Two evenings ago I played with setting a No-ip host, setup the Swisscom router to make a Pi available in the DMZ so that I could access the apache server and Nextcloud from the open web and it worked. I had it all done within 15-20 minutes. Now for those with the “But why nextcloud?” the answer is simple. It offers two factor authentication and it is trusted by various EU institutions and governments.

Yesterday I configured PhotoPrism to work with my iPhone photo album that was being synced to Infomaniak’s Kdrive, before then being synced to a drive that I could access via the Photoprism docker-compose config file. I then used No-ip to make that PhotoPrism instance available to the world wide web. For several years I have had an Infomaniak Kdrive account but did not use it much, until I noticed that what costs 100 CHF with Google Drive costs 67 CHF with Kdrive.

While walking and listening to podcasts I kept hearing about NixOS and how good it is for instantiating environments over and over again. What I didn’t hear about, so much, is that there is a steep learning curve, to get started with. Installing the OS is easy. Download NixOS, flash it to a USB stick, reboot a computer onto the OS on that USB stick and begin installation of the OS.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is twice as powerful as previous Pis according to various sources. For the last 24 hours I have been using a Pi 5 running Ubuntu and the experience has been good. Despite being a small computer it feels as comfortable as some of the computers I have been using. The Pi 5 feels comfortable I have loaded several webpages at once, in various tabs, tried importing images via photoprism, whilst writing this blog post and running VS Code.

Recently I have been Lunix Unplugged and Self-Hosted. It’s by listening to self-hosted that I decided to experiment and learn about Linux by experimenting with Pis and projects created for Pi such as PhotoPrismPi, Pi-Hole and Nextcloud, to mention just a few. These podcasts kept mentioning boosts, sats, value for value and compatible apps such as Castamatic, among others. I haven’t played with the others but I have played with Castamatic.

This morning, for the first time in months I used Sleepcycle manually to mark the start and end of my sleep and I noticed that they added the Cough Radar. This is a quick and easy way of seeing whether there is a lot of coughin in the region where you live, or not. I find this to be interesting. Governments are no longer tracking COVID and other diseases so we’re flying blind.

Last night I spent hours going through videos and changing them from “public” to private, so that they would be removed from the index. I went through them by loading 2024 without filters and worked my way through 60 or so files at a time, before scrolling, and waiting for content to load. After a few hours I got bored so tried to switch things up. I decided to sort images by camera but that’s slow, so I tried to sort by colour, and by category, and more.

After more than a week of working twenty four hours a day my Raspberry Pi 4 finally indexed over 120,000 videos and photos. The first thing that I notice is that Photoprism feels slower now. It takes several seconds and it feels as if it is suffering. Overloaded with 120,000 Files The Raspberry Pi 4 and PhotoPrism were not designed to have so many photos at once. It tells me that 63,000 files are videos, which I will remove from this archive eventually.

Yesterday I watched a video about setting up a Mini Nextcloud Server on a Pi 5 so I experimented with using the Pi-Hosted script to install docker and then portainer. Pi Hoster uses two scripts. One installs Docker and the second one installs Portainer. Portainer is a web interface to install docker containers instead of doing the same thing via the command line. It allows you to install Pi-Hole, Ad Guard, PhotoPrism, Nextcloud and many other solutions on a single server with relative ease.

Yesterday it snowed enough for the snow to get some depth. I went for a walk with snowboard trousers, a proper winter coat and the Xero Xcursion Fusion in snow that reached above their rim without getting snow or water onto my socks until I removed the shoes at the end of the walk. They’re minimal waterproof shoes that have “FeelTrue®” soles. These are thin, minimal soles. Despite this my feet felt warm for the entire walk with normal soles.