We follow the principle of doing one thing well instead of all things mediocre, so we use 2 solutions for what you asked. As others in the thread, we do use Tandoor, but only for Recipes and Meal Planning. It does this execeptionally well, but the shopping list part is fitting to our style of shopping.

As a shopping list, we use David Shays Groceries / Specifically Clementines. Why?

• It works offline when you are in one of those huge buildings that work like a faradays cage and you do not have reception anymore.
• It lets my partner attach a picture to a list item, so I can find that specific cheese when I am standing clueless in front of those shelves with 500 different cheese brands and that helps me find the right item before the shop closes.
• It works exactly the way we shop. We always arranged items in the order they are in the shop when you work through the shop from entry to exit. That is super efficient.
• It supports aisles. That means your items are assigned to an aisle. The super cool feature here is, that you can rearrange the isles for each shop. Veggies are at the entrance of Shop A, but at the middle of Shop B? Just arrange the isle for Shop A to the start of the list and to the middle of Shop B. Since all items are connected to an isle, they move with the aisle. This way you never have to turn around in a shop to get “those other things”. You just walk from entry to exit in one line and be done with it.
• With this software I never forgot to buy something I did not find in Shop A. How this software does it is that you create list groups that contain lists for every shop that fits. For example you group food shops together, or shops for gardening stuff. Within the list groups, you have your items. And when putting an item on a list, you can select on which list it should appear. Now when you put your favourite cheese on the List of Shop A and B and you bought it on Shop A, it gets ticked off on Shop B too. Or the other way round, I think you get the idea.
• I have to repeat that it works offline. A shopping list is useless if you can not use it when you are shopping.
• Accidentially ticked off an item because, well… touchscreens and you do not know what it was? No problem. Ticked off items just move down that list and you can pick it up again. With other apps stuff just disappears or gets send back to the global item list and now you do not have any idea what you missed. Not so with “Specifically Clementines”.
• It never let us down. It always worked, whether offline or online without any hiccups.

There is more, but this post got too long already. It also has User Management, Permissions and Live Sync. Yes, my Partner can see live when I tick of items on the list and can put stuff on the list while I am shopping :-)

Everything in that software feels like it was created by a person that goes actually shopping.

It has a very good web interface (which also has the offline mode AFAIK) and a very good Android App.

Does it look fancy? No. Has it everything we ever searched for in a shopping list app? Absolutely!

I am looking at those kind of devices for a few weeks now because I need to replace my DD-WRT Router with something more powerful and reliable. I am aiming for those Mini PCs / Appliances with 2+ 2.5GbE network ports and went through dozens of “manufacturers” (many are just putting their label on it) and read hundreds of Forum posts, watched videos etc.

To me it comes down, that they do not differ that much and on my journey so far, these are the things I discovered:

• Many manufacturers still implement previous CPU generations. This one has a recent N100, so that´s good. The newer gens are usually more power efficient and produce less heat, so you have higher chances to run them fanless without burning your house down.
• If you want 2.5GbE, it is almost always Intel i225 for the older models and i226-V for the newer ones. And those seem to have issues with ASPM, which you need to turn off, depending how you plan to use them. And this adds a few extra Watts.
• With many “nameless” China boxes that are actually tested by people in Forums / Videos etc. it happens often, that they have to mod them. They either add fans to them because they get unreasonably hot, or the internals are sloppy built, so that hot components do not even touch the case properly to transmit the head. So be prepared to mod them if you get one you did not found a thorough review yet.
• Some build their Boxes still with DDR-4 memory, although they are on a new platform that would support DDR-5. Sometimes you see this in the product description, sometimes you see it when you bought it and opened the box.
• For many offers I have seen there is no information about the BIOS/EFI and what you can do there. I have seen / read tests, where you could barely change anything in the BIOS/EFI and are stuck with what the manufacturer configured for you.
• With the “nameless” boxes, the biggest issue I have is, that they do not even have proper descriptions of the built in components on their product page. The place where they advertise their product. If this information is not even there, I suspect long-time support and build quality is not better either.
• Sometimes the RAM is fixed and you can not change it, but with the sloppy product pages, you sometimes can not see this or it is not that obvious, so pay attention to that if you plan to use it for a long time and might want to upgrade the RAM.
• Sometimes you find the exact same hardware just relabeled. I looked at the Thomas Krenn LESv4 for example and found out that it is from Iwill. This is one example where I thought I get it from a German manufacturer and pay a bit extra to support them, but it’s just a relabel from a Chinese company. That’s not bad of course, just a heads up if you insist on buying something that is not coming from China… which is near impossible anyway in my opinion, because what kind of Electronics is not from there nowadays ;-)
• I am following Hardkernel for a while and their new H4 Series seems to tick all the boxes for me at the moment… apart from one: The Case! But they announced a “GC-Style” Case that is injection molded and will post pictures in 2 weeks, so I will wait to see how it looks and how it is built. I love how they nerd out on their Product pages. There is hardly anything you can not find there. They use current technology and offer it for a very fair price. They also seem to pay attention that you have plenty of room to tinker with the settings in their BIOS/EFI and they seem to put quite some though into how they build their stuff, so it also consumes the least amount of energy (which should mean less heat) than others. They even have the guts to host their own Forum, which is a big thing nowadays when you have to fear one Shitstorm after another if you do something that one person does not like. Their H4+ with the Netboard (adds 4 more NICs) and a SSD in a cozy case would be sweet, so I hope the new case they will release soon fits my needs.

That’s my 2 cents for today. Sorry for the long post, but since this is a topic I am doing research for myself to get me a good, fast, low energy, low heat hardware for a new OPNsense Firewall :-)

I think nowadays you will hardly find Hardware in that area that is not made in China, no matter where the company sits that sells it. There are a few, sure, but hardly in that price range, unfortunately.

Me too, I have a lot of fun with it this season.

I run Nextcloud for many, many years. I hosted it for a very long time at Hetzners second lowest tier of Webspace they rent. It was not very fast there (you get what you pay for), but fast enough for our need here. Later I moved it to an Azure VM and after that to my Homeserver where it runs blazingly fast, especially since the last updates they pushed out.

In all that time I never reinstalled. I just upgraded to the newer versions when they were out. The only times I had problems upgrading was when I was hosting at the cheap Webspace instance at Hetzner and an upgrade process took longer than the PHP timeout my very cheap hosting instance provided. So it was never a fault of Nextcloud, but just that I hosted it on basically the cheapest hosting plan I could find.

We use it for file sharing, calendar + contacts (+ Sync with DAVx), Notes and of course Talk. For talk to make full use of Voice + Video calls, you should have a TURN Server, but if you do not use that (if you just text) it was running great even on the Webspace instance at Hetzner.

We are very happy in our family that it exists, that it is free and that it serves us well since many years.

Oh yes. The codex sounds really interesting. I also like that it saves the best version of an aspect you extracted so far and not just puts in the best one or a lower tier one like we have it now. There will still be excitement when finding an item with the same aspect, but a higher roll, so you can improve your codex over time. I also do not have any issues with the codex resetting every league. Since it is kept in the eternal realm, I can play eternal at my own pace and slowly improve the aspects I have there if I want.

I far too often did not use my higher rolled aspects because I was waiting for a better item to apply them to… the end result was often, when I stopped playing a season, I had the best rolled aspects still in my stash. The codex will help me with that :-)

I am really looking forward to the changes and can’t wait to try them out.

You would think so, yes. But to my surprise, my well over 60 Containers so far consume less than 7 GB of RAM, according to htop. Also, of course Containers can network and share services. For external access for example I run only one instance of traefik. Or one COTURN for Nextcloud and Synapse.

El Camino!

I see a lot of Nextcloud here, but I can not share the same experience anymore. I ran it for years on a shared webhosting instance (Hetzner Shared Level 4) which surprised me that with the limited resources it has here, Nextcloud was still working flawless. Unless I ran an update. In 8 out of 10 attempts it caused issues and it being a shared webhosting infrastructure, I had limited ways to intervene when something went wrong. As I said, that Level 4 has very limited resources in any way you can think of, so I never blamed Nextcloud for it.

Since a year or so I self-host at home and run Nextcloud in Docker compose (Nextcloud Community Image (not AiO, not LSIO), Mariadb, Coturn) and never had issues. It obviously runs much faster than on the shared webhosting instance and I never had issues updating. It´s just a matter of docker compose up -d after Watchtower tells me that there is a new version and I´m done. We would not know what to do without NC here at home. We use it extensivele for Contacts, Calendar, Talk and Files from inside and outside our network with various devices (Windows, Android, iOS) and various Applications (Nextcloud, Talk, Notes, DavX, Webclient) for many many years and we are very happy with it.

I tried Borg for a brief moment when I used the Nextcloud AiO Container and it has Borg Backup integrated into it.

But then I tried Kopia and sticked to it. I wanted a unified backup solution for all my systems (Linux + Windows) and Kopia is doing that. Also it has a nice Web Interface and GUI Client, so it´s usable even for the people not that tech-savvy.

My Homelab runs 2 Kopia Containers at the moment. The first one is here to backup all my compose files and the Docker volumes. The second one is backing up my NAS to a cloud storage. I can access these 2 via the Web GUI, which is very convenient. And when I need to restore something, I can mount the Repo and just restore what I need. To test my Homelab Backup, I spun up a Linux VM, installed Docker + Kopia CLI to restore everything and all my containers were up and running again.

On my Windows Systems I run Kopia GUI which can connect to multiple Repositories. So my Desktops backup up to my NAS and to a Cloud storage at the moment. So they run basically 2 Backup jobs (which only take a few minutes each when run once a week). But there is also a feature that a Kopia Repo Server syncs its Repo to another Repo, so this could have been a solution too. That way your system creates a Backup only once and Kopia takes care of synchronizing the existing Repo to an additional place.

Kasm looks super interesting. I read up on it a bit, but it seems you can not run itself as a Docker Container, is that right? I know that Kasm itself spins up Docker Containers for the applications, so it would be Docker within Docker… or maybe how Pterodactyl does it (spins up Docker Containers on the same host itself runs on).

I remember that I went to the table and talked to the guy next to it. The Event also only works if you have a character in the current Season. The whole of the fractured peaks should be in a purple shade if you look at the map. Do you see that? And you do not have any quest in the quest log related to the event maybe?

I would absolutely look into it. Many years ago when Docker emerged, I did not understand it and called it “Hipster shit”. But also a lot of people around me who used Docker at that time did not understand it either. Some lost data, some had servicec that stopped working and they had no idea how to fix it.

Years passed and Containers stayed, so I started to have a closer look at it, tried to understand it. Understand what you can do with it and what you can not. As others here said, I also had to learn how to troubleshoot, because stuff now runs inside a container and you don´t just copy a new binary or library into a container to try to fix something.

Today, my homelab runs 50 Containers and I am not looking back. When I rebuild my Homelab this year, I went full Docker. The most important reason for me was: Every application I run dockerized is predictable and isolated from the others (from the binary side, network side is another story). The issues I had earlier with my Homelab when running everything directly in the Box in Linux is having problems when let´s say one application needs PHP 8.x and another, older one still only runs with PHP 7.x. Or multiple applications have a dependency of a specific library when after updating it, one app works, the other doesn´t anymore because it would need an update too. Running an apt upgrade was always a very exciting moment… and not in a good way. With Docker I do not have these problems. I can update each container on its own. If something breaks in one Container, it does not affect the others.

Another big plus is the Backups you can do. I back up every docker-compose + data for each container with Kopia. Since barely anything is installed in Linux directly, I can spin up a VM, restore my Backups withi Kopia and start all containers again to test my Backup strategy. Stuff just works. No fiddling with the Linux system itself adjusting tons of Config files, installing hundreds of packages to get all my services up and running again when I have a hardware failure.

I really started to love Docker, especially in my Homelab.

Oh, and you would think you have a big resource usage when everything is containerized? My 50 Containers right now consume less than 6 GB of RAM and I run stuff like Jellyfin, Pi-Hole, Homeassistant, Mosquitto, multiple Kopia instances, multiple Traefik Instances with Crowdsec, Logitech Mediaserver, Tandoor, Zabbix and a lot of other things.

Oh wow! That looks like a pretty unique experience. I have a pen, indeed! Thank you very much :-)

I always miss Demos for games, but totally forgot that on Steam you can refund within the first 2 hours of gameplay. It should not hurt if it´s used rarely. I can not figure out yet if Slay the Spire is for me (for some games it is pretty clear when reading about them), so this one might be a good opportunity to test it out.

Thanks for the suggestion. “Unfortunately” I grew up with those and know probably each one of them inside out, as they have been replayed multiple times over the decades. But I did not think about SCUMMVM and reading this I get the urge to Talk to Mr. Tentacle Guy again :-)

Oh cool. That looks like it might also be a battery saver and not causing too much excess heat in the tablet :-)

I love Traefik! When I started, I tried NGinx, but could not wrap my head around it. So I tried Caddy. Pretty easy to understand andI used it for a while. Then I had demands Caddy could not do ant stumbled uponTraefik. As you said, a learning curve, butfor me much easier than NGinx. I like that you can put the Traefik config inside the Compose files and that the service only is active in Traefik when the actual Containers are up and running. I added Crowdsec to my external facing Traefik instance and even use a plain Traefik instance for all my internal services also. And it can forward http, https, TCP and UDP.

That´s a good idea. A Sci-Fi setting is a nice change from the classic Civ theme. I loved Alpha Centauri back then, could not stop playing. This might scratch that itch. Thank you :-)