The command you’re looking for is btrfs send. See man btrfs-send.

I know of at least one tool, btrbk, which automates both automatic periodic snapshots and incremental sync, but here’s an example manual process so you can know the basic idea. Run all this in a root shell or sudo.

As initial setup:

• Create a btrfs filesystem on the sender drive and another on the receiver drive. No need to link them or sync anything yet, although the receiver’s filesystem does need to be large enough to actually accept your syncs.
• Use btrfs subvolume create /mnt/mybtrfs/stuff on the sender, substituting the actual mount point of your btrfs filesystem and the name you want to use for a subvolume under it.
• Put all the data you care about inside that subvolume. You can mount the filesystem with a mount option like -o subvol=stuff if you want to treat the subvolume as its own separate mount from its parent.
• Make a snapshot of that subvolume. Name it whatever you want, but something simple and consistent is probably best. Something like mkdir /mnt/mybtrfs/snapshots; btrfs subvolume snapshot /mnt/mybtrfs/stuff /mnt/mybtrfs/snapshots/stuff-20250511.
• If the receiver is a separate computer, make sure it’s booted up and running an SSH server. If you’re sending to another drive on the same system, make sure it’s connected and mounted.
• Send/copy the entire contents of the snapshot with a command like btrfs send /mnt/mybtrfs/snapshots/stuff-20250511 | btrfs receive /mnt/backup. You can run btrfs receive through SSH if the receiver is a separate system.

For incremental syncs after that:

• Make another separate snapshot and make sure not to delete or erase the previous one: btrfs subvolume snapshot /mnt/mybtrfs/stuff /mnt/mybtrfs/snapshots/stuff-20250518.
• Use another send command, this time using the -p option to specify a subvolume of the last successful sync to make it incremental. btrfs send -p /mnt/mybtrfs/snapshots/stuff-20250511 /mnt/mybtrfs/snapshots/stuff-20250518 | btrfs receive /mnt/backup.

If you want to script a process like this, make sure the receiver stores the name of the latest synced snapshot somewhere only after the receive completes successfully, so that you aren’t trying to do incremental syncs based on a parent that didn’t finish syncing.

Depends on what you consider self-hosted. Web applications I use over LAN include Home Assistant, NextRSS, Syncthing, cockpit-machines (VM host), and media stuff (Jellyfin, Kavita, etc). Without web UI, I also run servers for NFS, SMB, and Joplin sync. Nothing but a Wireguard VPN is public-facing; I generally only use it for SSH and file transfer but can access anything else through it.

I’ve had NextCloud running for a year or two but honestly don’t see much point and will probably uninstall it.

I’ve been planning to someday also try out Immich (photo sync), Radicale (calendar), ntfy.sh, paperless-ngx, ArchiveBox (web archive), Tube Archivist (YouTube archive), and Frigate NVR.

I have not once ever seen anyone shorten the name of a Debian release like that and I’ve been following/using Debian things for two decades.

Squeeze, Wheezy, Jessie, Stretch, Buster, Bullseye, Bookworm, and Trixie aren’t “ds”, “dw”, “dj”, “ds” again, “db”, “db” again, “db” for a third time in a row, or “dt”. Both stable and sid are “s” too.

Most of the “Is open source software safe?” section of this post seems to advocate for what’s conventionally called Security Through Obscurity, which is widely considered very ineffective at preventing exploitation and at best a minor hurdle.

There are a lot of differences between Android and iOS in terms of security, attack surface, and exploitation, but attributing that to open vs closed-source completely misunderstands the entire subject. For just two of the countless reasons: Many of the worst vulnerabilities that affect Android devices are in closed-source proprietary Qualcomm firmware. A platform being open in the sense of allowing users to install any application they want to (like Windows and Android to a limited extent) or closed off to prevent installation of unapproved software (iOS, PlayStation, Toyota cars, TiVo, etc.) is completely separate from whether that platform is open-source or not. GPLv3 has license terms that try to tie the two concepts but I chose examples that don’t use it at all. Also, iOS has public kernel source code.

Anbernic devices in particular are known to ship with an SD card that’s preloaded with a fairly large game library. I own a RG351M which did indeed include a cheap card loaded with both the OS and a collection of games by Nintendo, Sega, and many others, plus some strange rom hacks. I immediately swapped that card out for a better one with a better CFW and my own files.

Most other notable names in the emulation handhelds space like Retroid, Ayn, and Ayaneo expect users to be able to provide their own files instead, which I’d say makes more sense.

USB-C video is usually DisplayPort Alt Mode, which uses a completely different data rate and protocol from USB.

Even using old 2016 hardware, a computer and USB-C cable that both only support 5 Gbps USB (such as USB 3.1 Gen 1) can often easily transmit an uncompressed 4K 60Hz video stream over that cable, using about 15.7Gbps of DisplayPort 1.2 bandwidth. Could go far higher than that with DP 2.0.

Some less common video-over-USB devices/docks use DisplayLink instead, which is indeed contained within USB packets and bound by the USB data rate, but it uses lossy compression so those uncompressed numbers aren’t directly comparable.

For that portable monitor, you should just need a cable with USB-C plugs on both ends which supports USB 3.0+ (could be branded as SuperSpeed, 5Gbps, etc). Nothing more complicated than that.

The baseline for a cable with USB-C on both ends should be PD up to 60W (3A) and data transfers at USB 2.0 (480Mbps) speeds.

Most cables stick with that baseline because it’s enough to charge phones and most people won’t use USB-C cables for anything else. Omitting the extra capabilities lets cables be not only cheaper but also longer and thinner.

DisplayPort support uses the same extra data pins that are needed for USB 3.0 data transfers, so in terms of cable support they should be equivalent. There also exist higher-power cables rated for 100W or 240W but there’s no way a portable monitor would need that.

A related issue I still see very often, even with files newly created just this year, is when trying to extract zip files on my Linux systems that contain non-ASCII filenames and that were created on Windows systems, especially ones with apparently non-English locales like Japanese. Need to trial and error the locale I give to unzip and sometimes hack together fixed names with iconv until the mojibake seems to fix itself.

The whole point of copyright in the first place, is to encourage creative expression, so we can have human culture and shit.

I feel like that purpose has already been undermined by various changes to copyright law since its inception, such as DMCA and lengthening copyright term from 14 years to 95. Freedom to remix existing works is an important part of creative expression which current law stifles for any original work that releases in one person’s lifespan. (Even Disney knew this: the animated Pinocchio movie wouldn’t exist if copyright could last more than 56 years then)

Either way, giving bots the ‘right’ to remix things that were just made less than a year ago while depriving humans the right to release anything too similar to a 94 year old work seems ridiculous on both ends.

Btrfs doesn’t have encryption, so you need to do it with luks to an mdadm raid, and build btrfs on top of that. Luks on mdadm raid is known to be slow, and in general not a great idea.

Why involve mdadm? You can use one btrfs filesystem on a pair of luks volumes with btrfs’s “raid1” (or dup) profile. Both volumes can decrypt with the same key.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox in 2019 because that’s when Google adopted Manifest V3 and I never looked back. There were already articles then describing how it’d break ad blockers, and Firefox had at the time just recently released their “Quantum” overhaul which drastically improved responsiveness.

I’m a bit surprised it took five years for Google to drop support for Manifest V2, but the threat has long been there.

Legitimately playing 4K blu-ray video on a PC without cracking the DRM requires an insane combination of requirements:

• Windows 10 (not 11)
• An Intel processor between gen 7-10 (nothing newer because Intel ditched SGX in 2021)
• Intel integrated graphics (no nvidia/amd)
• Monitor that supports HDCP 2.2 for DRM (some 4k ones don’t)
• An approved optical drive
• Proprietary playback software which costs about $100 USD, separate from the cost of hardware and Windows
• Miscellaneous other requirements for the motherboard features, bios settings, etc.

Meanwhile MakeMKV can rip them on basically any Windows/Linux/Mac system with a compatible BDXL drive.

Likewise, I’m far less hesitant to accept buying digital console games than video because I generally can expect that once I download a game on my one device that I’ll pull out the same device whenever I want to play it and it’ll keep working when offline and even after the servers are gone, until the hardware fails. Modern games’ physical releases rely so heavily on updates and DLC that the cart/disc you get isn’t complete anyway; buying physical effectively becomes a digital game with an extra point of failure (and partial resellability). PC gaming complicates things but at least some games are available completely DRM-free there.

With video content sold online, streaming directly from some server is always the focus. As soon as the server disconnects you become unable to watch by default. Even if some service lets you pre-download within its app and watch offline (which probably won’t work indefinitely without checkins anyway), that’ll defeat the portability expectations for watching your videos on any device interchangeably.

Blu-ray video isn’t ideal considering you cannot watch it on a phone, tablet, or linux system without cracking its DRM, but that’s still way better for lasting access than anything else major movie/TV studios are willing to let consumers access without piracy.

I bought a Milk-V Mars (4GB version) last year. Pi-like form factor and price seemed like an easy pick for dipping my toes into RISC-V development, and I paid US$49 plus shipping at the time. There’s an 8GB version too but that was out of stock when I ordered.

If I wanted to spend more I’d personally prefer to put that budget toward a higher core system (for faster compile times) before any laptop parts, as either HDMI+USB or VNC would be plenty sufficient even if I did need to work on GUI things.

Other RISC-V laptops already are cheaper and with higher performance than this would be with Framework’s shell+screen+battery, so I’m not sure what need this fills. If you intend to use the board in an alternate case without laptop parts you might as well buy an SBC instead.

This board has the StarFive JH7110 SoC. That processor has previously been in very low power single board computers like StarFive VisionFive 2 (2022) and Milk-V Mars (2023), a Raspberry Pi clone that can be bought for as low as $40. Its storage limitations (SD/eMMC rather than NVMe) show how much this isn’t meant for laptop use.

Very underpowered for a laptop too, even when considering this is intended for developers and doesn’t need to be remotely performance competitive. Consider that this has just 4 RV64GC cores, the cheapest Intel board options Framework offers are 12 cores (4P+8E), and any modern RISC-V core is far simpler with less area than even an Intel E core. These cores also lack the RISC-V vector instructions extension.

I’m not completely sure but I think they removed it at some point after the public backlash (which was 3 years ago now). For the Windows version at least, there apparently used to be an option during the installation wizard for setting whether telemetry is enabled or not. Most Linux distros never had the telemetry at all. I don’t know about Mac.

It is open source, but had some controversy. Most prominently the addition of telemetry a few years ago, which was never included in the builds managed by Debian or most other distro maintainers. They also added a Contributor License Agreement which lets the Audacity project change its own license (even to a non-foss one, though they promise they won’t) without needing to have the change approved by any individual developers.

Even their earliest “uncarrier” features weren’t without issue. Making certain services (spotify, apple music, youtube, netflix, etc.) not count against subscribers’ data caps, while continuing to enforce data caps for other uses, goes against the spirit of net neutrality. This also includes throttling video streams by default to force lower quality (with opt-out on their site).

Promos like a free pizza on Tuesdays seems like a neat optional perk on the surface but their existence fundamentally mean subscription expenses on cellular network service are partially going towards things that have not even the slightest tangential connection to the service.

A standard called SystemReady exists. For the systems that actually follow its standards, you can have a single ARM OS installation image that you copy to a USB drive and can then boot through UEFI and run with no problems on an Ampere server, an NXP device, an Nvidia Jetson system, and more.

Unfortunately it’s a pretty new standard, only since 2020, and Qualcomm in particular is a major holdout who hasn’t been using it.

Just like x86, you still need the OS to have drivers for the particular device you’re installing on, but this standard at least lets you have a unified image, and many ARM vendors have been getting better about upstreaming open-source drivers in the Linux kernel.

To the contrary, I would expect the sample to skew more towards people who have a heavily customized X session and strong opinions about window managers while drastically underrepresenting average GNOME users who stick with the default Wayland session. Someone who likes their custom setup can still be waiting for a Wayland equivalent while casual Ubuntu users have been defaulted to Wayland on new non-nvidia installs since early 2021.