• 6 Posts
  • 134 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 27th, 2023

help-circle




  • In case you’re doubting about doing it: do it. It’s fine.

    But don’t make the mistakes I made :')

    1. don’t “recycle” an old microSD with osmc or some other system still on it. Start from scratch.

    In fact, I bought a new SD card. 32 GB costs a ridiculous 7 €. It’s worth not taking the risk with some old one that’s possibly been flashed many times before. I’m quite sure some blocks on the one i was using previous were corrupted.

    1. don’t use raspbian, osmc, debian, … Use DIETPI. Possibly raspbian lite. It’s the absolute minimal system you can get, with a focus on home-servering whatever you want on a rpi. This is the way. It’s disabling sending power to whatever is on there that you’ll never be using anyhow. Including the option to fully disable local hdmi output, absolutely no local audio-out support, etc. Squeezing all these little ones for sure pays off on a rpi 3 or older.

    2. video streaming works fine! Better than local video playing used to be with the osmc/kodi install years ago on the exact same pi. Mkv HVEC H264 at 4.4 Mbps with AC3 sound 384 Kbps: plays smooth in browser. Sure, it’s not what you want if you’re doing the ultrahd 4K i don’t know what, but is good enough for me.

    3. invest in the silly cooling accessories. It is worth it. Putting a tiny deskfan on the pi within a minute drops temperature 15-20 °C, while libraryscanning + videostreaming… Glue the cooling elements (1 € or even less) on the chips, buy the tiny fan or a case with fan built in. It’s another 6-12 € that is more than worth it.

    4. stay away from HDD. They eat lots of energy. SSD is worth it. Even if HDD has external power source: they are slow as fuck, takes a while for disks to start spinning. They’re still usefull, as back-up. Another reason to go the DIETPI-way: the back-up disk / live disk shit is easy peasy built in there! No messing around searching how to set that up. Same with (auto-)mounting drives in general by the way.

    5. The only downside so far: the Nordvpn-meshnet approach for remote access was a bit more annoying. It’s not integrated in the dietpi-vpn (or not yet). So you gotta install nordvpn seperately and make that work.

    TL;DR: DIETPI !!!



  • I will try that in a few days ;)

    I’m assuming it will be okay-ish, as long as its 720p or lower and not super compressed and only 1 client connected. Ordered a tiny 3.3V rpi fan, it might help. Or make things worse as it drains some power, who knows.

    Used to have kodi on this rpi for a few years, until about 4 years ago. Only local tho, not as server. It struggled hard with playing HVEC. Visibly (annoyingly) lagging. Older filetypes worked very fine.

    If it sucks, I can still use it as server remote through vpn, download something, play locally.

    Only music jellyfin has somewhat stabilised now. Got 48h without crashing! Think internet connection somehow gets stuck sometimes. Quite certain it’s not a RAM, not a temp and not a SSD issue. Gonna put a cron script to regularly check connection, if down to long, reboot. That might “fix” it well enough to be usable longterm, local+remote.

    Got it going remote too, can listen to my jellyfin on any network now, with the Nordvpn meshnet it’s really easy to set up and presumably that’s secure too.



  • Server is Raspberry pi 3 B with 1TB SSD.

    Rpi temp idle is ~49°C, gets to about ~65° when being queried, etc. ~75° during initial library scan

    Was a osmc install (which as I understand is a minimalist debian ?), installed jellyfin, disabled mediacenter (kodi) on boot. It’s all on home wifi still… Only about 1700 albums of music and audiobooks, no movies no series. Perhaps the wifi chip in rpi isn’t good enough?





  • Slow reply but it might still be worth it. It got easy to request the refund if you’ve booked in their DB Navigator app, then it’s just: open the trip, go to tab “ticket” (where qr code is), scroll all the way to the bottom for “more actions” and select “submit compensation request”. No paper form required! Quite the feat for a German bureaucratic company!


  • I think this perception is false.

    On many big rail corridors like Antwerp/Rotterdam through Germany/Switzerland to Milan/Torino/Genova a lot or the rails are very shared by freight and passengers.

    There are dedicated passengers rails mostly on (expensive to ride) high speed lines and there are dedicated freight tracks within ports and such, but a lot of tracks are still shared by both.

    Plenty of saturated lines where you can see everything pass by: intercities, S-bahn style, freight all on same tracks and only at certains stops can they overtake each other.


  • I think the Swiss beat you aswell. They run a rather dense network too. Not dense like NL in the urban sense of the word, but Swiss connections are very well frequented and they run through some quite difficult terrain adding to the difficulty of running it all smoothly. The Swiss and Dutch network has quite some resemblance actually in how it is ran, both more perceived as a transfer model with rather easy to read, logical timetables (“runs every half hour”: 13u00 13u30 14u00 etc), both barely having any real high speed lines.

    From having travelled with trains in Europe, i’ld intuitively say in Europe Swiss wins, followed by the Netherlands and then perhaps the Austrians or the French. Belgium up there is this ranking is just lies and deceipt, in my experience the Germans the Belgians are about as reliable (not), but the germans do still win from Belgium because they are (often but not always) more fair in the communication and they hand out “request a refund”-forms in delayed trains.


  • running it slower on schedule does solve the problem of being more predictable and being able to plan a bit better if you have to catch connections. I much rather have more realistic timetables over trying to achieve overall shorter travel times.

    The ‘fast’ version of Mechelen-Leuven (the 25min) is a lot slower now because they rerouted it to add the new Brussels airport stop on this line. Of course a train with fewer stops will run faster. But this airport stop seems worth it to me for both cities, though longer route it now runs almost the same time as the slow stops everywhere L-train (31min) between the two cities.

    Anyhow, not really punctuality to blame in this example, it’s a planning/routing choice. One you might disagree with, sure, but it’s not punctuality.

    Sometimes trains become “faster” in the same way because stops get skipped more often or cancelled altogether. They could run a very fast train between Eupen and Oostende, but what’s the point if you’re not picking up and dropping off any passengers along the route? Filling up the path for a “fast” connection almost noone can actually use. Trains in Belgium are slow in general because there are just villages and stops everywhere, every single train not on an actual highspeed line has the same hard choice: how many stops, where yes, where no, how many passengers a day does a stop need to be worth it? I’ve cursed often at the Beveren stop on the Antwerp-Gent line, but there are always people getting on and off there… Our city planning has just been shit for 200 years and this is a consequence, much of our rail network functions more like a large metrosystem.