Category: 00 – TOASTERBOTNET BLOG

Creating a Youtube Video is fucking hard as fuck. I have some expierence with Video Editing and even did an hour long Snowboard Movie once. So this is not my first project. But holy shit, talking to a camera was way more difficult than I initially thought. I mean. I didn’t think It would be easy. But man that shit was amateurish as hell. I couldn’t even remember a single sentence for longer than a split second. always stuttering and loosing thought. I think I have to do away with the strict scripts and just speak more freely and more relaxed.

Besides being a total dork on camera, I see like a million things to improve. It’s cringy as hell, but if I don’t upload, I won’t improve. I need to just own it and keep posting.

So onto Number #2 🙂

…When you realize you are actually making progress.

Just today I was sitting on my couch and had the urge to do something productive. But I didn’t exactly know what to do. I believe I have all my shit together. Nothing can be optimized or improved, well at least not that I’m aware of. Chores are all done. I’m on track. Everything is taken care of.

And suddenly that weird feeling of anxiety overcame me.

It took me a while to realize… I actually reached a lot of my personal goals and I’m on track with all my plans. But … what … now ? I just couldn’t relax. I had this anxious feeling to do something… anything. And this is when it hit me. I need to move forward already and start something new.

It’s time for a new project. And I have a couple of ideas.

I immediatly starting braindumping and planing tasks to start to get creative again. And when I was done I realized I’m actually making progress because I feel ready to tackle new challenges.

Feels good man. So this is progress ? Seems like it.

Achievement unlocked. HAVE MY SHIT TOGETHER 🙂

I’m going overboard with Todoist. Why the fuck am I enjoying time management so much? It’s weird. But it kinda gives my deprived brain the dopamin rush it needs. I’m way too much into organizing the shit out of my schedule. Custom Filters and Tags are neat. They allow me to fine tune the app to get exactly the workflow I want. It kinda reminds me when I first moved from Excel Sheets to YNAB. These tools just gamify the boring stuff and you can spend hours tweaking it exactly the way you like it. Well at least it works. And it does work… way better than my old app, which was basically just a bunch of lists. But I noticed I’m not the average user. went from beginner to intermediate karma level in 2 days of using the app. Probably because I added so much tasks. I have the weirdest hobbies. I even have two accounts now. One main one and one for work.

Alright I moved my entire Workflow to ToDoist. The App convinced me. immediatly subscribed to the pro version and moved all my tasks over.

Since a couple of years I have a system of recurring Tasks, which allow me to basically run my life on autopilot. But I wanted everything a bit more fancy and needed more control. Todoist was exactly what I was looking for.

So I moved a total of 600 Tasks and Reminders over. Including the settings for each task. Took me my entire Sunday. I was moving everything manually one by one. I hope it was worth it.

Okay. I’ve done it.

I bought all the dips yesterday and I’m all out of money now.

I doubled down on a lot of stocks. My portfolio looks horrible. But at least I’m not in the red in overall returns.

So if everything drops even more now, you can thank me, because that’s probably because I bought. I can’t buy more dips now. I’m broke.

It’s Rice and Lentils for me now. But I’m expecting a Lambo in return.

So I’m waiting for a recovery now. If the US goes full recession mode now, I’m fucked. I hope for the turnaround and will bite my nails, while I look at my stock portfolio dipping deeper into the red. If everything goes south, I have a bridge nearby, in case I get tired. So no worries.

Good luck to all the other apes out there. May your candles be green and your gainz plenty. God help us all.

Recently I read this hypothetical blogpost here .

Got me thinking. Maybe I should think about my backup strategy.

I should use an old encrypted smartphone as emergency backup and 2FA and keep it in a safe place offsite. If my place burns down and my phone with it at the same time, I might be screwed. Not only would I lose all my stuff, I’ll probably lose access to my complete digital life. At least most of it. I might still get access to some of it with some effort, because I have some offsite backups in place. But using a backup phone would be a better solution and would include banking apps and services I’ll probably want to have access to in case of an emergency. A safe deposit box would probably be a good idea. Would cost a bit of money but it would be like insurance for worst case scenarios.

Am I overthinking this?

If you want to access your NAS internally and externally you might run into the problem that you have to run port 5001 on your LAN and port 443 externally as port redirection. You could run on port 5001 externally aswell but that can cause problems if you want to access your box somewhere with strict firewall rules or if you want to share stuff with people. So it’s way more conveniant to just use 443 externally. If you want to run your synology directly on port 443, though, it tells you that this port is reserved and cannot be used.

You end up with a setup where on LAN you use port 5001 and for remote you redirect port 443 to 5001.

So now you have the problem that you are using different ports when your phone or laptop are on your WiFi or when they are connecting from remote. So how can you avoid changing ports in your DS Apps all the time ?

Well I found a workaround for this.

Just install web station. Change the backend to apache and add a .htaccess file to your webroot with rewrite rules:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://yourdomain.com/$1 [R,L] 
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 443 
RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://yourdomain.com:5001/$1 [R,L]

Now I can configure all my apps to use 443 as default and when they connect to the wifi they get redirected to 5001 internally. Also I can forward port 80 external to port 80 internal and now Letsencrypt works for auto-renewall. And for a bonus externally now port 80 redirects to https aswell.

Aren’t you all glad that technology is so straight foward all the time with obvious solutions? Synology could just let you use port 80 and 443 for your DSM Webportal in the first place. But who wants to do it the easy way if you can do it the hard way instead?

Have a great day 🙂

So a couple of days ago I got a letter.

Back in 2019/2020 I’ve send a job application to a company and they got hacked lately… appearently. Or to be exact: They outsourced their hiring process and the company that does the applicant-management for them got hacked. Now they have send me a letter, that my resume and other data was probably affected, even though, they are required to delete such data within 6 months.

The sentence that my “data was still present at the database level without their knowledge” was nice but … that’s just a load of bullcrap.

How hard is it to write a cronjob which nukes database entries after 6 months?

If the law requires you to delete data after 6 months, I believe that includes the fucking database level you imbeciles.

Now my data is somewhere on the darknet and I’ll probably start getting spam, phishing and whatnot on my email and phone. Thanks I guess.

How it started

Well…

It all started way back, when, like many people, I had a bunch of external hard drives and a total mess in terms of data organization. And how it goes in these scenarios… I lost my precious data. The drives did break and I had no backups. There are still a lot of projects and files, which, to this day, are missed very dearly. It was mostly a bunch of 500GB disks and smaller ones. Puff ! gone !

Around 2012/2013 a friend of mine gave me a 2TB drive. I attached it to my home server and I started collecting, like many datahoarders out there, “Linux ISOs” from scratch again, since, you know, my hoard ( if you could call it that ) was gone. This time my organization was much better and I even started to make backups of the most important files.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2015, I bought a NAS. I wanted something, that doesn’t need a lot of maintenance and can scale. At this time I still had a webserver and a mediaserver in my appartment. But I wanted a central storage, which, well, just works. So I bought a synology with 4x4TB drives. So 16 TB of raw storage. Finally I had a storage with RAID. But, as you all most certainly know already, RAID is not a backup.

And that’s were the fun began.

I bought additional drives and hooked them up, so I can rsync the most important stuff and have at least one full backup at all times. I also started to make random copies, here and there to have offsite backups. After all, I had collected a fine amount of data again and still remembered how I lost all my stuff before. This time I wanted to do everything right. No more losing data.

I discovered r/DataHoarder. And I thought. Holy shit: they are just like me. Except some of them had storage arrays in the 100s of terabytes. But I’ll probably get there… some day. So I felt motivated and continued collecting Linux ISOs. 2019 my NAS broke. Immediatly bought a new one , same model and kept going.

My storage slowly started to fill up. In 2020 I bought more drives to increase my capacity. I went from 4x4TB to 4x8TB and 16TB for backup.

How it’s going

I’m currently at 65,5TB RAW Capacity. But my actual hoard is just 13,21TB. A lot of it is duplicated and hence, a lot of TBs are used for backups. Also a lot of it is used for RAID.

As you can see the hoard is slowly growing over time. At this pace I still have some room to grow, but I already think about upgrading my equipment to more drive bays and bigger drives.

The size of the actual hoard, makes some bumps from time to time. That’s when I’m on a collecting spree or copying stuff from friends. So these are my current numbers:

Expenses

I also calculated the expenses for this weird hobby and I’m currently at 2790,30€ for everything so far. If I take 2015, when I bought my first NAS, as a starting point, the current monthly expenses for my datahoarding are at 33,22€.

So HAPPY HOARDING everybody.