Admiral Patrick

I learned to play the guitar growing up as a young rapscallion in Mississippi. But things didn’t really take off until I moved to Memphis. There I met the Colonel and the hits just kept coming. Unfortunately, the fame went to my head, I gained a lot of weight, started wearing a white jumpsuit, and ate tranquilizers like they were trail mix. Then, in 1977, I died on the toilet.

Or did I?


I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Somehow the description of the filter differences for mods and admins got lost, so here’s that:

    Filter Behavior for Mods and Admins

    Depending on your account’s role in relation to the content’s, the filters behave differently and some functionality is reduced or disabled.

    Admins: There are two different types of admins recognized by the filter processor: local and remote.

    • Local admins when the content is on the same instance as your account
    • Remote admins when the content is from a federated instance

    For local admins, all filtering is disabled for posts and comments to local communities, and submissions cannot even be collapsed into a stub.

    For remote admins, content from remote instances can be collapsed into a stub but NOT hidden.

    Moderators: All filtering is bypassed in communities you moderate. Nothing posted or commented in your moderated communities can be filtered or hidden.

    This behavior was chosen in order to prevent moderation blind spots.


  • Found the first post-release bug, but it’s mostly just the wording.

    The imported groups will merge with any existing groups

    That is not true at all. It was when I wrote the description for that, but I changed the importer behavior to completely replace your current config. When you import groups through the group editor, they will merge, but not through the settings importer.

    The reason for that change was so that copying your settings between devices would move the entire application state (minus profiles, for security/safety reasons).



  • What do you want to practice? Just general sysadmin stuff? Networking? Clustering? Horizontal scaling? All of the above?

    Old PCs are just Debian servers waiting to happen. Depending on their specs, you may be able to do VMs or you can utilize container frameworks like Podman, Docker, or LXC to deploy individual applications or application stacks. Or you can just bare metal install anything you want.

    Years ago, I bought a batch of 16 Wyse thin clients on eBay for about $15/each. These had 4GB SSDs and 2 GB RAM, so I upgraded about half of them with 64-120GB SSDs (whatever I had lying around) and 8 GB RAM. Thin clients can usually be found pretty inexpensively and are pretty power efficient, but they’re not performant workhorses. They’re great for practicing networking, VLANs, system orchestration (e.g. Ansible, Cockpit) application clustering and horizontal scaling, diskless workstations, setting up a demo office server and workstations, and even VMs if you’re just practicing; they’re a little underpowered to run a lot of VMs, but you can certainly run a few small ones just to practice managing them.


  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgtoFediverse@lemmy.worldQuestions about Matrix Chat
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    5 months ago

    Is there a community about Matrix on Lemmy?

    !matrix@programming.dev

    Is Matrix technically part of the fediverse?

    I would say no. It doesn’t use ActivityPub and is its own thing. It’s federated in that indepedent Matrix servers can talk to each other (like email or Nextcloud). So while email would be considered a federated service, it’s not considered part of the fediverse. At most, it’s like a 2nd cousin.

    Who is the developer/team and do they have an active presence on the fediverse?

    Matrix.org foundation (https://matrix.org/) and not sure. Maybe some of the individual contributors do, but I don’t know any off the top of my head













  • Just about anything as long as you don’t need to serve it to hundreds of people simultaneously. Hell, I once hosted Jellyfin over a 3G hotpot and it managed.

    Pretty much any web-based app will work fine. Streaming servers (Emby, Plex, Jellyfin, etc) work fine for a few simultaneous people as long as you’re not trying to push 4K or something. 1080p can work fine at 4 Mbps or less (transcoding is your friend here). Chat servers (Matrix, XMPP, etc) are also a good candidate.

    I hosted everything I wanted with 30 Mbps upload before I got symmetric fiber.


  • Most of the requirements are going to be for the database, and that depends on:

    1. How many active users you expect
    2. How many large rooms you or your users join

    I left many of the large Matrix spaces I was in, and mine is now mostly just 1:1 chats or a group chat with a handful of friends. Given that low-usage case, I can run my server on a Pi 3 with 4 GB of RAM quite comfortably. I don’t do that in practice, but I do have that setup as a backup server - it periodically syncs the database from my main server - and works fine. The bottleneck there, really, is the SD card storage since I didn’t want an external SSD hanging off of it.

    Even when I was active in several large Matrix spaces/rooms, a USFF Optiplex with a quad core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD was more than enough to run it comfortably alongside some other services like LibreTranslate.


  • I disabled local thumbnail generation almost a year ago, and things mostly work the same.

    Instead of a local thumbnail image URL for things like news articles that get posted, it will be the direct URL value from the og:image metadata from the source. Usually those load fine, but sometimes they don’t due to CORS settings on their side. Probably only 1-2% of posts have issues, though.

    For image posts that come in via federation, (memes, pics, etc), the thumbnail image URL is the same as the post URL. In other words, you’re loading the full res version in the feed. Since I use a web client that has “card view”, this actually works out better, visually. YMMV whether that’s a drawback for you.

    The only pitfall is that you will lose thumbnails for image posts if an instance goes offline or shuts down.

    I’m sure that does increase load slightly on other instances, but no more than if the remote instance had image proxying turned on. And the full-res version always has to load from the remote instance (even if you have local thumbnail generation enabled). All in all, I’d say the additional load is acceptable given the benefits of disabling local thumbnail generation.

    To mitigate that, in my case anyway, I have my own image proxy/cache in place. My default UI is Tesseract and it’s configured with the image proxy/cache on by default… (I think I saw that Photon is also working on something similar). In this configuration, the first person to scroll past a remote image fetches it directly (via the proxy/cache) and it’s now available locally in the cache for everyone else (unless they’re connecting with a different client that doesn’t use Tesseract’s proxy). Granted, I shutdown my instance last year and it’s just now a private testbed for development, but when I did have daily active users (plural), the proxy cache helped.

    Now the only images my instance stores are ones that are uploaded locally.

    Why did I disable local thumbnails?

    • I closed up my instance and didn’t want potentially problematic thumbnails being generated while I wasn’t actively modding it
    • Generated thumbnails go in, but they don’t go out. There’s no way to clean them up later other than the ephemerally generated ones (if someone requests a version in a custom size, for example)
    • Increasing storage costs. Like, I’d be scrolling the feed and see some of the dumbest shitposts while constantly thinking “Ugh, this is costing me money to store a copy”.

  • Atkinson Hyperlegible is my new jam. I’m dyslexic and it helps tremendously even though that’s not its primary goal. It also looks a lot better than OpenDyslexic which I used to use.

    Loaded “Hyperlegible” onto my Kobo, the reader app on my phone, and set it as the default font on my desktop environment.

    Also added it as an option in Tesseract UI (which I swear I’ll be releasing “soon”).