of the general engineering questions I might have myself. I also can't help but give some guidance when I have some that is pertinent and its asked for by younger engineers. Thanks for creating this!

Do you guys have a docker image or something that I could put on my homelab server?

AntennaPod

As a (now former) Pocketcasts user, I thank you for letting me know about AntennaPod!

Lettuce? Isn't that what cows eat?

This looks like something I could make pretty easily since I have a SodaStream!

Never tried to duplicate Dorothy Lynch, although we've made homemade Ranch and French dressing before. I like to put a little Dorothy on my (American) tacos or dip my grilled cheese in it also. 😋

If I'm putting ranch on a pizza, its because it is a VERY bad pizza. That's a desperation move.

In Nebraska we have a hyper-localized salad dressing called Dorothy Lynch, so we are forced to split our time 50/50 between Dorothy and Ranch. :)

Thanks! It looks to be about an 8-9 hour drive for us, so that should be great!

We have the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha here in Nebraska. It's probably my favorite "close" trip to take with my family.

If you're looking for something completely different but still in Nebraska, you can try Toadstool Park! https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/nebraska/recarea/?recid=10616

Although honestly, the Badlands are probably closer for you since you live in Omaha.

If you're into Bird and Sandhill Cranes, you can check out Rowe Sanctuary near Kearney, NE. Its not a park, but there are plenty of places to camp nearby.

I also really like the Wildcat Hills near Scottsbluff: https://outdoornebraska.gov/location/wildcat-hills/

If you're into Canoeing or Tubing, check out the Niobrara river. You can see the tallest waterfall in the state, Smith Falls! https://outdoornebraska.gov/location/smith-falls/

The state website for Game and Parks is actually really good, so you can check there: https://outdoornebraska.gov/

There's also a lot of places that are starting to pop up on Hipcamp that you can stay at. (Think AirBNB but for RVs and Camping) https://www.hipcamp.com/

South Central Nebraska here, born and raised! I love living and working out here in rural Nebraska. I'm an Electrical Engineer by trade and an Open Source/Linux Enthusiast for fun! I was glad to see there's some other stuff like a woodworking community here also! Looking forward to a replacement for the centralized social medias. I'm already on Mastodon and Pixelfed, so this should be a nice addition for me.