I’m happy with 90 day certs for homelab stuff: I’m not worried about anyone MITMing my network. I figure the short lived certs are more important for people who provide services with a significant external user-base, or who process sensitive transactions.

I have my certbot set to check every 12 hours and renew at 60 days. Renewing every 3 days would be 20x more load on Let’s Encrypt systems, and that feels like abuse of a free service for my use case.

I really wonder who these retailers are. Like, my grocer typically has 2 human and 12 self checkout open, and it’s no question which of those is going to be faster for someone pushing less than a full cart. They don’t even have the floor space to build twelve more full service checkouts. Reminds me of the bad old days when I’d go to the store and they’d have every human checkout line open, every one of them with 5+ people in line, and it’d take 30 minutes just to check out. If you’re a retailer that only processes a couple dozen patrons an hour, then yeah, I can see where a few self-checks wouldn’t be any benefit.

Feels like we’ve reached the enshittification phase of self-checks: big stores are now so beholden to the technology that the vendors can jack up their prices to where self checks cost the store more than a full-service checkout, but they can’t go back because there’s no staff and no space.

Also love the pi-0-2w, but I’ve started to use ESP32 for those edge sensors. You can get those for like $1-2 each on aliexpress, where real world prices on Pi zero is upwards of $20 now. Truly embedded systems like arduino were always intimidating to me, but esphome reduces ‘programming’ to a YAML for any of the many supported devices. The Pis that are working now aren’t likely to change any time soon, but I bought a handful of ESP32s for $10, and I’ll probably buy another handful before I buy another zero. Maybe convert a zero to ESP32 if I really need a whole OS for something new.

I feel like (mostly because of my own path) Pi is a great platform to get started with self hosting because of projects like pihole, homeassistant, and osmc. Projects where someone has put together simple, all-in-one solutions where you can just download an image and go. That same approach, and the Pi’s hardware limitations, make it harder to co-host multiple services, while the price point of Pi’s, at least pre-2023, made it reasonable just to run a handful of them. Only once you start wanting larger or more compute intensive stacks does the pressure to use containers/VMs on ‘real’ hardware appear. If you’ve already got pihole and ha running on Pis, there’s no pressure to move them to the big server.

If it’s the path I followed, it must be the path everyone follows :)

Calibre-web and calibre can share a library directory. You can edit the .kobo/kobo/Kobo ereader.conf file to wirelessly sync to calibre-web instead of kobo.com (while still using kobo.com to buy new ebooks)

Could they be astroturfing, looking for a specific solution to fill search engines with their own product placement, then deleting because most of the comments are other FOSS solutions?