u/thepenguinboy

Similar to a construct. Something that we've collectively assigned meaning to, or defined an indiscrete thing as discrete. I had an old psych professor use this word to describe the idea of sleep back in college, to emphasize that we only say it's a thing because it feels like a thing to us.

My partner and I are pretty good with money. We have a couple moderate student loans and a home loan, but have always paid our credit card in full every month, bought our vehicles in cash, and have several thousand sitting in savings with a big national bank.

I'd like to switch to a local bank or credit union because fuck big banks. In my mind, it makes sense to have all our finances (except home loan) in one institution to keep things simple, so I'm imagining moving our checking, savings, and cc over to the same local institution. I've looked around and one credit union in particular has an incredible rate on a high yield checking/savings combo (5% on first $25k in checking, and 4% on savings, as long as you use the debit card 25x/mo) and a credit card with decent rewards (Visa Platinum Rewards, 1.5pts/$). Should I just go with that? Or is there something else I should be looking at besides interest rate and rewards? Why would I go with a bank/cu with lower interest checking/savings?

My partner and I are pretty good with money. We have a couple moderate student loans and a home loan, but have always paid our credit card in full every month, bought our vehicles in cash, and have several thousand sitting in savings with a big national bank.

I'd like to switch to a local bank or credit union because fuck big banks. In my mind, it makes sense to have all our finances (except home loan) in one institution to keep things simple, so I'm imagining moving our checking, savings, and cc over to the same local institution. I've looked around and one credit union in particular has an incredible rate on a high yield checking/savings combo (5% on first $25k in checking, and 4% on savings, as long as you use the debit card 25x/mo) and a credit card with decent rewards (Visa Platinum Rewards, 1.5pts/$). Should I just go with that? Or is there something else I should be looking at besides interest rate and rewards? Why would I go with a bank/cu with lower interest checking/savings?

Running a homebrew campaign where my players have just intercepted the current baddie carrying a Time Shard, a homebrew magic item that allows some wild magic-style time travel mechanics. Last session ended with them sneaking up on her camp and trying to steal the Time Shard, setting off a glyph of warding and rolling initiative. My plan for the baddie in combat is that she's going to try to get to the Time Shard at any cost and activate it, sending her back in time to the beginning of combat. If she's able to do this, I'll tell the players to reset their spell slots, HP, and other resources and combat will start over from the beginning, this time with two copies of the baddie: the original and the one who went back in time.

My goal is for it to feel like a two-phase combat, but having never run one I don't know if this will work. Also it will help increase the difficulty, since they survived a previous encounter with this baddie and have leveled up a couple times since then.

As a player, would you find this a fun and interesting encounter, or would restarting combat from the beginning just be annoying/frustrating/demoralizing? Is there anything that would make it swing one way or the other?

My wife and I have been couple friends with this other couple for about 7 years. I consider the husband my best friend. About 2 years ago, the other woman said some things that really deeply hurt my wife. I'm confident the other woman is completely unaware she did this, but that's part of the problem and what my wife is hurt about: this other woman is so self-absorbed as to not consider other people's feelings or the impact her words have on anyone but herself. My wife doesn't want to address it directly, because she has no confidence that it will be heard and accepted without her lashing out and hurting my wife even further. I largely agree with this assessment and support her desire to maintain distance. The other couple lives about an hour away, so it's not too hard to avoid and come up with reasons we're not available when they're in town.

The problem is that I really miss my friend, the husband. I don't feel like I can just tell him what's going on: it wouldn't be fair to ask him to keep that from his wife, and if he did tell her then it'd be sure to blow back at my wife. Either way, I of course expect him to side with his wife over me/my wife. Is there any way I can maintain my relationship with the husband?

TL;DR couple friends wife hurt my wife, but I still want to be friends with the husband.

This is going to be a bit of a rant.

I've known and understood the importance of backups for decades. I've used Time Machine backups religiously since the feature was introduced on 10.5 Leopard. And yet, any time I've actually come to need my backups, it's fucked me in the ass.

About ten years ago, I plugged an external hard drive into my router and set it up for my wife and I to back up both our macs to Time Machine on the network share. Seemed to work great for several years, until my wife accidentally deleted a bunch of photos. No problem, I thought, we have a backup, I can just restore that!

Wrong. The first thing I learned is that the Time Machine restore process is destructive. If you restore an old file (like a photos library file) in place, it first permanently deletes the existing file, then restores the backup in its place. The second thing I learned is that my backup was corrupted (I suspect was the result of a couple unexpected power losses over the years). So by trying to restore a backup, I turned an accidental deletion of a few dozen photos into an almost total loss of her entire photo library.

Yes, I know this was entirely avoidable and my fault. I now know half a dozen places where I went wrong: 1) Don't use the built-in restore process—download the backup file separately and check it first before restoring; 2) Test the restore process periodically; and 3) use a UPS to mitigate corruption issues in the first place.

Nonetheless, my—and more importantly, my wife's—trust in my ability to keep our data safe was shattered. We went back to the tried-and-true method of periodically plugging in a USB drive for backups.

Fast forward to today. I'm setting up Immich on a home server with the intent of gaining independence from Google Photos. My budget is basically zero so I'm using 90% old hardware I had lying around. Old laptop running Debian, four old hard drives in a 4-bay DAS with MergerFS + SnapRAID for redundancy, and an additional 2.5" external drive for backups. I've got it on a UPS (which I have tested), and I'm using Backrest to backup my Immich library from the DAS to the 2.5". I did a full test restore of the backup and it worked great. Or so I thought.

Out of an abundance of caution, I decided to keep all my photos on Google Photos and not try to onboard my wife until I had test driven it for at least a year. Thank God, because nine months later I went to migrate hard drives in the DAS, thinking that I could just restore from the backup (and also knowing I still had Google Photos in case of disaster). I discovered that, because I had made a mistake in the docker bind mounts for Backrest, instead of backing up to the external 2.5", it was backing up to the same drive as the original. Fortunately the old drive hadn't failed, so I was able to just use rsync to from the old drive to the new.

Still, the mistake was far too close for comfort. I've fixed the docker bind mount, and used df -h to verify that space is actually being used on the 2.5" drive now. But I'm still left with a question:

TL;DR Every time I thought I was backing up correctly, but then something I didn't know that I didn't know came up and proved me wrong. So how can I ever be confident that there's nothing breaking my backups that I don't even know that I'm doing wrong?

Just set up SnapRAID on a home server for the first time. I consider myself a novice so I try to test everything to make sure it works how I expect. I want to make sure I test in a way that makes sense and actually ensures that it's working properly.

Here's what I tried:

1. I have /mnt/disk1, /mnt/disk2, and /mnt/disk3 in my pool, plus /mnt/parity1.
2. cd /mnt/disk3
3. rm -rf ./*
4. Log into daemon webUI and run maintenance.
5. Restore based on * wildcard.

It seems to have worked, but did I actually do what I think I did?

In case it matters, this is with legacy free g suite. I need to keep gmail, google accounts, everything but just transfer the domain to a different provider/registrar. Currently it's with GoDaddy, but I'd like to migrate to Cloudflare or similar. Anyone have any advice/experience with this?

In case it matters, this is with legacy free g suite. I need to keep gmail, google accounts, everything but just transfer the domain to a different provider/registrar. Currently it's with GoDaddy, but I'd like to migrate to Cloudflare or similar. Anyone have any advice/experience with this?

I hear a lot of people using Pihole with Tailscale to get dns ad blocking on their devices away from home. But I'm looking into other tools and am curious if anyone has gotten Pihole working with Pangolin to achieve the same end result?

Looking at Docktail and noticed that Claude code is a contributor and now I'm questioning whether it's safe to use. I know vibecoded projects can introduce serious security issues, but Docktail seems to get a lot of love despite this. Can anyone vouch for it (who isn't associated with the project)?

I have two network devices: an unRAID server and a raspberry pi. The pi is hosting an NFS share which I want the unRAID server to be able to access. How do I go about mounting the NFS share in unRAID?

Help! I've been using backrest to back up my Immich data to an external drive... or so I thought! I was trying to set up a second backup to an NFS share and when running the first backup, it completely filled the local drive that has Immich and Backrest running on it. That's when I checked and discovered that the external hard drive I *thought* I was backing up to was completely empty, as is the NFS share I just set up.

Here's my compose file:

version: "3.8"
services:
  backrest:
    image: garethgeorge/backrest:latest
    container_name: backrest
    hostname: backrest
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - ./config:/config
      - ./cache:/cache
      - ./tmp:/tmp
      - ./rclone:/root/.config/rclone # Mount for rclone config (needed when using rclone remotes)
      - /home/jordan:/userdata  # Mount local paths to backup
      - /mnt/backup:/repos     # Mount local repos (optional for remote storage)
    environment:
      - BACKREST_DATA=/data
      - BACKREST_CONFIG=/config/config.json
      - XDG_CACHE_HOME=/cache
      - TMPDIR=/tmp
      - TZ=America/Los_Angeles
    ports:
      - "9898:9898"
    restart: unless-stopped

And my respository URI is just /mnt/backup/test-repo.

This is on a headless unit so I can only SSH in and I don't know enough on the command line to figure out where Backrest is putting everything. But I ran du -h -s on my home directory and on /mnt/backup and neither of those are large enough to account what's going on.

Not sure what other info would be helpful here, but I'm kind of panicking. TIA!

ETA: it looks like it's filling up the docker container somehow?