A little slower by today’s standards, but if your needs are light, it’ll do the job. Keep in mind it only has a gigglebyte of RAM, so its capacity for running things may be limited, especially as docker applications go (since they bring a copy of each dependency). You won’t be able to run something as large as GitLab or Nextcloud, but a smattering of small apps should be within its capabilities

The thing with using the “latest” tag is you might get lucky and nothing bad happens (the apps are pretty stable, fault tolerant, and/or backward compatible), but you also might get unlucky and a container update does break something (think a 1.x going to 2.x one day). Without pinning the container to a specific version, you might have an outage suddenly due to that container becoming incompatible with one of your other applications. I’ve seen this happen a number of times. One example is a frontend (UI) container that updates to no longer be compatible with older versions of the backend and crashes as a result.

If all your apps are pretty much standalone and you trust them to update properly every time a new version of the container is downloaded, then you may never run into the problems that make people say “never use latest”. But just keep an eye out for something like that to happen at some point. You’ll save yourself some time if you have records of what versions are running when everything’s working, and take regular backups of all their data.

I’m not so sure. I seem to be able to find my way around a GitLab project in much fewer moves than a GitHub project. But maybe I’m biased because I use it all the time at work. I know they change the sidebar a lot, though.

The problem child for me right now is a game built in node.js that I’m trying to host/fix. It’s lagging at random with very little reason, crashing in new and interesting ways every day, and resisting almost all attempts at instrumentation & debugging. To the point most things in DevTools just lock it up full stop. And it’s not compatible with most APMs because most of the traffic occurs over websockets. (I had Datadog working, but all it was saying was most of the CPU time is being spent on garbage collection at the time things go wonky–couldn’t get it narrowed down, and I’ve tried many different GC settings that ultimately didn’t help)

I haven’t had any major problems with Nextcloud lately, despite the fragile way in which I’ve installed it at work (Nextcloud and MariaDB both in Kubernetes). It occasionally gets stuck in maintenance mode after an update, because I’m not giving it enough time to run the update and it restarts the container and I haven’t given enough thought to what it’d take to increase that time. That’s about it. Early on I did have a little trouble maintaining it because of some problems with the storage, or the database container deciding to start over and wipe the volume, but nothing my backups couldn’t handle.

I have a hell of a time getting the email to stay working, but that’s not necessarily a Nextcloud problem, that’s a Microsoft being weird about email problem (according to them it is time to let go of ancient apps that cannot handle oauth2–Nextcloud emailer doesn’t support this, same with several other applications we’re running, so we have to do some weird email proxy stuff)

I am not surprised to hear some of the stories in this thread, though. Nextcloud’s doing a lot of stuff. Lots of failure points.

I was going to make some smart ass comment about browser version numbers being ridiculous anymore (after Firefox 3.6 I stopped keeping track), but then I saw it

touchpad & touchscreen gestures, swipe-to-nav

Hot diggity damn. This might make me less likely to revert to Chromium every new install, if Firefox works well with touchscreen at last. I’ll have to check this out on my Pi 5 on Ubuntu.

Mastercard and Visa both offer the same zero liability protection on debit cards as credit cards. So both my cards are comparable to credit cards in that regard. If I was at a bank that didn’t have good fraud protection I’d be shopping around.

I’ve never had a situation where fraud took money out of my account. Someone got my debit card information somehow (I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often). The bank called me, asked if that was me that was in London trying to buy something out of a vending machine, I said nope, they turned off the card and sent me a new one. No money ever left my account, and I wasn’t terribly inconvenienced, other than having to change a few autopay thingies.

I do get cash back bonus on my PayPal debit card. I appreciate the irony of taking advantage of that in contrast with my original comment. But I presume since PayPal is not a credit card company, they’re paying for it with the merchant fees they collect. I could be wrong.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

All that said to say there’s nothing a credit card can offer me that a debit card can’t, except debt.

It’s possible, just tricky sometimes. You can have credit without a credit card, you can rent a home or a car without a credit score, and you can even buy a house without a “good” credit rating, you just need real landlords or real mortgage underwriting that looks at your financial situation as a whole.

It’s really silly. You could have a million bucks sitting in an account somewhere and your credit report wouldn’t say anything about that, but one look at your bank statements would be enough to tell a landlord or a mortgager you’re good to go.

I was fortunate enough to be able to sign up for a house payment (in this market! During the zombie apocalypse?!). When the time came for underwriting, they looked at 4 months worth of bank statements since my credit report just had my student loans and a car payment I got rid of in 2017 (in other words, not a “good enough” credit score). It was quite the eye opener of a process, having to explain every deposit to convince them I wasn’t laundering money.

Once that house is paid off, that’s the last time I’m going to have a credit score. I can get everything else without debt, I just didn’t have a cool $155k to drop on the house at the time. Hotels, car rentals, phone bills, electric bills, everything I’ve tried works fine without a credit check just using EFT or debit cards. Sometimes they charge a deposit, and that’s fine. I budget to account for that.

These fees are how they’re paying for your airline miles and cash back bonuses.

Personally, I’m perfectly fine without a credit card. I don’t care if I’m “giving up free money” because I know this is where it’s coming from.

Pressing F to pay respects. R.I.P. in pieces

Depending on how mission critical your data is…Set up delayed replicas and backups (and test that your backups can actually be restored from). Get a second pair of eyeballs on your query. Set up test environments and run it there before running it in production. The more automated testing you put into your pipeline, the better. Every edit should be committed and tested. (Kubernetes and GitLab Auto DevOps makes this kind of thing a cinch, every branch has a new test environment set up automatically)

Don’t beat yourself up too much though. It happens even to seasoned pros.

When you decide

It’s kind of hilarious they didn’t just build this into the options app. But WebUSB gets a bad rap for no good reason.

WebUSB’s only sin is that it’s being spearheaded by Google. It’s a useful technology that means theoretically you only need to write to one platform - the web. Let the browser deal with the different USB APIs for each OS (please god google save me from libusb). It’s safer because of the browser’s sandboxing, the permission dialog, the much greater likelihood they’re using good standard TLS instead of rolling their own encryption, the list goes on.

Personally, I’d rather visit a web page one time to set it up and then forget about it, than to have to install Yet Another Thing™ that ends up running in the background, always checking for updates, reporting analytics back to the mothership, and constantly sucking up just a little bit of my CPU time even when I don’t have any Logitech devices connected. (Sound like any other Logitech software you know of?)

I had a Pixel phone that I wanted to reflash back to the standard factory image. Did I have to download a special program, reboot the phone into bootloader mode, and perform an ancient ritual sacrifice like I do with a Samsung phone? No, I just had to visit the right web page and click “yes, allow this page to fuck up my phone”. No lingering software left over on my PC, at least once the browser cache goes away.

Same with many Arduino and ESP32 projects, by way of WebSerial. If the page you’re reading doesn’t have to send you off to some other program and can just, right there in the web page, flash your device with the software it’s telling you about, that’s a good thing.

The web is becoming the application platform of choice. No App Store guardians to reject you from it. No 30% cut to the man. The list of reasons to have to install a program to your native OS is shrinking. Even 3d games can be done entirely in the web now. Rejecting WebUSB/WebSerial just means developers have to keep writing stuff for every OS (if you’re lucky).

This is my little setup at work

Kubernetes cluster (created by kubespray)

• “Glue” services:
  • nginx ingress controller (automatically sets up nginx vhosts for Kubernetes apps)
  • cert-manager (gets SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt for any apps that need them)
  • MetalLB (finds and provides an IP for Kubernetes services)
  • rook (storage provisioner–I have a few partitions & drives dedicated for rook to provide storage to the apps on the cluster)
• Apps:
  • GitLab (via GitLab helm chart which brings along nginx ingress and cert-manager)
  • Nextcloud (via Nextcloud helm chart)
  • Mattermost (via Mattermost helm chart)
  • Rancher
• Apps deployed via GitLab CI/CD (primarily through Auto DevOps):
  • Company website
  • Firmware updates for embedded systems
  • Mobile apps

I always google on Bing.