Interesting - I’ve never heard of this but it looks useful. Love that it supports OIDC. Thanks for the link.

Syncthing is pretty good.

I tried seafile and it kept going down and corrupted a lot of files after an unexpected server shutdown. It shared the corruption to all the local files on every app/pc I had it shared to.

This sounds like an issue with your server rather than with Seafile specifically. Was the unexpected shutdown due to a power outage? You should have a UPS so that it can properly shut down during outages. You’ll hit similar issues with any other system otherwise.

That’s true, but the stickers weren’t much work so I figured I’d try them out.

paperless treats it as a single ASN number row and reports the highest used.

This is OK as long as you consistently use the QR codes to assign ASNs.

If your scanner supports scanning to a network share, install Samba on your Pi and share the paperless-ngx incoming directory. My ScanSnap iX1600 supports this, but I’m not familiar with other models. I had to configure the scanner using the Windows app to add the SMB details, but once it’s configured, it works without a computer attached.

Paperless-ngx also supports email. You can set up a separate email account for it, then forward it any documents you want to keep to it.

For documents you need to keep a physical copy of, use ASNs (archive serial numbers) to correlate the physical and virtual copy. You can use QR code stickers to automatically set the ASN in paperless-ngx. I posted a nested comment with more details about this.

Consider using paperless-ai to use an LLM to tag and title your scanned documents automatically. It needs a webhook to be configured. Consider a local model if possible, and if you want to use a hosted model, review the provider’s privacy policy to ensure they do NOT train the AI on user content.

And file away your scanned papers separately,

I’d recommend using ASN (archive serial numbers) for documents you store a physical copy of, following the recommended flow

I printed ASN QR code stickers, using the smallest Avery labels I could find (Avery 5267 in the USA, L4731REV-25 in Europe) along with their free online design app.

For documents I want to keep, I stick a QR code sticker on them before scanning. Paperless-ngx automatically detects the QR code and sets the ASN. I then file it away in a folder that’s sorted by ASN. When I need to find the physical copy again, I first look in Paperless to find the ASN, then find the document in the folder (pretty quick since all documents are sorted).

You’ll need to set the following settings:

PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_ENABLE_BARCODES=true
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_ENABLE_ASN_BARCODE=true
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_BARCODE_SCANNER=zxing

I’ve been meaning to try this. It’s backed by Louis Rossman, so I’m sure it’s great.

These days I see so much AI slop that my reaction when I see code I hand-wrote myself is “hey, that’s pretty good”.

My team’s code is great, but we use a lot of shared code written by other teams, with varying levels of quality.

Open source projects are particularly vulnerable here since anybody can just grab the source and throw an LLM at it to see if it can find exploits.

On the other hand, this means that they should end up more secure. Open-source projects get far, far more vulnerability testing than closed-source projects. Security holes in closed-source systems can exist for years at a time, which is how things like the Pegasus malware work (undisclosed security holes).

Password protect it and just let friends use it? Or have it just for yourself :D

I just posted a comment about this :D

https://romm.app/

https://romm.app/ - Self hosted game ROM manager that lets you play retro games directly in the browser (using RetroArch cores compiled to WebAssembly).

https://retroassembly.com/ is a similar project.

There’s also https://gamevau.lt/ which is like a self-hosted version of Steam, for DRM-free games (like from GOG).

Game servers? https://linuxgsm.com/. Have an Unreal Tournament 99… tournament with friends.

Companies sometimes sell their own first-party data, but not nearly as often as people think. If a company has data that other companies don’t have, a lot of the time they’ll want to keep it for themselves, since it can give them a competitive advantage over other platforms.

If Amazon knows what movies and TV shows you like, they’re going to use that data to improve ad performance on their own platforms - suggested content on Prime Video, product ads on Amazon, etc. They’re not going to give it to some other company to use.

The one major exception to that are data brokers. These are companies that only exist to sell data. These are less well known companies. They often use public data and combine it with things like supermarket loyalty data and purchase history.

For a beginner, I’d probably stick to Github initially, just because there’s so many guides and tutorials on how to use it, and their free plan is still pretty generous.

A lot of the knowledge is transferable though. If you do want to try something else, Codeberg is pretty good for open-source.

To just learn about Git, you don’t even need a host like Github or Codeberg. You can have a Git repo just on your computer, and still get a bunch of the benefits of source control - a full history of everything, separate branches and worktrees so you can have multiple incomplete changes and switch between them, etc.

Or Forgejo, which is a fork of Gitea and is what Codeberg uses. They explain their advantages over Gitea here: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

The tl;dr is that Forgejo is maintained by a non-profit whereas Gitea is maintained by a for-profit company, and Forgejo is completely open-source whereas Gitea is open-core with some features only available in their hosted service. Forgejo also has better testing and a bigger focus on security.

WAL mode makes writes a lot faster, which is sufficient for a bunch of use cases. Writers do still need to wait, but they have to wait for a shorter duration. It’s still not the right choice for write-heavy use cases, of course.

I felt like a grown up once I got my paperless-ngx setup up and running.

I have a Scansnap ix1600 scanner. Everything is automated once I insert a document and click the button to scan it.

1. Scanned documents are saved to an SMB share on my home server - it’s a built-in feature on the scanner.
2. Paperless-ngx is watching that folder and grabs the files.
3. Paperless-ai uses AI to add metadata to document (title, tags, correspondent).

For documents I need to keep a physical copy of, I give each document a consecutive ASN (archive serial number) using QR code stickers. When importing the document, paperless-ngx sees the barcode and attached the correct archive number to the document.

If I need to find the physical copy, I first find it in Paperless-ngx, look at the archive number, then look in a folder where the documents are arranged by archive number. Easy.

For backups I use Borgbackup with Borgmatic, to two different storage VPSes (hosted by two different providers in two different regions).

Interesting - I didn’t see that. They say “You can add your own copyright as well”, so you don’t have to give up your rights to the code. They do still need to comply with the terms of the Apache license.