Well known in the industry how you don’t assess programmers by lines of code. You kind of want them to be efficient and clean. Spend their day thinking and design clever solutions… Not pump out lots of unmaintainable low quality stuff. And have a million lines of that by tomorrow. But yeah, guess every aspect of this aligns well. You should be using Linux by now. Or at least do the switch in the near future.

If you’re set on these devices, maybe have a look at the open-source projects meant to strip Tuya devices from their Cloud dependencies. There’s some aftermarket firmware available for some devices. And we have projects like TuyAPI, Local Tuya, tuya-mqtt… It involves some tinkering, but some of these devices work with new firmware or a fake version of the API. And there might be some information on specific devices in the HomeAssistant forum. With a bit of luck, someone already tried it. I generally don’t buy devices unless there’s some info in the forum.

Hmm. I think the main damage is done by other factors. I mean even before AI, everything turned into subscriptions and services. We use Office365 these days and the documents are in the cloud. There isn’t much need for Free Software Office Suites or mail clients anymore. Operating systems have less impact because honestly only old people use computers. Everyone else does their stuff on a phone. And then we finally crossed the barrier into a post-privacy world and people don’t care. And on top of that large companies take the nice database projects, libraries etc and monetize products with that. Without caring too much if that’s sustainable. And AI is one negative factor amongst many.

I think educational activities work best once they have some application to someones life. So it’d be something within the realm of a 7yo. And it’s not fun unless there’s a sense of achievement every now and then, along with all the stuff to learn. So probably not too steep of a learning curve.

Sadly they discontinued Lego Mindstorms. I think robotics is a great hands-on topic. People can grasp what they’re currently doing, why they do it, and what it’s good for. It has a tactile aspect, so you’ll train dexterity as well and gently connect the physical realm with the maths.

But other than that, I bet there’s a lot of things you can try. Design a website (and deploy a small webserver). Maybe some easy to use photo gallery if they have a tablet or camera. Maybe a Wordpress for them to write a Blog? They should be familiar with the concept of a diary. Kids love Minecraft, so maybe a Luanti server if you’re into Free Software. But learn how to add NPCs and animals, that is (or used to be?) a complicated process in Luanti and the world feels boring and empty without. A chat server to their loved ones could motivate them to read and write text (messages). Or skip the selfhosting aspect and do the kids games available for Linux. Paint, LibreOffice…

I like the recommendations from other people as well. Sadly I don’t know which kids programming language works best. I think I heard you can just go straight for Python as well. Not sure if that’s true or what age group that applies to. It’s a bit more involved to learn the syntax and why you need brackets around certain things etc but at least they get to learn the real deal and something properly useful. 7 might be a bit young, though. And there might be a language barrier. But that applies to all the computer stuff behind the scenes, unless you’re a native English speaker.

If you just want something simple that does the job, you can try a turnkey solution like YunoHost. There’s several other ones out there. Some with containers, some with more or less pre-packaged software… If you want to learn more during the process, maybe don’t and do it yourself because these things don’t teach you a lot. There’s some resources like the awesome-selfhosted list in the sidebar of this community. But I think for installing services you’d mainly look at the specific documentation of the specific service you’re just about to tackle. And maybe read up on Docker containers etc to judge whether you want to do it that way.

Or maybe @WhiteHotaru@feddit.org would like to do that for us?

Thanks. Yeah those would be great in an awesome-webhosting list. Or something concerned with household or businesses. But as far as I know you’re supposed to stick with a topic with those awesome lists and not make random lists of random projects… I’ve filed a bug report in the meantime: https://github.com/ccbikai/awesome-homelab/issues/24

Lol. Why isn’t Forgejo in Development but some predecessors are? And Gitea is listed twice. And why is a tower defense game listed under Automation? Also I think a few projects I use are missing. Why isn’t the most common content management system there? The second most common password manager? The reverse proxy everyone uses? And who on earth needs customer live chat and a lot of business-scale website analytics, webshop systems and CRM and ERP in their homelab?? I’m sorry but this looks like slop.

Maybe first check if it’s even legal to robo-call the police emergency line. I suppose with off-the-shelf systems that’s done by people in some callcenter who read the notification. In this case that’d be you. Or they’re somehow certified or have some agreement with the police… I don’t know the details. Technically it’d be possible. I’m running an Asterisk PBX server and hook into the dialplan with the REST API (that’d be ARI on the Asterisk side). That way Home Assistant can call me and make my landline phone ring twice once the laundry is done. And Asterisk can do arbitrary things. You could make it call you, play back some announcement, wait for your answer and process it and then call the police line and play back some pre-recorded message.

But you’d really need to talk to police and ask them about how to interface with them.

I’m not sure if this translates to the content creators. There’s many of them whom I really like to watch who do (or did) Youtube as a business model. Tom Scott being one example or Derek Muller (Veritasium). I’m subscribed to many more. Simplicissimus and their yet better second channel (in German). We wouldn’t have those without monetization. The platform of course went shit over time. Fortunately my Ad blocker still works and thanks to Sponsorblock my experience is fairly alright… But personally - I’m split on this question. We had quite the amount of entertainment before monetization but I think a large amount of quality content also arrived after that, and because of it. Those people would be working some office job today if it wasn’t to Youtube. And I (and the world) would miss out… On the other hand we got MrBeast, a lot of fake cooking videos…

One thing I did is connect to the smart home (Home Assistant) and the NAS running at home. Some internet service providers don’t provide proper IPv4 addresses any more so IPv6 is the most convenient way to connect. This doesn’t require a VPN provider, though.

As far as I know it uses the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol. On a channel within the regular 2.4GHz wifi spectrum. So no license needed unless it collides with laws for point-to-point beams. All people communicating to each other obviously need to agree on a channel. It comes with some hierarchy where I’m at. There are local chapters who make up some config and who also operate nodes and exit nodes into the internet. These are necessary because Germany has stupid laws.

There’s Freifunk as well!

Yes. I think several clients have open feature requests. The Stalwart documentation has a list of projects. There is one command line client as of now. But I’m not switching to a cli mail client or proprietary software, so I’ve postponed it. We’ll see where this is going.

I welcome these modernization attempts. Though in theory I’d love to see someone revamp email in its entirety, add encryption, signatures, chat and crack down on spam and phishing. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen, but that’d be great, too.

Unfortunately JMAP isn’t supported (yet) by a lot of email clients. I don’t think there’s a good open-source email suite for computers available… But I’ve tried Stalwart as well and it’s really sleek and seems to come with good defaults.

Lol. I think FIFA demand a pile of money from people integrating the live streams into their platforms. We should start the fundraiser soon.

And I think I’m going to boycott the world cup 2026, so make this the women’s world cup in 2027.

Yes. And I’ve seen people do really weird (and worse) stuff, like re-post questions. And if you’re unaware of that, you’re bound to take 10mins out of your day to answer the product or Linux or life question and later find out you were ripped off. At least that’s how it feels to me if people fabricate that kind of activity. And it kills the mood to write comments for a while.

Alright. And for your information, the Peertube function is a bit broken. I think the Peertube developers did their best. But Youtube has a lot of datacenter IP address ranges blocked. And they do rate-limiting and force people to sign in after downloading a few videos. Plus yt-dlp (which it relies upon) and Youtube are playing this cat and mouse game… So it’s disabled on most instances because it doesn’t really work. I was able to make it work on my instance, but I had to jump through several hoops. Configure a SOCKS proxy and tunnel it over my home, residential internet connection. And I think I transferred my login cookies because some videos would be age restricted.

PeerTube has that built in. You can set up a channel and have it import or mirror a Youtube channel. For Lemmy there’s several bots and scripts. As other people said that’s what lemmit.online is about.

Be a bit careful when rolling this out. Several people don’t like it. They’ve left Reddit for a reason and this is drowning them in bot activity. And usually these posts are low engagement, Reddit users can’t see the comments, so you’re not getting a lot of answers. I think it’s good practice how we here have separated that to dedicated instances, so users can just have genuine conversations everywhere else.

Wow, is that better or worse than a president making up tariffs with Grok AI? And police force experimenting with these predictive policing technology and contracting with Palantir? Probably fits with the military, as war is often not very humane to begin with… But all of this aligns in a very dystopian way.