SuspiciousCarrot78

Yeah…this Circlus thing has a particular odor to it. Knew it was too good to be true but wanted to double check, as had not heard of it before. Thanks for confirming.

I think I will fork Simple LAN Chat and add what I want: https://github.com/nathanielxd/simple-lan-chat

It’s server-less, which is one less thing to host. Text chat already works. The main problems are broken image/file transfer (literally craps itself with anything > 5kb in testing) and no useful notifications. So I will fix those, then probably add offline message queuing. The codebase is small and simple enough (he said, ominously) and if I don’t scope creep, this should do the job nicely.

My kids are really into PictoCHAT on their DSes, so I’m thinking of it as something along those lines.

I want something that only works on the local WLAN, between vetted devices, and does not rely on Google accounts, FCM or other cloud middleware. I don’t allow them unlimited access to the net / social media, so am engineering in house solutions. The base app here already keeps communication on the LAN, and I will add the device-vetting part. It looks like it’s configured down to Android 5.1, so I can install it on old junkers without SIM cards, modern tablets, etc. That way the kids can play around with it (without doing something they ought not to), take it camping (hotspot) etc. I’ll need to reroll the Android APK. Could be a fun little project…

Aw crap, I may have awakened something in me…like hosting another bloody service the kids will use once and then just quit. No amount of my over-engineering can solve user apathy…so this time I’m investing less effort :)

Interestingly…the local brain found these

github.com/nathanielxd/simple-lan-chat

f-droid.org/…/net.usikkert.kouchat.android/

I still kinda wanna do the XMPP thing now…but I have a nagging suspicion I will be talking to myself or the clanker with it.

Circlus messenger?

Right - ran a search and got no results, so am asking directly

This thing any good? Anyone run it?

circlus.org

Use case: want to give my kid a SEVERELY locked down Moto E (2nd gen) as a Youtube music player device and a “message Daddy” app - strictly wifi / in house only.

The first thing is simple enough. The second thing is…interesting.

I had my local AI do some research and it spat out the above. I don’t think it’s quite right but It looks interesting. Any one use it / can comment? Failing that, can anyone recommend a simple WLAN messaging app that will run on Android 6 / lineageOS? I’m sure I can dig one up but if someone has one running, I’m all ears.

PS: I’m not looking at using a VPS for this…but the above did catch my attention as fairly normie friendly. Might be worth self hosting something like that…

👋👋

The reddit analogy may have been bad. What I meant was: there’s usually a side door and it’s usually simpler. You don’t have to walk through the whole building to get to the room you want.

But actually, specifically on the topic of reddit…

redlib.catsarch.com

github.com/complexlogic/flex-launcher

I mean, people fetishise it. Ad blocker, third-party cookies blocked, fingerprint-resistant browser, Pi-hole, VPN… all to visit Reddit.

When the simple solution is Lemmy.

There’s usually a 80/20 solution to these things and it shouldn’t require a burner phone, cryptography and tradecraft.

I’m probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in “OK…shit’s expensive…what’s the MOST I can do with the LEAST?”.

I think that comes from spending time in the lowspecgamer culture, where folks (hello!) will literally recode the game engine, bridge motherboard pins with paperclips and drill holes into the PC before buying new hardware.

For example, I specced out a (very decent) “sneakernet” / internet mirror for myself, as an intellectual exercise…and every time I run the numbers, they go from 8TB on the low end to 16TB on the high.

That includes mirroring somewhere around 3-5yrs of YouTube videos (in glorious 540-720p).

I can (and do) host an obscene amount of stuff on a SBC with a 256GB M.2.

Given narrow jobs like DNS, VPN, media, sync, search and automation and you can do a stupid amount with pi4 4GB.

Same thing with LLMs. People try to solve the problem of LLMs with bigger models, bigger GPUs etc…and I’m over here thinking “actually, the LLM is really just the mouthpiece; everything else around it is just good old programming”.

Memory, search, STT and TTS, OCR, file tools…none of that needs to live in the model or chew up a GPU…and once normal software handles that stuff, the question becomes: how small can the LLM be and still be useful middleware?

Turns out…pretty fucking small.

Honesty, I don’t think prices are coming down any time soon (RAM, 8TB NVMe drives, Threadrippers, 25GbE gear…hell, I saw a Blackwell yesterday on “sale” for $15K USD) so we might need to get creative.

Personally, I’m building towards resilience and independence. My next DIY will be the solar system… and because I’m paring down my homelab significantly, I can get away with a micro-system for around $2K.

Do wish hard drives were cheaper tho. Might have to go back to my “DVD as back up server” idea.

TL;DR: the only way to win is not to play the game…or at least, play it by your own rules.

What are these ads you speak of? 😎

Kidding aside…ya’ll go crazy with your piHoles and such and I’m over here using software that just…doesn’t serve ads. I think the most I’ve had to do is install Karma Firewall on the kids tablets and maybe change the front end on the TVs (which doesn’t connect to the net, though media stick does).

That and uBlock on browser seems to give me 90% of the results of using pihole, pfsense etc. So, I just…stopped using them.

Now, when I visit my folks…yeah…holy shit…but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.

It’s a little bit like the four rules for winning a street fight.

• Avoid stupid people.
• Avoid people doing stupid things.
• Avoid stupid places.
• Avoid stupid times.

Can’t speak to cutting edge options but will say when we went to Tokyo at start of year, I took the google Chromecast with TV (1080p version) + USB pass-thru + 128GB flashdrive.

The Chromecast had Nova player installed. I pointed it at the flashdrive and boom - instant media front end for the kids. Had to connect briefly to scrape images etc but after that was all off line.

That - plus smart tube - meant they could decompress after a day out and about.

That version of the Chromecast has been superseded (though can still buy on eBay).

Huh? The ABC app works perfectly fine on the google Chromecast with TV (the little white hockey puck one). Hell, it works fine on my $199 TCL (2GB) from OfficeWorks.

Or did you mean the generation before that (the one that looks like a fat USB stick), where you’d be casting from your phone?

Yep, that too. Though on one of my TVs (TCL), simply disabling the inbuilt ‘startupwraith’ seems to have the same effect

# Disable com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx which is the default launcher on CCwGTV
$ adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.apps.tv.launcherx
# com.google.android.tungsten.setupwraith will then be used as a 'fallback' and will automatically
# re-enable the default launcher, so disable it as well
$ adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 com.google.android.tungsten.setupwraith

Stremio (with uh…some optional extras enabled) should do that for you just fine.

It’s available on the play store IIRC…because by itself, its just an aggregator. You just need to enable some community plug ins.

Works even better if you pay for just one thing (all of $9 for 3 months iirc - what’s the current Real-Debrid cost, someone?).

www.reddit.com/r/…/stremio_all_you_need_to_know/

One really fun thing about it is a “currently hot on ____” (Netflix, disney+, whatever) plugin. Makes the yar har har even easier.

I haven’t tried enabling voice search in Flauncher (Android TV and GCCWTV are pain in the ass - won’t accept other keyboards let alone voice search apps) so its click into stremio first then go looking.

Google Chromecast with TV (GCCWTV) - aka the one that looks like a hockey puck - has / had Hoopla.

I used the adb commands they recommend to disable the stock interface. So pressing home on the remote brings me back to Flauncher always.

Haven’t seen the stock dash in years. Been great.

The only bastard thing is that when I set it up on a fire stick, the fire stick would disable wifi if the stock dash wasn’t used. That thing is trash anyway, so no loss. Don’t buy firesticks.

The baller move would be to get reddit.com to resolve to lemmy.

Or meatspin, if you want (…negative?) reinforcement

Don’t see why not. It’s just a front end launcher. If you can install the app…this will launch it.

PS: I like Jellyfin but I’m a fan of Nova-Player too. Simpler is sometimes better.

github.com/nova-video-player/aos-AVP

All of that. Lack of ads, more performant etc. Plus (and depending on the device), you can set it up in such a way that you don’t need to sign into your google account, yet still have ability to watch YouTube (Smartube), install apps (side load plus use the Fdroid TV store … name escapes me at the moment… Flicky I think?).

Even if you need to be signed in for some reason, it’s a smoother experience.

Its just…better. You’ll lose some of the prettiness (for some reason, mine no longer displays backgrounds from upsplash, only solid colours) but its more than worth it.

EDIT: Yes, it IS Flicky

f-droid.org/packages/app.flicky/

f-droid.org/en/packages/app.smarttube.fdroid/

www.sendfilestotv.app

I’ve been using Flauncher as the replacement dash for years on all my android TVs and Chromecasts

gitlab.com/flauncher/flauncher

It makes a massive difference and I strongly recommend it

Actually, I’ve been toying around with doing just that.

github.com/karpathy/nanochat

Given the surplus of power from solar I have, my set up (discussed elsewhere), I can run the training process end to end over about 50 days. It could be fun to make something truly bespoke from scratch.

Returning to my prior example - it was only overkill for this task (and only because the problem turned out to be relatively simple), but I wanted to answer against the claim that people were using LLMs and agents for just programming.

The example I cited IS silly, but it happened - IRL - 3 days ago. I can cite several much more “serious” use cases if you’d like.

On the broader topic of costs: none of us can really comprehend the embedded costs in the things we use everyday.

However unlike (say) the recurring embedded costs of buying bottled water, a cup of coffee or streaming a movie, the costs of my set up are paid once and pay off multiple times.

Ultimately, I get why there’s a FuckAI sentiment… but really we should expand that to “Fuck Corpo AI”. My feeling is that it’s not AI that people are against per se, it’s the corpos and what they’re doing with them. Too much of that gets flattened and tribal.

The “true cost” argument only holds if you assume the only valid infrastructure is someone else’s. I don’t make that assumption, and I’d say that neither do others in the enthusiast community.

I am indeed. With the amount of solar here - and the relatively low cost for this sort of mini DIY set up - it’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.