Fair enough, I got the wrong impression with the post (which I did read) finishing with

It is not impossible to circumvent these issues, for instance by paying for a jmp.chat phone number with monero XMR. In this case you don’t actually have the sim, but rather access it remotely over XMPP. If you do this over Tor very little can be used against you.

and so on, which I found wanting from a privacy perspective at the implied threat level. No phones (or perhaps faraday bags, or aircraft mode, if tested, depending on threat model) is a much more astute take home, hence the spycraft suggestion.

Anyhow, best of luck.

Agreed, and now I’m whistling.

So, your key takeaway seems to be getting an untraceable phone number. From an opsec point of view I see a few problems.

First, this is implicitly aimed at going against state level actors, which is a whole other game than random internet services. With that in mind…

You assume TOR is actually anonymous, but it has been shown that with enough compromised exit nodes that fails. It’s also a NSA project originally, which may or may not be relevant, the code may be good and is open and has had eyes on, but at the least shows they are intimately familiar with it.

You assume acquisition of Monero is uncompromised and untraceable. Perhaps cash at a machine might be pretty good, but a camera could easily invalidate it, or the machine itself be compromised, wouldn’t be hard to imagine a profit motive or false flag driving that.

What’s the security implications of the XMPP protocol ? Just using TOR may not be enough (I don’t know, just asking the questions). What about the other end of the phone call?

One approach, especially for local efforts, is just using old school spycraft, dead drops, one time pads etc.

You asked for feedback.

Until next week, sigh.

Huge kudos to Freetube, I love it. Just the opposite to Alphabet, go on, be evil again.

Seems like data integrity is your highest priority, and you’re doing pretty well, the next step is keeping a copy offsite. It’s the 3-2-1 backup strategy, 3 copies, 2 media (used to mean CDs etc but now think offline drives) 1 offsite (in case of fire, meteor strike etc), so look to that, stash a copy at a friends or something.

In your case I’d look at getting some online storage to fill the offsite role while you’re overseas (paid probably, but a year of 1 or 2 Tb is quite reasonable) leaving you with no pressure on the selfhosting side, just tailscale in, muck around and have fun, and if something breaks, no harm done, data safe.

I’ve done it for what seems like forever and I’d still be worried about leaving a system out of physical control for any extended period of time, at the very least having someone to reboot it if connectivity or power fails will be invaluable, but talking them through a broken update is another thing entirely, and you shouldn’t make that a critical necessity, too much stress.

OP: I knew what I was wishing for…

Bastard.

I say go for the desktop for grunty work and pick up an older thinkpad for the mobile use case or just remote in with your macbook. I have a T580 (last of the dual batteries, infinite battery life baby), works an absolute treat on linux and next best build quality to a macbook but with a repair manual and massive upgradeability.

Would’ve sworn Potatohead/Voldemort was a caretaker and they’d switch for the election. Instead the shit stain is neck and neck (according to Murdoch polls). Wtf is wrong with this country, we see Trump and go ‘hold my beer’. May not be the worst timeline, but it ain’t good.

I run a gluetun docker (actually two, one local and one through Singapore) clientside which is generally regarded as pretty damn bulletproof kill switch wise. The arr stack etc uses this network exclusively. This means I can use foxyproxy to switch my browser up on the fly, bind things to tun0/tun1 etc, and still have direct connections as needed, it’s pretty slick.

Thing is, the time for net-zero has passed, did you hear that whooshing sound?

To pull back from the brink, what is needed is net-negative, which ain’t happening without capture (alongside massive reduction in emissions), economics be damned, it’s an existential threat, it’s about survival. Could be as simple as massive reforestation, could be fusion generators pulling CO2 out of the air, will probably be many different things, but learning what works, as soon as possible, is imperative.

I have exactly this (AM4, 7800XT, 3440x1440 monitor) running bazzite. Almost every game I have maxes 165Hz, works great for LLM inference too, really the nutso expensive stuff is only necessary for 4K+, which I find diminishing returns at present, LLM training (rent a GPU instead), and probably modern VR. Just to let you know you’re barking up the right tree. :)

Oh, and the 7800XT idles / youtubes ~ 14-20W, 7 with the monitor off. I’m actually using it as a backup NAS / home server in down time, system pulls ~40-45W at the wall and I haven’t even gone deep into power saving as it’s a placeholder for a new homelab build that’s underway.

Don’t sleep on switching to nvme.

Well, that’s all kinds of wrong.

The old adage is never use v x.0 of anything, which I’d expect to go double for data integrity. Is there any particular reason ZFS gets a pass here (speaking as someone who really wants this feature). TrueNAS isn’t merging it for a couple of months yet, I believe.

He wants real estate.

Yup (although minutes seems long and depending on usage weekly might be fine). You can also combine it with updates which require going down anyway.

You’ll be wanting sudo ostree admin pin 1 seeing as 0 was broken. Double check with rpm-ostree status.

Proceed to rpm-ostree update, if that does nothing it means 0 is up to date, personally I’d just wait for a new update using the working deployment, but you can blow away 0 and get it again if you’re keen.

Basically, you want to shut down the database before backing up. Otherwise, your backup might be mid-transaction, i.e. broken. If it’s docker you can just docker-compose down it, backup, and then docker-compose up, or equivalent.

Just use multiple database files (e.g. one for unimportant, one for important) and automate the syncing with syncthing or something so the lazy doesn’t matter…

2 for me, manufacturer refurbs, didn’t say I disliked it, but as per OP, it sure would be nice if prices moved in the right direction.