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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • Luxury! My homeserver has an i5 3470 with 6GB or RAM (yes, it’s a cursed 4+2 setup)! </badMontyPythonReference>

    Interesting, I also run Nextcloud and pihole, and vaultwarden, jellyfin, paperless-ngx, gitea, vscode-server and a minecraft server (every now and then).

    You’re right that such a system really does show its age, but only when doing multiple intensive tasks at the same time. I try not to backup my photos to Nextcloud while running minecraft, for example, as the imagine identification task pins my CPU at 100%. So yes, I agree, you’re probably not doing anything out of the ordinary on your setup.

    The point I was trying to make still stands though, as that pi 2B could run more than I would’ve expected beforehand. I believe it once even ran jellyfin, a simple file server, samba, and a webserver with a simple HTML website. Jellyfin worked just fine, as long as the pi didn’t have to transcode (never got hardware transcoding to work).

    It is funny that you should run out of memory, seeing as everything fits (albeit, just barely) on my machine in 1/5 the memory. Would de overhead of running VM’s account for such a large difference?


  • Coming from someone who started selfhosting on a pi 2B (similar-ish specs), you’d be surprised. If you don’t need anything fast or fancy, that 1GB will go a long way, and plenty of selfhosted apps require very little CPU. The only real problem I faced was that all HTTPS-related network tasks were limited at ~3MB/s, as that is how fast my pi could encrypt the data (presumably, I just saw my webserver utilising the entire CPU and figured this was the most likely explanation)


  • I’ve had good experiences with whisper.cpp (should be in the AUR). I used the large model on my GPU (3060), and it filled 11.5 out of the 12GB of vram, so you might have to settle for a lower tier model. The speed was pretty much real time on my GPU, so it might be quite a bit slower on your CPU, unless the lower tier models are also a lot faster (never tested them due to lack of necessity).

    The large model had pretty much perfect accuracy (only 5 or so mistakes in ~40 pages of transcriptions), and that was with Dutch audio recorded on a smartphone. If it can handle my pretty horrible conditions, your audio should (hopefully) be no problem to transcribe.


  • It depends what you’re optimising for. If you want a single (relatively small) download to be available on your HDD as fast as possible, then your current setup might be better (optimising for lower latency). However, if you want to be maxing out your internet speeds at all time and increase your HDD speeds by making the copy sequential (optimising for throughput), then the setup with the catch drive will be better. Keep in mind that a HDD’s sequential write performance is significantly higher than its random write performance, so copying a large file in one go will be faster than copying a whole bunch of random chunks in a random order (like torrents do). You can check the difference for yourself by doing a disk benchmark and comparing the sequential vs random writes of your drive.


  • Maxy@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldData HDD with SSD catch drive
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    15 days ago

    qBittorrent has exactly the option you’re looking for, I believe it’s called “incomplete download path” in the settings, letting you store incomplete downloads at a temporary path and moving them to their regular location when the download finishes. Aside from the download speed improvement, this will also lead to less fragmentation on your HDD (which might be part of the reason why it is so slow when downloading directly to it). Pre-allocating space could have the same effect, but I would recommend only using one of these two solutions at once (pre-allocating space on your SSD would only waste space)


  • It’s possible for a certain hardware/software setup not to support a certain codec. For example, my jellyfin client (Finamp) uses the iOS native decoders (afaik), which means opus files are practically broken. My music library (8000+ songs) contained exactly 1 lossy file, which just so happened to be an opus file. I decided to spend the extra ~20MB to standardise my entire library to flac files, ensuring I could play every song on all my devices.

    Edit cause I posted too soon: you are generally correct; only in very specific circumstances will you encounter compatibility issues like this one in the modern world. This is 100% apple being apple, and you can expect pretty much every other (reasonably modern) device to support all codecs you might encounter in the wild.


  • To add to the audio compression: it isn’t possible to further compress an mp3 file without losing any quality. You can either:

    1. Recompress to a lossy codec (mp3, aac, opus). This will lead to smaller file sizes if you set the bitrate lower than that of the input file, but it will always worsen the quality, no matter the bitrate.
    2. Recompress to a lossless format (flac easily being the best one). Going from a lossy to a lossless format will increase the file size (sometimes by quite a substantial amount), while keeping the same quality. There is very little reason for you to do this
    3. keep the original files (my recommendation)

    If you’re willing to spend some extra time learning about audio compression, you can download lossless files and compress those directly to whatever format and bitrate you want. The quality will be better than option 1 above, as the audio is only lossely compressed once instead of twice.







  • I’ve been running some external drives on my server for about a year now. In my experience, hard drives with an external power supply suffer less from random disconnects. The specific PC also makes quite a large difference in reliability. My server is just a regular desktop and has very little problem staying connected and powering my 3 external drives. My seedbox is an old laptop, and has been having almost constant problems with random disconnects and power issues. Maybe test how well your framework does with some external drives before committing to the plan?


  • To change the ownership of the files, you should only have to run sudo chown -R user:group directory. -R makes chown run recursively, so it will modify the directory and all subdirectories and files. Do note that changing the ownership to plex:plex or something similar would leave your user unable to normally modify the files. My solution to this was to add both my regular user and the plex (in my case jellyfin) user to the same group. That way both users can easily see and modify the files, as long as the group has read/write permissions (the 2nd column of rwx in ls -Al). If necessary, you can add group permissions with sudo chmod -R g+rw directory.

    On a side note: have you considered using jellyfin? It’s a completely free alternative to plex, which recently received a truly massive update with tons of new features. Some people prefer plex’ overall experience, but I’ve been running jellyfin with almost no complaints.

    Small disclaimer: I’m writing from mobile, so the commands might not be 100% correct. Run at your own risk, and NEVER POINT A CHMOD/CHOWN COMMAND AT SYSTEM DIRECTORIES LIKE / OR /USR. That’s one of the easiest ways to completely break your system.



  • I believe SSD’s don’t actually experience wear when reading data, only when writing. Loading more data from SSD’s shouldn’t cause any premature failure. Overwriting more data each update could cause the drive to fail slightly earlier, but if that’s really that big of a concern, you’d be best of moving to Debian stable (no updates means no SSD writes).

    If SSD wear prevention is really that big of a concern, you might be interested in profile-sync-daemon (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Profile-sync-daemon). It reduces writes to hard drives by keeping your browser profile in RAM, and only periodically syncing it to disk.

    Though I must add that SSD’s wearing out really isn’t that much of an issue with modern drives. With normal usage, a drive will become obsolete long before it actually wears out.





  • Could it be that the /usr/local/bin directory doesn’t exist? If that’s the case, you’d either have to create it or replace that part of the command with some other directory in your $PATH (make sure to change both occurrences in the command if you decide to go with this latter option). Though I must add that this kind of manual install isn’t great if you want to keep track of installed apps and pending updates, since you’d have to do all of that manually too.