Yes! Hyphens and “+” are also legal, and while most will accept a dash, many don’t allow ‘+’. But it’s explicitly allowed in the spec!

God, the French. My friend has two first names, two middle, and thankfully only one surname.

So she writes 4 names? Does she put her maiden and married names both in the “surname” field? Or middle and maiden together in the “middle name” field?

This is fantastic. Was not expecting the punchline.

Young me would have missed the personal interaction. Older, less hormonally-motivated me would be fine if the accommodations were nice, reasonably large, and contained a good, Linux-based, powerful computer, a copy of the entire Library of Congress archives, and deep clones of Github and Sourcehut. A decent, fast, current generation AI setup would go a long way to filling any gaps. I think I could probably live for several decades - maybe centuries - left to my own devices. Until the literature and media ran out.

I’d like to be able to work with AI systems to generate movies from my favorite sci-fi books. Just, throw literature at it, give it some direction, tweak the output, have a ton of dedicated processing power and a lot of free time, and no copyrights to worry about.

The Mona Lisa was underwhelming, too. :-P

Then the first part is interpreted (in the US, anyway) as a middle name, not as part of the last name. I did run into a recently married woman who did that: dropped her middle name, moved her last to the middle, and used her spouse’s last name.

More commonly, places that don’t take hyphens tend to just run the two names together: Axel-Smith becomes AxelSmith.

Programmers can be really dumb.

I haven’t tried it yet, and I haven’t had a reason to look into it. My experience with Fi was that you pay $10 per Gb - it didn’t come out of your normal bank - and per-minute charges. When I was traveling, I used my company phone, or if on vacation, purely data with heavy up front-caching as much as I could at the hotel. I really don’t like surprise bill sizes.

But to be honest, I haven’t tried Mint internationally, so I can’t say.

Not so bad. I use gmail as a backup for some accounts in case something happens to my VPS or domain, and my Amazon account is still linked to it out of laziness, but otherwise I never use it.

Oh. Except that I have an Android phone, and that’s linked to my gmail, although I don’t use any Google apps or services beyond Play. So I suppose my phone would stop working. Everything’s backed up, though, so maybe it’d be a good thing; maybe it’d motivate me to pull the trigger on a Light Phone. I kinda want a Minimal Phone because my F&F uses Jami, but that’d still be an Android phone, so it wouldn’t work either.

Fi isn’t that great. We were on Fi for years; I switched to Mint, my wife stayed on Fi until I was sure it was going to work. So far, I pay less for more, no gotchas.

It was amazing when it first came out; now it has a lot of competition that beats it.

There are a frightening number of systems that don’t allow “-”, which isn’t even an edge case. A lot of people - mostly women - hyphenate their last names on marriage, rather than throw their old name away. My wife did. She legally changed her name when she came of age, and when we met and married years later she said, “I paid for money for my name; I’m not letting it go.” (Note: I wasn’t pressuring her to take my name.) So she hyphenated it, and has come to regret the decision. She says she should have switched, or not, but the hyphen causes problems everywhere. It’s not a legal character in a lot of systems, including some government systems.

I do this all the time, so yes, it exists. Usually, though, I’m trying to accomplish something specific for which I haven’t found a solution, or existing solutions don’t work for me.

What I’m saying is that maintaining a project that other people use becomes a commitment, and IME that’s where the fun ends. It’s one thing if I’m writing something for myself, because I’m the main user and I can be cavalier about requests and tickets.

But, I write throw-away stuff all the time, and it all goes into public repos. I doubt anyone is using most of them.

Why does it bug my that the pencil lines disappear in the last panel?

Honestly, find an existing project in your language of choice with an active maintainer and start fixing tickets.

You start a new project, odds are you’re stuck maintaining it for years, and it becomes a job, or it dies. IME, it’s far better to find a project you yourself use and like, that you’re capable of contributing to, and doing that. Start popping stuff off the bug list, if you’re a hero, or implement that missing feature in the backlog that you want. Your commitment to the project is a patch. Or, maybe you like working with the project and you become a long term contributor.

That’s just my recommendation. I’m not saying don’t start something new; just, if you’re looking around for things to do, and aren’t passionately trying to scratch an itch you haven’t found a solution for, you’re most likely just going to create a throw-away project.

Just my opinion.

Yeah, I use systemd for the self-host stuff, but you should be able to use docker-compose files with podman-compose with no, or only minor, changes. Theoretically. If you’re comfortable with compose, you may have more luck. I didn’t have a lot of experience with docker-compose, and so when there’s hiccups I tend to just give up and do it manually, because it works just fine that way, too, and it’s easier (for me).

This is great additional information, much of which I didn’t know!

I’m doing the backing-up-twice thing; it’d probably be better if I backed up once and rsync’d - it’d be less computationally intensive and save disk space used by multiple restic caches. OTOH, it’d also have more moving parts and be harder to manage, and IME things that I touch rarely need to be as simple as possible because I forget how to use them in between uses.

Anyway, great response!

I started with rootless podman when I set up All My Things, and I have never had an issue with either maintaining or running it. Most Docker instructions are transposable, except that podman doesn’t assume everything lives as dockerhub and you always have to specify the host. I’ve run into a couple of edge cases where arguments are not 1:1 and I’ve had to dig to figure out what the argument is on podman. I don’t know if I’m actually more secure, but I feel more secure, and I really like not having the docker service running as root in the background. All in all, I think my experience with rootless podman has been better than my experience with docker, but at this point, I’ve had far more experience with podman.

Podman-compose gives me indigestion, but docker-compose didn’t exist or wasn’t yet common back when I used docker; and by the time I was setting up a homelab, I’d already settled on podman. So I just don’t use it most of the time, and wire things up by hand when necessary. Again, I don’t know whether that’s just me, or if podman-compose is more flaky than docker-compose. Podman-compose is certainly much younger and less battle-tested. So is podman but, as I said, I’ve been happy with it.

I really like running containers as separate users without that daemon - I can’t even remember what about the daemon was causing me grief; I think it may have been the fact that it was always running and consuming resources, even when I wasn’t running a container, which isn’t a consideration for a homelab. However, I’d rather deeply know one tool than kind of know two that do the same thing, and since I run containers in several different situations, using podman everywhere allows me to exploit the intimacy I wouldn’t have if I were using docker in some places and podman in others.

2¢

I have no opinion about rsync.net. I’d check which services restic supports; there are several, and it is it supports rsync.net and that’s what you want to use, you’re golden. Or, use another backup tool that has encryption-by-default and does support rsync.net - there are a couple of options.

I would just never store any data that wasn’t meant for public consumption unencrypted on someone else’s servers. I make an exception for my VPS, but that’s only because I’m more paranoid about exposing my LAN that putting my email on a VPS.

restic, and other backup tools, are generally not always on. You run them; they back up. If you run them only one a month, that’s how often they run. The remote mounting is just a nice feature when you want to grab a single file from one of the backups.

What you’re describing is a classic backup use-case. I’m recommending the easiest, cheapest, most reliable offsite solution I’ve used. restic has been around for years, and has a lot of users and a lot of eyeballs look at it, and it’s OSS. There are even GUIs for it, if you’re not comfortable with the CLI. B2 is generally well-regarded, is fairly easy to figure out, and has also been around for ages. Together, they make a solid combo. I also backup with restic to a local disk and use that for accessing history - B2 is just, as you say, in case of a fire, or theft, I suppose.

I wouldn’t.

Use a proper backup tool for this, like restic. BackBlaze has reasonable rates, especially of you’re mostly write-only, and restic has built-in support for B2 and encrypts everything by default. It also supports compression, but you won’t get much out of that on media files. restic is also cross-platform and a single executable, so you can throw binaries for OSX, Linux, and Windows on a USB stick and know you can get to your backups from anywhere. It also allows you to mount a remote repository like a filesystem (on Linux, at least), and browse a backup and get at individual files without having to restore everything. It’s super handy if you screw up a single file or directory.

The molten aluminum version was seriously cool, though.

Location services in Android are in-phone, and they’re definitely accurate and reporting to Google. I only clarified that your cell provider probably can’t locate you using triangulation via your cell Signal. Turn data off, and you’re fine; otherwise, Google is tracking you - and from what I’ve read, even if you have location services turned off.