kevincox

kevincox , 1 month ago to Asklemmy in How long is one obligated to keep a kid’s gift?

I think we as a society need to be a bit less sensitive about gifts. I think it is fine to not like a gift. What matters is that they thought of you to get something. Sometimes it won't land. It is better to admit that (if necessary) than hide it forever. It isn't my responsibility to love and care for a give that you give me.

I get you something I don't want it wasting space in your house just because you are afraid I will be offended. That is like the worst outcome of a gift, I don't want to be giving you a burden.

So if the kid is no longer interested in the toy I think it is fine to give it away or otherwise get rid of it. If the person is offended they should chill the fuck out.

kevincox , 1 month ago to Programmer Humor in The perfect way to round out your career

I would definitely go for Irish sheep farmer. You get to live in a cute little house in a green pasture by the seaside and the sheep feed themselves. What do you need to do? Sheer them every once and a while? I'd take that over Terraform any day of the week.

kevincox , 1 month ago to Linux in Systemd wants to expand to include a sudo replacement

the whole security model of sudo makes no sense

I think that is a bit strong. Sure, you aren't gaining much protection if you just allow sudo -su root but there are a lot of valid use cases.

1. Logging.
2. A bit of an "explicit" check to keep you from doing something stupid without thinking.
3. You can configure sudo to only allow specific commands from different users. (Maybe a trusted friend should have permission to reboot your Minecraft server but nothing else)

kevincox , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in Is ansible worth learning to automate setting up servers?

If you haven't used any configuration management before it would definitely be valuable to learn.

However I would also recommend trying Nix and NixOS. The provide much better reproducibility. For example using Ansible-like tools I would always have issues where I create a file, then remove the code to create the file but the file still exists or the server is still running. I wrote a post going into more detail about the difference a while ago https://kevincox.ca/2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/. However this is more involved. If you already have a running server it will be a big shift, instead of just slowly starting to manage things via Ansible.

But I would definitely consider using something. Having configuration managed and versioned with history is super valuable.

kevincox , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in Google Feed alternative

If they can shove ads into the GMail UI I'm sure they could have found a place to put them in Google Reader.

kevincox , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in Recommendations for Hardware for Physical Media/Jellyfin Server

Video serving is a very sequential workload so hard drives will be more than sufficient and you can typically get storage at a lower price.

SSD may give you slightly faster start and seeking but it is unlikely to be noticeable.

kevincox , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in Recommendations for Hardware for Physical Media/Jellyfin Server

If you want to serve multiple resolutions and bitrates you will probably want hardware that can do transcoding. However basically any graphics card (even integrated) will be able to transcode a video stream in real-time at a decent quality.

(If you wanted you can try to pre-transcode offline, but Jellyfin doesn't support this well)

kevincox , 1 month ago to Selfhosted in Recommendations for Hardware for Physical Media/Jellyfin Server

Although getting something that supports AV1 hardware decoding could be forward thinking. For now you are probably fine without it and if you are ripping DVDs you may consider just keeping the original encoding. But most likely you will start to see more AV1 files coming in the future, and having a server that can transcode AV1 to older formats easily will keep everything on your network working properly.

kevincox , 1 month ago to Canada in Canada is still backing the fossil fuel industry with billions, report finds

*to an industry who creates serious health complications that raise the costs of hospitals.

kevincox , 2 months ago to Selfhosted in Post your Servernames!

Currently s1 and t6. I'm not a fun person.

kevincox , 2 months ago to Fediverse in PeerTube 6.1 is out!

I like the option to preserve originals. I wonder if this is now always done or if it is configurable. Often times I am preserving the original footage and project files anyways so don't need an original. However other times I am just throwing footage straight from the camera and the archive is nice.

It also opens interesting possibilities like re-encoding down the road to new or better codecs or even just better encoders. For example it would be interesting to dedicate one background thread to re-encoding in a much higher effort, and possibly re-running this every few years to take advantage of encoder upgrades.

kevincox , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to Security in A doubt in encryption

Great question. Modern encryption schemes are usually composed of a handful of primitives. If we consider something like HTTPS it uses both asymmetric and symmetric parts.

Asymmetric encryption is the "magic" that you are missing. Asymmetric encryption algorithms create a keypair, one half of this is the "public key" which can be used to encrypt messages that can only be decrypted by the "private key". This means that even if the public key is public (as the name suggests) the messages can't be decrypted without the private key.

You can think of this as giving someone an open padlock. They can put something inside a box and lock it using the padlock, but they can't open it without your key.

Using this you could come up with a very simple protocol for establishing a secure channel:

1. The server sends you their public key, along with a certificate that proves that it belongs to them.
2. The client then uses this public key to encrypt a key for symmetric encryption.
3. The client sends this encrypted key to the server.
4. The server decrypts the key.
5. Now the client and server can both use the shared key to communicate.

(Note: There are many missing features from this system, but I think it illustrates the point. Don't design your own crypto.)

kevincox , 2 months ago to Security in A doubt in encryption

It depends on the cryptosystem. The private and public halves of the pair are often not symmetrical and often have overlap.

The parent is likely confused because in most situations the "private key file" will also contain all of the public key. Whether by necessity or for convenience.

kevincox , 2 months ago to Selfhosted in Selfhosted messenger/community software like discord

Element is running a beta for Video Rooms which is basically exactly this. However it isn't standardized yet and I haven't tried it.

kevincox , 2 months ago to Selfhosted in what's your fav recipe manager?

I ended up creating my own because I couldn't find something that did what I want a few years ago when I started looking. My main requirement was easy scaling of ingredients. It has a handful of features around that such as scaling by specifying servings, scaling by setting the amount of a particular ingredient (example making pancakes with leftover buttermilk, pour the buttermilk into the bowl then scale the recipe based on how much was left) and ingredient conversion. In most other ways it is pretty basic and free-form but it does the job. It stores data in a user-provided provider so other people never send me their recipes.

https://recipes.kevincox.ca/