Another option is that instead of trying the bare metal install, get docker working: https://gist.github.com/manoedinata/d93549d85acbee94f37683fa6cbd626e

Then you can just use the pihole container.

You’re welcome!

One of the things that is almost universally true of FOSS software is that the documentation is usually really good. In addition to the talented developers there are a lot of talent technical writers who donate their time to maintaining wikis and documentation.

The man (manual) pages are also really useful (type ‘man ls’ or ‘man systemctl’) and most projects include man pages for their man commands. man systemctl:

Another helpful tool to install is tldr. Instead of showing you the manual, it’ll show you a page which includes a brief list of the most common use cases for that command and explainations.

tldr systemctl:

Don’t feel like you need to read these things like a novel, just know that they’re there so when you have a problem or want to try to customize your system in some way you will have a source to turn to.

Also, since you’re really new you’re likely to stumble into vim and get trapped. It’s a text editor with a unique way of interacting with the text due to it being a terminal application. This style of input is often mirrored in other things. man pages use vim-like keybindings, for example. Once again, Fireship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-txKSRn0qeA

Learning vim completely is it’s own project, but at least be familiar enough with it that you can open a document, navigate around, make changes and save/close the document. There’s tons of videos on the topic (and cheatsheets for the more advanced vim motions, just do an image search).

Good luck! :D

Linus Tech Tips - TruSpec

They have them in their store.

I look forward to the next LK-99

It is simple, it is not easy.

‘Take a picture of the entire ocean and look for ships’ is simple, but executing that plan is not.

It requires hundreds of millions of dollars of reconnaissance satellites, and an entire branch of personnel to operate and digest the information.

This is why the US operates carrier battle groups instead of just sailing their carriers everywhere with a small escort. They can’t hide, but they can pack enough offensive and defensive power into a tiny area to make most attacks infeasible.

Anyways, there’s a reason submarines exist

True, and even they’re vulnerable when they surface (if they’re moving), the v-shaped wake is also very detectable from space where satellites can detect wave heights within 3cm. It’s not easy for humans to find, but with billions of dollars to spend on computers, these kinds of things are very much within the reach of sovereign nations.

The delay is almost assuredly to prevent live scamming. Like a grandparent picking up a random call or text and being tricked into thinking they’re a family member/bank worker/etc.

I’ll admit it’s annoying, and could be used by Google later to do more annoying shit.

Taking their explanations in good faith and looking at it from an customer security point of view, I can see this cutting back on some common scam types. This is kind of like how, when you go to rustdesk.com there’s a giant ‘YOU’RE PROBABLY GETTING SCAMMED’ banner across the top of the page:

These little steps can seems pointless or annoying to us, as most of us are probably in the upper range of tech skills, but consider the average user and it starts to make a lot more sense.

False positives are fine, you assign 1, 10, 50, 100 analysts to review hits. You only need to find it once, then the search area becomes incredibly small for each subsequent satellite pass.

I’m not saying that it is easy, just that you don’t need to have a surface ship within 15 nm in order to see it.

While the resolution could be good, have fun looking for that spec.

Seems like an simple but tedious job. Something that a computer can do.

Object detection algorithms are incredibly fast and can learn to tell the difference between an aircraft carrier and an ocean.

I can understand this workflow being created to protect the legions of people who are tricked into installing spyware.

It doesn’t remotely affect me because I use GrapheneOS and if this is an issue for you then you’re probably someone who should look at installing GOS or Lineage.

I don’t think Google should be able to do this and it is likely part of a longer-term strategy to strangle any competition. At the same time, I can understand how this change will save a lot of grandparents from clicking a link in a text from their ‘grandchildren’ and installing spyware that’ll steal all of their bank information.

emotional contagion

If that doesn’t sum up all of social media for the past decade, I can’t think of a better term.

This is no different than the tobacco companies discovering that tobacco was bad and then sitting on the data and muddying the waters for decades so that they could make profit… but instead of lung cancers, Zuckerberg’s machine is causing genocide and destroying democracies.

USB cables are a mess when it comes to compliance with the standard.

I’ve been buying overengineered cables (promoted by a popular Linus youtuber, which I won’t link due to not being an ad bot) just so I don’t have to worry about the cable being the problem.

If you do this professionally, a thermal camera is also useful, I’ve found some bad cables on client sites just by scanning the cable mass in IR. Cheap cables + high current loads (like laptop charging) can summon the magic smoke demons.

Since you’re just starting you’ll want to make sure you have a good foundational understand of what Linux is and how it works. Understanding the File System Hierarchy, file permissions, user/groups management, etc will help the ‘feeling over your head’ part. There are a lot of Youtube videos/playlist talking about the basics, skim a few to see if you like how they’re presenting the information and pick whichever works best for you.

For a more structured approach, look for books (or a class at a vocational school if that’s something you’d do) teaching Linux+. This is an entry level certification by CompTIA and the course will cover all of the fundamental things that you need to understand.

Have a project in mind to motivate you. In the end, you’re learning all of this so that you can do something with Linux so pick a something that would improve your setup. Jellyfin running on a NAS is an good and achievable goal to start with.

Join some of the Linux/selfhost/homelab communities: !linux@lemmy.ml, !linux@programming.dev, !selfhosted@lemmy.world, !linuxmemes@lemmy.world. These are great when you’re stuck on something and need to ask for help.

On Reddit the homelab, linux and selfhosted subreddits are also good to read.

When you’re getting started and also when you have a problem remember: RTFM - Always, ALWAYS read the manual/docs and also check the Arch wiki and Gentoo wiki. Asking for help without first reading the documentation and wiki is… frowned upon in the community. Some people will give you a hard time if your question is answerable in a Google search or in a wiki article.

LLMs can be useful as well. You have to be careful here because they can hallucinate and provide you with wrong information. LLMs that search and summarize based on your question will generally be more accurate but generally don’t run any terminal commands that they give you without first verifying what they do. Treat them like a search engine, a starting off point for you to do your own research. You could probably just ask for the exact terminal commands to setup a Jellyfin server on docker and get pretty far, but you wouldn’t learn anything and that will hurt your efforts to learn. I’ve been using Kagi’s AI assistant which includes a research agent option that has been pretty useful.

Finally, don’t avoid using the terminal, you can do a lot with a GUI but being comfortable with terminal use is fairly mandatory for anything but casual desktop use.

“We wanted to show that you wouldn’t accept this in the analogue world,” said Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, the council’s director of digital policy. “But this is happening every day in our digital products and services, and we really think it doesn’t need to be that way.”

We’re at a point where tech companies have given away easy solutions to all of our problems to the point that nobody actually knows how to use the technology that they rely on.

How do people listen to music? Spotify

How do people watch videos? Netflix

How do people talk to your friends? Meta/X/Whatever

All of those services seem like a great deal, they give you things for free/cheap and you never have to take the effort to figure out what a codec is or how to manage your own media. People pay for these services with their privacy, freedom and permanent reliance on tech companies to give them access to technology (and $10/mo, $12/mo, $13.99/mo, $15/mo, $20/mo)

These services have created a dependency that they’re now exploiting. What does someone do when Netflix raises their prices? Their technological skillset limits them to operating the Play/App Store so all of their other options are similarly bad options offering the same Faustian bargain.

The solution is simple and also difficult: learn to use the technology that you depend on and stop using the services that require you give up your privacy and freedom.

There are entire communities of people who’ve already made this leap. Look into the Privacy/Self-Hosted/Homelab communities, they are full of people who’ve rejected the idea that technological services are only available as a product where you have to give up control over your digital life to purchase. The Free and Open Source community is made up of a huge amount of people who volunteer their time to create software that is available for you to use or modify as you’d like.

It isn’t easy. Most people have spent the majority of their lives learning to use software created by Microsoft, Google and Apple. They’ve spent hundreds of hours learning how to use Facebook or iOS and this creates a strong incentive to stay on these services. Learning these things was a waste of time and have become the hook that keeps you stuck in enshittification land.

I know that people don’t want to hear ‘Well, you just need to learn Linux/Docker/FOSS software’, but that’s the solution that we have collectively arrived at in this alternate world where we’re rejecting commercial software/service providers.

Nobody is coming to save you from this problem, there’s isn’t going to be a not-enshittified Norwegian Netflix opening up next year for you to subscribe to. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world.

Come and join us.