For terminal, the first thing I install is Midnight Commander - dual pane file manager. midnight-commander.org
For all of my physical Linux machines - Cockpit and Cockpit-File Sharing plugin.
Desktop
Thunderbird
Firefox
Vivaldi
Gnome
Chromium I use Firefox, wife uses Chromium and My WFH job I use Chrome. Vivaldi is a backup browser, I’ve been messing around with.
QEMU/LibVirtd - So I can run a Windows VM for my old Canon Lide 60 scanner which scans clearly there, otherwise in Linux, it’s contrasted super grey for some reason.
Kopia-UI - Backup system which supports NFS Shares - set and forget type of setup.
VLC - Need I say more? Lol
OnlyOffice - Better aesthetically IMHO than LibreOffice
PDF Arranger - Works well to re-arrange pages or rotate them after scanning them in. (I self host Sterling PDF and will probably switch to that later)
If after 9pm M-F, and I plug it into AC Power (Not USB on desktop), then it mutes all system sounds until I unplug it from the AC power. During said time, if certain people call, it raises the ringer to full so I can answer it.
I still have this enabled, but rarely ever use it, it came in handy about a year ago though - when near any of the WiFi hotspots at my work, then turn volume off, upon leaving the range, volume comes back up. Also, enabled my work profile which set an Autonotification to set a timer on my phone and watch for my break and meal periods. I now am full time WFH, so neither of these come in to play.
While connected to Car bluetooth, cancel my work timers (above).
I was working on but had to put on pause, a Google Voice interceptor - the goal behind it is to auto use Google Voice to make outbound calls if you are not calling a contact in your list otherwise, if you called one of your contacts, it would use your normal phone number.
Taskernet share for above (Google Voice Robot) If link is broken, it should be searchable. It’s not guaranteed to work.
In one way, I’m happy this is happening, in another way, I’m not - I’ve given well over 2 decades of my life to the call center way of living. Let me give you a sneak peak into what really happens in the daily life of a call center worker.
You live by the time on your telephone, it’s your punch in and punch out system in most centers. Don’t clock in more than 8 or 15 or whatever insane metrics they set past your clock in time else you will be considered tardy. This includes all breaks and clocking out.
If you are a first contact person and taking phone orders, your ‘talk time’ is measured. Anything more than the standardized 5 or 6 minutes is considered excessive and they tell you to move the calls along faster.
If you are customer service, your talk time is loosened but you are also the first and last contact the customer should have for the issue.
Your phone calls are monitored and/or recorded (For Real!). If you are like me and hate to your your voice, woe be it to you when they play back your last call or two so you can hear yourself talking to the customer. If not recorded, then it is up to the monitoring person to be nice. You are then told what you need to do to speed up your talk time, or increase sales etc…
Telemarketing
Oh dear God, this is a life sucker and has the highest turnover on jobs. You quickly learn more about human nature in an odd sense. The sheer pressure on booking that next sale is insanely high and if you don’t meet the sales minimums for the day or even hour, you are sent home without pay. I worked for a company which sold HR Manual trials, I was never more relieved and happy to be fired when I was for not making the per-requisite sales quotas for the half day.
TIPS
I don’t think I’ve encountered a single call center rep in my years of service where a CSR decided that today, they would be a jerk. All we ever want to do is get through the day and earn our wages and go home.
One thing I will say with confidence, is everyone you work with has something in common, you aren’t there necessarily because you enjoy it, you are there because it puts food on the table and beats living off of unemployment benefits. It’s a thankless job.
If you receive great service from a call center rep (CSR) and are happy, politely ask to speak with their supervisor and when you do, be sure to leave them a good review. It doesn’t always help to do this after a bad call, but sometimes rebounding to a new agent by calling the company back and asking for a supervisor will make a big difference if you take issue with them about the poor quality of service you received.
Remember, if you can’t resolve an issue with a CSR, It’s not always that they don’t want to resolve the issue for you, their hands are probably tied and in fear of losing their job or being reprimanded, they simply won’t budge.
Kindness goes a long way with us as well, if you are respectful and kind, we reflect the same back to you and often have tools at our disposal to grant you an extra discount and/or savings. We genuinely want to see you happy!
ON THE OTHER HAND
If putting AI in front of the call centers will help screen out the most common issues, then by all means do it. Also, if the stupid bean counters out there which insist of outsourcing to third world countries as it’s cheaper, can find it to be more cost effective to use AI, and keep the jobs local to their country of operation, then I’m in favor of it.
The use case is basically so that all my family members we can check that “John has an old laptop collecting dust” or “Mary has this specific tool that I’d love to use for my current project”....
Homebox - before we relocate - whenever that is, I will be printing labels and putting them under and behind my stuff, scanning it into there and then will use that to keep track of our items after the move to know what is in which box etc.
NocoDB Self Hosted (I use this for a few things) - started out with my network ip’s I have on my servers and ports for my containers and most recently a sleep log.
Hi all. I just set-up my first self-hosting server with NextCloud, Immich and a VPN server. I was wondering if there is a tool or layer of tools which would help me monitor my server and the services including running stats, resource usage stats, system logs, access logs, etc?...
Grafana + Prometheus dashboards can be quite addicting or useful. Noted.lol put together a nice tutorial for getting started.
For most of my services though, I simply use Uptime Kuma which then sends an alert to Gotify when my services go down or whatnot, Gotify then instantly notifies my phone so I can be aware. It helps keep the spouse happy when their go to service for some reason crashed. :)
This is my new favorite thing. I don’t have a CRT to display this on, but I’ll settle for an old 4:3 LCD monitor I have sitting on a shelf in the basement - it’s old and blurry enough to be a reasonable facsimile....
Looks nice! I set mine up and have it as an Iframe in Home Assistant. The app is a fork from github.com/vbguyny/ws4kp with his demo site here: battaglia.ddns.net/twc That version has the music we all came to know and love from back then.
From their readme. I asked about that last night and he replied an pointed me to it. :)
Kiosk mode
Kiosk mode can be activated by a checkbox on the page. Note that there is no way out of kiosk mode (except refresh or closing the browser), and the play/pause and other controls will not be available. This is deliberate as a browser’s kiosk mode it intended not to be exited or significantly modified.
It’s also possible to enter kiosk mode using a permalink. First generate a Permalink, then to the end of it add &kiosk=true. Opening this link will load all of the selected displays included in the Permalink, enter kiosk mode immediately upon loading and start playing the forecast.
I didn’t see IIS mentioned, but I didn’t take a close look at the code. They give you a docker run command to set it up, so I converted it to a docker compose file so I can run it later. All of this is running on a Debian 12 system, so if IIS is needed, I’d wager that is if you are running a Windows setup.
I have mine embedded in Home Assistant now as an iframe using the Kiosk mode setting which works.
I use Ferdium on my desktop and self host my server for it, then just add it through there. Works quite well. Plus, with Ferdium, I can add other services such as Discord, and Mastodon so, it’s sort of my go to hub for a lot of my social media.
I host a few docker containers and use nginx proxy manager to access them externally since I like to have access away from home. Most of them have some sort of login system but there are a few examples where there isn’t so I currently don’t publicly expose them. I would ideally like to be able to use totp for this as well.
With that, I use Pomerium for apps which accept a HTTP Headers, for example, my Fresh Tomato firmware flashed router, it has a HTTP dialog. This allows me to login from the road if I need to manage something like rebooting it or updating firewall rules etc.
It works flawlessly. I don’t often use it, but when I do, it helps. I also had it enabled for AdguardHome but moved to Technitium DNS which I prefer and that doesn’t have the HTTP Headers so it’s not fully compatible with Pomerium that I’m aware of.
Authentik is my IDP provider so I put it in front of all my publicly facing Apps which support OIDC login. For example, I can log into my Portainer instance from an external network, but to do so, I log into Authentik First which sends it to my service.
For the apps which support HTTP headers, like I said, Pomerium acts as the service which passes my credentials to the device. I admit - Authentik does this also without the need for Pomerium, (through their flow settings) but I found Pomerium to be much easier to set up for this than Authentik and haven’t looked back or felt the need to change it.
I came pretty close to death I think - I was home recovering from a surgery and woke up early in the morning, short of breath, my heart was racing, and literally felt like it stopped. Naturally, at that time, my bladder decided it need to be relieved so I stumbled breathlessly into the restroom and did my thing. When I stood up, started to lose my hearing and vision for a few seconds, and felt myself starting to collapse, but I managed to catch myself and things restored, I face planted on my bed which got my wife’s attention and 911 was called. All of this was due to a massive pulmonary embolism choking my heart I later learned. The embolism was caused by a clot which traveled up my leg.
Lesson learned: Keep moving after recovering from surgery at home kids! Your life depends on it.
I’m wondering if cats think of us kind of like how a person thinks of a friendly bull: aware that they could easily kill us, but not necessarily afraid of them; or more like a large Dalmatian: they could fuck us up, but most of us don’t really think about that unless they’re being aggressive....
I’ve always felt that we are like clumsy giants to them lumbering on throughout the home with the great strength and dexterity to manipulate objects. In spite of all of this they can swing from loving you to down right cold shoulders on a whim!
For those that don’t want to go back to the Dark side (Reddit), the post referenced a theme (Grey Layout global theme) which got KDE Dev’s involved who in reaction removed the listing from the store.
In short - the theme ran code to run a rm -rf on the user’s drive which wiped everything during install. Aside from backing up your data religiously, be sure to inspect the code instead of blindly installing for now. KDE Dev’s said they will need to do better so I expect some changes are afoot to provide better security.
www.youtube.com/His Authentik videos are top notch and they (Authentik) have also had him make some for them. One of those videos, I can’t recall shows you how to do this, I think it may be the 2FA/MFA one. I use Authentik and can login with fingerprint login without using my UN/PW first. It’s pretty slick.
I am testing it and it seems to run every 5 minutes to sync. Handles standard IMAP and POP inboxes. No auth for main page, so they caution appropriately to avoid public facing web exposure. They are planning on adding more support for Gmail and the like:
It installs by default in debug mode which may or may not be a red flag depending on your security model.
The email search is fast, but could use work, I will say it is VERY early in development. But for downloading email for later storage, it should do. It stores your e-mails in a SQLite database in the same directory as the installer, so if you want to manipulate the compose file a bit, it should be able to point to your desired storage directory. With that said, I also was able to add a TZ= directive so my logs at least are a bit cleaner with timestamps to match my timezone, something they have not added.
If you wish to access this remotely before they add a public facing login, protect it with a SSO solution or other front facing login setup so it would not be accessible. Or securely access it via Wireguard, TailScale, or Headscale.
After self hosting several services for a few users, with SSO, backups, hardware issues etc, I really appreciate how good the IT was in my old company. Everything was connected, smooth, slick and you could tell it was secure. I had very few issues and when I did, they were quickly solved. Doing this all at scale for thousands of...
I am a former IT Desktop drone…er…support worker… I used to swap towers for my local municipality back when Windows XP was being replaced with 7. I saw passwords on post-its attached to the monitor, mouse pad, and even under the keyboard or keyboard drawer (I had to get under desks to do the swap). Our policy was to remove those whenever we saw them and trash them in a different can across the building or a different one. They have a standard 90 day password cycle and most people couldn’t handle that. I would answer the phone often to 'unlock" their account after 3 attempts. My all time favorite when I would help an end user with software was when I would encounter someone’s “God Mode” icon for some of the registry hacks that used to float around. Everyone had Admin privileges (ironically), so it wasn’t really needed anyway.
Their primary server admins and IT folks in the main office were Top notch though. Never any downtime and the main security guy was very strong in making sure everything was adhered to. We, as desktop support didn’t have the master password to decrypt a laptop which was GPG protected and had to bring it to him if we had a user which locked themselves out. With great consternation, only a few machines would be allowed to XP and those were VLAN’d and isolated from the outside world.
The rest of the server admins handled everything with ease seemingly. The fun part was when they had a third party come in and do a security audit. No problems on the server side, but it wasn’t a success. They did the 'ol drop a flash drive randomly in different locations test. Knowing human nature, they knew someone would pick it up, plug it in and be baited with an excel file which looked like it had financials. Unbeknownst to the user, it sent a ping to their reporting server and the drive ID. Which was later reported back. They also did physical security penetration tests - walk in behind you type of thing. I remember seeing a group of guys non company ID badges try to follow me into the main IT office. I stopped them and asked who they were and what they wanted (this was a Govt building), and the look of confusion mixed with satisfaction from them that I stopped them was priceless. I let the head IT guy know who was at the door and left it up to them to unlock it for them.
I now work in a help desk position for a software company and miss those days of desktop support. But, I know for a fact that I.T. Guys an Gals don’t get enough recognition. They are the understated backbone of a company’s well-being especially when holidays and weekends are prime time for systems to fail and they are practically on call no matter what.
I use Proxmox and don’t use Truenas. My setup is basically to install Cockpit on the host server via apt-get and then the 45 Drives cockpit-sharing plugin. This provides the NFS and Samba sharing I need and use. I host Home Assistant in a VM and Docker containers in a few LXC containers which host about 10 containers each. Then, in combination with tteck.github.io/Proxmox/ you can set up pretty much anything you need from there.
This is on in computer terms, ancient; a 13 year old Dell Optiplex 990 with 16gb Ram and software such as Authentik and Vaultwarden from different dedicated LXC containers. Never have any issues with overload of the system resources or running out of memory. It’s pretty much rock solid.
(Picture alt text: a screenshot of my phone’s call log, with numbers redacted (just in case). The phone numbers (except for one) are all spam calls)...
I have a policy - only those who should know my phone number is family and they are very strict about asking me before giving to anyone who asks. So, it’s usually not given. Then for businesses and other places which require a phone number, I use a Google Voice number. From doctors, to banks, or other places. I rarely get the scam calls.
HOWEVER
I get around 6-15 SPAM text messages daily. All 100% Political for Trump, Biden, Harris, or whatever scammer tries to get me to support on my non-shared number. A lot try to guilt you into “donating” to them too! I feel bad because while I won’t fall for it, I know many people already do. I have to use Google Messages to effectively block those automatically.
I have AT & T and complained to them about it to be told that I could change my number, but it would be $40.00 to do so. That’s a big scam in itself and I refused.
extra-testing in Arch? Not at least on my end. I’m still on 6.0.0
I’m honestly surprised that Arch hasn’t pulled plasma 6 out of unstable and into the mainstream yet. I have two Arch boxes and have mine updated using the unstable repo and extra-testing. The other machine without. The one without hasn’t picked up the Plasma 6 release yet.
I’m using a Pixel 6 Pro right now, and I’m looking around to see if there are any good phones. However, I have heard that there are ads in the newer flagship phones (Samsung, Xiaomi). I am willing to spend around USD$750 on a new phone, but I just don’t want any crazy ads or preinstalled apps like Facebook. Are there...
I just plug into the Private DNS settings dns.adguard-dns.com and run ad free. As for bloat- mine was infested with Facebook and other apps preloaded by Samsung, but it was easy enough to remove by long pressing and deleting it. They fortunately didn’t make them system apps.
With that said, if you are handy with android-tools such as ADB, you can place your phone in debug mode and issue adb commands to disable system apps. Pretty easy once you get the hang of it.
If behind CGNAT and forwarding is not an option, Headscale, Tailscale or ZeroTier may be an option. I use Tailscale and it have ZERO forwarding on and can access anything on my network when connected through it. Think of these as Wireguard on Steroids. :)
Tailscale is but since you already tried them, maybe headscale that’s supposed to be the self hosted version of Tailscale that someone wrote, so you have better odds at less latency! headscale.net
Zerotier? Not sure -https://www.zerotier.com/ can speak more to this.
with the demise of ESXi, I am looking for alternatives. Currently I have PfSense virtualized on four physical NICs, a bunch of virtual ones, and it works great. Does Proxmox do this with anything like the ease of ESXi? Any other ideas?
I also can log into it from the web as it’s secured by Authentik, SSO OIDC login when Away from home and need to manage it. Rare! But the option is there! :)
“KWin’s “Active screen follows mouse” setting is now gone; now the active screen is always the one with the cursor on it, or the last one that was tapped with a touchscreen. This turns out to be much simpler and it’s what we think most people wanted anyway, hopefully alleviating complaints about OSDs and new windows opening on unexpected screens”
That was one of my most annoying issues, but learned to work around it. But on the rare occasion where I end up clicking and I don’t realize that my mouse was on the the other screen, this will be a huge improvement. (especially when I have my Always on top windows for my job)
What are your must-have programs?
Trying to discover new/unheard Linux desktop programs (Sorry for the confusion)....
Share your Tasker Automations
I am fairly new to Tasker and I would like to hear about your clever automations. My automations are mostly location, WiFi and time based ones....
Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO (www.techspot.com)
Thinking of building a database of "stuff" that I have at home + some other family households. Multiple accounts with private and shared inventories.
The use case is basically so that all my family members we can check that “John has an old laptop collecting dust” or “Mary has this specific tool that I’d love to use for my current project”....
[Question] Self hosted setup for monitoring Self-hosted services?
Hi all. I just set-up my first self-hosting server with NextCloud, Immich and a VPN server. I was wondering if there is a tool or layer of tools which would help me monitor my server and the services including running stats, resource usage stats, system logs, access logs, etc?...
WeatherStar 4000+ Emulator (github.com)
This is my new favorite thing. I don’t have a CRT to display this on, but I’ll settle for an old 4:3 LCD monitor I have sitting on a shelf in the basement - it’s old and blurry enough to be a reasonable facsimile....
recommendations for desktop Lemmy client?
Looking for a Lemmy client for my desktop, archlinux. Was hoping for a good community recommendation and preferably open source.
Looking for a reverse proxy to put any service behind a login for external access.
I host a few docker containers and use nginx proxy manager to access them externally since I like to have access away from home. Most of them have some sort of login system but there are a few examples where there isn’t so I currently don’t publicly expose them. I would ideally like to be able to use totp for this as well.
The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’ (www.theguardian.com)
New research into the dying brain suggests the line between life and death may be less distinct than previously thought...
Are housecats aware of how much bigger people are? (feddit.de)
I’m wondering if cats think of us kind of like how a person thinks of a friendly bull: aware that they could easily kill us, but not necessarily afraid of them; or more like a large Dalmatian: they could fuck us up, but most of us don’t really think about that unless they’re being aggressive....
Malicious KDE theme can wipe out all your data (www.reddit.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/13397700...
Simple authentication for homelab?
What’s everyones recommendations for a self-hosted authentication system?...
This Week in Self-Hosted (15 March 2024) (selfh.st)
Weekly share. As usual, not my blog, just a good community share. Authors are on Mastodon at selfhst@fosstodon.org.
If Askjeeves.com was invented today, chances are it would be a GPT Site.
Instead of a less than useful search engine.
Appreciation / shock at workplace IT systems
After self hosting several services for a few users, with SSO, backups, hardware issues etc, I really appreciate how good the IT was in my old company. Everything was connected, smooth, slick and you could tell it was secure. I had very few issues and when I did, they were quickly solved. Doing this all at scale for thousands of...
Proxmox vs. TrueNAS Scale
I’m in the process of migrating my system to some new hardware. I was curious on everyone’s thoughts about Proxmox vs. TrueNAS Scale....
I cannot stand these spam calls any more. (lemm.ee)
(Picture alt text: a screenshot of my phone’s call log, with numbers redacted (just in case). The phone numbers (except for one) are all spam calls)...
What's a good phone now that doesn't force ads on me?
I’m using a Pixel 6 Pro right now, and I’m looking around to see if there are any good phones. However, I have heard that there are ads in the newer flagship phones (Samsung, Xiaomi). I am willing to spend around USD$750 on a new phone, but I just don’t want any crazy ads or preinstalled apps like Facebook. Are there...
What does your current setup look like?
virtualizing PFSense. What else works besides ESXi for virtual networking?
with the demise of ESXi, I am looking for alternatives. Currently I have PfSense virtualized on four physical NICs, a bunch of virtual ones, and it works great. Does Proxmox do this with anything like the ease of ESXi? Any other ideas?
This week in KDE: Inching closer (pointieststick.com)