I'm currently traveling for months at a time and my homelab has become unreachable to me over VPN due to a unknown complication after a power outage.

Just as a learning experience for all, my mistake was that I set-up my VPN very far down the stack - as a wg-easy app inside TrueNAS SCALE's apps ecosystem. My very important reason for doing it was that way was that wg-easy allows for setting up client devices with a QR code...

Anyway, the NAS is not booting back up nor do the TrueNAS apps. I should've set my VPN up right at the front of the network - on my MikroTik router that also supports Wireguard. The funny thing is I was so happy that my NAS has IPMI and whatnot but now I can't even access it.

For now the NAS is kept powered on from what I know, it just doesn't boot. This should help prevent bitrot until I'm back. All important files are backed up on a 3rd party service.

It's a shame my Jellyfin and Navidrome inaccessible, but I'll live.

Now I'm thinking about buying an UPS so that this doesn't happen in the future. I'd like the UPS to be fanless and rackmount, so that limits me to ~700VA territory.

Devices in my homelab pull about 65W idle and spike to say 150W when everything is booting. ISP modem, router, POE+ switch, AP, NAS. I might add another 20W due to a Lenovo M920q in the future.

I only really care about NUT and graceful shutdown instead of long runtime on battery.

I was thinking about this: https://www.apc.com/us/en/product/SMT750RMI2U/

In my country I can get it with new batteries (no front panel) and a network card for NUT for a total of 180 EUR.

Would that work? Would you be afraid of leaving an UPS (it is kinda like a bomb after all) unattended an leaving your home for 6 months at a time?

After reading a non-fiction book, do you beat yourself up over not remembering all that much? This is especially painful if the book took years to complete (e.g. Anne Applebaum's "Gulag").

It's a bit ridiculous to expect to become an Encyclopedia after reading something in passing too, though.

I feel as if working with a computer and using the internet daily destroyed my attention span, which is why I'm self concious about this.

I've been a social media hermit for the past 3 years but recently I've given up and created a few accounts across different apps again. It's unreal how strict the requirements are now.

1. Give e-mail (ok)
2. Give phone number (.... eeh, ok)
3. Use the new account for a while
4. Account suspended, please upload selfie to continue (no thanks xi). There are also some verification promps where you have to record a video and rotate your face left to right

If this isn't a message to move to indie web I don't know what is

I was working with NPM package.json files a lot lately and I often found myself saving them in an unparseable state. json-ts-mode highlights syntax errors in yellow but it wasn't enough.

I didn't want to use flymake-eslint becuase it requires having the jsonlint binary in the PATH and I just wanted a simple Lisp solution.

The code tries to parse the current buffer on save using Emacs' built-in json-parse-string and moves the cursor to the location of the parsing error if it fails.

The below code naively assumes that the saved buffer is always the current buffer, which may very well not be the case (e.g. (save-some-buffers)).

It also probably won't save JSON5 files which have // comments inside because json-parse-string won't handle that.

(defun rtz/json-parse-pre ()
    (interactive)
    (if (eq major-mode 'json-ts-mode)
        (condition-case err
            (progn 
  	    (json-parse-string
  	     (buffer-substring-no-properties
  	      (point-min)
  	      (point-max)))
              nil)
          (json-parse-error
           (goto-char (nth 3 err)) (error err)))))

  (setq write-file-functions '(rtz/json-parse-pre))

Yes, I know the answer is "don't buy them".

Anyway: I've been seeing posts in places that follow the format: "Look how item X in (rich country) costs the same or is more expensive than in Poland"

Admittedly, those posts aren't about basic necessities. They are about football tickets and the stadium beers or about Subway sandwiches. Although from personal experience, I know that this is happening with groceries as well. Inflation and the war across the border was a great excuse to hike the price of some goods. This doesn't seem just to me, given the wage disparity between say Ireland and Poland. But hey, you gotta get that YoY 20% growth somehow. Poland being the poster child of "look what capitalism does".

So when we take the example of buying groceries to stay alive, what alternative do you have to the large stores that are obviously fucking you over? I can afford to pay those inflated prices, I just don't want to affirm the effectiveness of the "let's hike the prices of everything because we have the excuse to" master plan.

Here are some loose (privileged), perhaps not particularly good ideas that I've had:

1. Buy food from the inflation basket The Polish (and others probably too) statistical institution keeps a "secret" basket of items based on which the inflation is calculated. It's clear that at least some of those items are known to the stores, because they always cost less, to artificially keep the inflation down. This could work, as long as the stores don't drop the ball on the quality.

2. Buy local? The thing is that while a supermarket chain has a team of people trying to get people to buy more stuff, the humble farmer selling stuff on the local vegetable market does not.

The same goes for clothes, as I could get bring my own materials and get some made by a local tailor, rather than buying off-the-rack chinesium from Zara. And look a little more old school wearing it. Though a tailor is a different level of service.

My local fancy soap shop is several times more expensive than just buying generic tallow bar soap. Sure it's made by local workers within my city, but that's part of the value, hence the price hike.