I started using it around 2006, and even back then it listed the pronunciation on the site.

Some people pronounce it like “fack”, and the official way to pronounce GameFAQs is “game facks”

Am I missing something? I’ve always pronounced it “imager”. How else would you pronounce it?

Depends on how much you download. You can pay a once-off payment for a block of data and it lasts indefinitely. I’ve got a 5TB block I’ve had for over 10 years. I think it was maybe $25 when I got it?

Edit: If you need more data, there’s plans with unlimited data for a few dollars per month.

is the only “cloud” storage service I’m aware of that doesn’t charge for either right now

Hetzner doesn’t either for their storage boxes. They support Borgbackup, restic, rclone, SFTP, FTPS, WebDAV and SMB.

Most storage VPSes will include a decent amount of traffic per month.

I use Borgbackup, with borgmatic to configure and periodically run it. I have two storage VPSes “in the cloud”, and back up to both of them. My main storage VPS is a HostHatch one with 10TB space for $10/month. I got it during Black Friday sales in 2021.

If you do back up to multiple destinations, Borgbackup’s devs recommend configuring two separate backups, rather than doing a backup to one server then syncing it to the second one. This is to handle the case where one of the backups becomes corrupted.

Hetzner have decent deals on their “storage boxes”. You don’t get root access, but they support Borgbackup, restic and rclone in addition to the regular protocols (SFTP, FTPS, WebDAV, SMB).

Make sure you configure the SSH key to only allow it to run borgbackup in “append only” mode, so that malware/ransomware on the client system can’t delete the backups. This is a common issue with other backup solutions like rsync - the client has full access to the server, so a malicious user/code could delete the whole backup.

I haven’t tested it, but in the “select your DNS provider” step, see if acme-dns is in the dropdown list.

I think the music experience with Plex + Plexamp is still far better. That’s the main thing I use Plex for.

I haven’t looked into paperless-ai yet, but I hope my machine would be beefy enough for this task

You need a GPU with a decent amount of VRAM to get LLMs working well locally. I don’t have a new enough GPU to be useful - my server just has the Intel iGPU, and my desktop PC only has a GTX1080, which is from before Nvidia added Tensor cores for AI.

And that sticker also has the ASN in human readable form?

Yes! They look like this:

So you would then add many documents at once to the feeder, and Paperless will read the QR and also split documents whenever a new code appears? What about documents you don’t want to keep physically? Is there a way to get Paperless to split them automatically as well if you add many to the feeder?

Paperless supports two different splitting methods:

• If it encounters an ASN QR code, it’ll split at that point and keep the page with the barcode
• If it encounters a special barcode that’s used as a separator sheet, it’ll split at that point and delete the page with the barcode. By default it looks for a “Patch T” barcode, and you can a page with a Patch T barcode from https://www.alliancegroup.co.uk/patch-codes.htm

so all you need to do is have a “Patch T” page between each document and it’ll split them automatically.

Docs: https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/advanced_usage/#document-splitting

I’m also using paperless-ai to automatically tag and set a title for scanned documents. Very useful. I’d love to run my own AI locally using ollama, but I don’t have good enough hardware so for now I’m using Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash. I trust Google’s privacy policy far more than OpenAI’s, Google Gemini is very cheap, and if you use the paid version they don’t retain any of your data nor use it for training.

a VM with torrent client and a killswitched VPN

You can use Docker for the same setup using the --network container:vpn flag to docker run or network_mode: "container:vpn" option in docker-compose.yml where vpn is the name of the container to route through. This makes one Docker container use the network of another (the VPN one), so both containers will share the same internal IP address, and you’ll have to map any ports on the VPN container rather than the torrent/whatever one. This is just as safe as a killswitched VPN.

Unraid has a nice UI for it when editing a Docker container:

also meant if it ever got virused I could just roll it back

Consider using a file system that has snapshots, like ZFS. Then you can get this same behaviour for your whole system rather than just a VM :)

is it ok to sit on the perpetual license (for a few years at a time), or are the updates really required?

I’m not sure, as the new licensing model is pretty new. I purchased Unraid in 2023, and back then, all licenses included lifetime updates. They switched to a subscription mode to make the business more viable long-term and afford to hire more developers, which I definitely understand.

It supports GPU passthrough right

It does. You can pass through any PCIe devices, so for example if you have multiple network cards, you can pass one directly to a VM (it’s a bit more efficient compared to using a virtual Ethernet adapter)

ScanSnap iX1600. I bought mine from B&H: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1615326-REG/fujitsu_pa03770_b635_scansnap_ix1600_document_scanner.html. There’s two scanners that usually get recommended for paperless: this one, and a cheaper (but not as nice) Brother one.

It’s a really compact unit - smaller than I thought it’d be! You can put up to 50 sheets in the feeder and it scans them all, on both sides (no need to manually flip the pages). Can scan 40 pages per minute.

I’ve combined it with ASN (archive serial number) QR code stickers for documents that I need to keep a physical copy of. I’m using Avery 5267 stickers + Avery’s online designer site to design and print them. If I need to keep a physical copy of the document, I stick a sticker on the document, scan it, and Paperless automatically detects the QR code and sets the ASN. Then I keep all the physical copies in a binder, ordered by ASN. If I need to locate a physical document, I find it in Paperless, check the ASN, then go to the right document in the binder (easy to find the right place since they’re all in order).

There’s just a few minor issues with the scanner, but otherwise it’s perfect:

• It was a bit expensive, at $400 in the USA.
• You need a Windows or MacOS system to do the initial setup. Setting it up is done through a desktop app rather than through the touchscreen on the device.
• Some of the options need a computer connected to the scanner via USB, or signing up to their cloud service. However, it does support scanning to a SMB share without a computer connected, which is all I needed. I have my paperless-ngx “consume” directory shared via Samba. You just need to delete the default scanning profiles and add a network scan (SMB) one.

Should/Could I be hosting anything else?

If you deal with a lot of paperwork, paperless-ngx and paperless-ai are very good for managing it. I bought a good scanner (edit: it’s a ScanSnap iX1600) and have been digitizing a bunch of paperwork. I feel like a proper adult now lol

Maybe something for recipe management - Mealie or Tandoor?

Audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts.

Healthchecks and Uptime Kuma for monitoring and alerting when things go down.

I used to use Wireguard, but Tailscale is a lot easier and has a lot of useful features. Tailscale is built on top of Wireguard but automates all the configuration - all you need to do is install it and log in on all devices. It handles NAT traversal using techniques like UDP hole punching, so you don’t need to configure port forwarding and it works behind firewalls.

What do you want to run in a VM that can’t run in Docker? If you’re using a VPN for torrents or whatever, you can easily use Gluetun and configure the Docker containers so that only done of them use Gluetun’s VPN connection, while the other containers directly connect to the internet.

I like Unraid. It supports Docker, VMs (via KVM), and Linux containers (via LXC), and has a nice UI to configure them. It’s a paid piece of software, but works very well. Proxmox is also very good and free, but it doesn’t directly support Docker.

Also, it’s on a higher quality, faster network (a lot of VPS providers use either 10Gbps or 40Gbps networking these days) and more reliable, newer, enterprise-grade hardware.

Good reminder to remove old DNS records that point to IPs or hostnames you no longer control or service providers you no longer use.

That’s the main attack vector here - you delete an S3 bucket but still have a subdomain CNAME’d to it, so anyone could create a new bucket with the same name and serve arbitrary files from your domain.

The part north of the Mexico - US maritime border is US territory and the US can name it whatever it wants.

Google Maps is US-based. And even if it wasn’t, it’s still going to use official US data for US locations, just like they use official Australian data for Australian locations. If Australia renamed the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Bridgey McBridgeface, they’d show the new name even if you view it from a different country.

Scripts/extensions/sites to bypass paywalls can only bypass soft paywalls, where the article is still available in some cases (e.g. you can read a few articles for free, they allow search engines to index the content, etc).

More and more sites are moving towards hard paywalls which can’t be bypassed other than someone paying for the site and downloading the content that way, which is legally much more sketchy.

Some paid news sites let members create free links to share articles with non members, which is another option.

It’s blocked a lot of sites now though.