My active account is @thayerw.

@thayer is inactive and no longer monitored; it remains only for the sake of post history.


  • 2 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Thanks for clarifying, and I can appreciate your overall concerns as I face the same dilemma with my aging relatives.

    Just to confirm, have you opened these files in Word yourself (or witnessed them being opened), to verify they are in fact valid documents? if valid, are they meant to be in English?

    It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen “other” files renamed with an incorrect file extension.


  • Assuming you meant “.docx files”, those should open without issue in LibreOffice. As others have said, OnlyOffice is another popular option if format preservation is a goal.

    What do you mean when you say the files are “not supported” by the tools you’ve tried? What, exactly, is happening and what are you trying to accomplish? The end goal wasn’t clear to me from your post.

    Getting Word to run under wine will require much more effort than copying the Word binary.




  • thayer@lemmy.catoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSome hardware talk
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    3 months ago

    Amazon typically has a few vendors that specialize in refurbished Optiplexes and/or HP Elites in small or ultra small form factor sizes.

    A word of caution about these refurbs though…the memory and storage they include are often dollar store brands (Kingfast) that I wouldn’t even trust for a child’s PC. It’s worth purchasing your own after the fact.


  • thayer@lemmy.catoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSome hardware talk
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    3 months ago

    Your options will depend on many things…

    • How much storage is needed?
    • Is RAID important to you?
    • Is power usage a concern?
    • Noise level?

    I don’t know how demanding photoprism is, but you could probably do fine with a refurbished i5/i7 Dell Optiplex or similar, with one or more SSDs added to it. If money is really tight and storage needs are high, you could go with mechanical drives instead.

    The problem with enterprise servers is that are generally very loud and use a lot of power…not unlike adding a second refrigerator to your environment. In my opinion, they’re not worth it unless you have a specific use case (training for a career, etc.).


  • I’ve been very happy with both Silverblue and Kinoite. I’ve installed it to all of my workstations now and can’t imagine ever going back to a traditional distro.

    Your comments suggest that you’re already aware of distros like Silverblue so, if I may ask, how are these different than what you’re looking for? Silverblue comes with several flatpaks installed, but you can easily remove these and you’ll be left with a pretty barebones ostree image.


  • thayer@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlTrying to rescue a 1GB RAM laptop
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    4 months ago

    If that’s one of those old 10" netbooks, I had good experiences running dwm and xmonad on mine back in the day (had an Acer and later an MSI Wind U120(?)). Typically ran all my apps maximized, one per desktop. Firefox did okay, but this was around 2010-2012. Mostly stuck with terminal apps and it was more than snappy enough.

    Some screenshots from days past…




  • While Reolink hardware is perfect for Blue Iris and other self-hosted solutions, I try to warn everyone that Reolink’s own Android app now captures your device’s clipboard whenever accessed. The same may be true for their desktop or iOS apps, I don’t know.

    I have several Reolink cameras and I’ve been happy with their overall image quality and capabilities, but I do not trust their software whatsoever and recommend keeping them isolated from the internet entirely.