I didn’t know anything about docker when I set up my NC years ago, so I ran it as a snap on bare metal. Man, it’s gotten so much better! It used to really suck. Like, simple file transfers just didn’t work half the time, so I’d be retrying the same thing over and over… A few years ago, I literally migrated it from bare metal to a VM, but kept the exact same install. I have so much crap on it now, I think I’ll never bother switching it out to docker, just because of the inconvenience. I know the snap version can just run using a local hostname, you just have to set it in trusted domains setting. Might be the same in the docker image?

I used to work on a support desk for a big company. I had a bunch of friends in similar roles at other companies. Fun fact: there are no good support desks. The incentives are all skewed. If a support desk makes the customer happy, it’s giving refunds out. If it’s giving refunds out, it’s costing the company money. If it’s costing the company money, someone in finance or accounting will “fix the problem.” In the case of my company, the fix was: 6 minutes per call, no more. Every call is a sales opportunity, no exceptions. So, people would call in with big, complicated problems, and before I was allowed to help them, I had to try to sell them shit, which pissed them off, got them ranting. This ran out the clock, so then we “accidentally” disconnected. Leather, rinse, repeat. Now, my company sucked, but even the best companies need to limit churn and refunds and deal with a lot of entitled assholes on the support line, so it’s never going to be a great time.

I use Gpoddersync to keep my phone and tablet in sync, but I have one podcast that keeps glitching out and redownloading over and over. Not sure why.

I got an N100 SZBox for cheap a few years ago(?) That has a big USB HDD drive plugged into it. Handles 1080p in house just fine, and I think the bloody hard drive eats more power than it does!

A couple of quick things: in UEFI, keep separate Linux and Windows efi partitions. Disable quick startup in Windows, as it “locks” any NTFS drives you touched in Windows before you booted back into Linux. (I always forget this and then wonder why a drive is read-only… Grr!) Don’t try to install Linux Steam games to an NTFS drive, it doesn’t work. Also, Windows and Linux have different default ways of dealing with the system clock. You can either do a registry entry edit to fix on the windows side, or there’s a Linux fix that is also quite easy, but I forget what and I’m lazy. This is purely optional, but I like to set up grub customizer and set it to boot into “last selected”, so when I’m updating Windows and it restarts, I don’t boot back into Linux, and vice-versa. Also, don’t try to run Windows installed Steam games. It doesn’t work. Lastly, if you virtualize using VMware, your VMs have to “belong” to one host OS or the other, or you’ll have no end to bugs. Personally, I wouldn’t use VMWare on the Linux side at all, except school requires it.