RootBeerGuy

I am just impressed by the idea and execution. Just wow. Too bad he took it too far.

I am using hd-idle (see link) to spin down my one external hard drive on my RPI server. It is not used for large parts of the day and night so it has been quite useful to set up hd-idle, which spins down the drive after an hour or so of no activity.

Now hd-idle can generate a log file where it notes down some data, e.g. when the drive was spun down, how long it was running, what time it spun down.

You can read the file to get an impression how well it works, but I'd like to see the data visualised or analysed in some way. Seeing the past month of how often per day the drive was spun down, or average length of long it was running and so on.

Searching online I couldn't really find anything. Maybe anybody here knows more? Or what ways of recording and looking at this type of data are you using?

I have a small self hosted setup at home with a RaspberryPi and an external HDD, just enough for what I need.

Some time ago I found a pretty sweet app which from the name implies its mostly working when you use a RPI OS, to monitor the RPI from your android phone: https://github.com/eidottermihi/rpicheck

Its called RaspiCheck (picture in the post is the one from github), and unfortunately it is seriously outdated and development ceased. It is still working on my current phone but I am well aware that's not going to last.

So I am wondering what else is out there that could fill the gap it would leave.

I am using it for 2 things mostly:

1. monitor system stats, like simply seeing the system is running (I know, like ping), but at the same time also showing memory, average load, temperature and so on.
2. sending SSH commands, and this is where the app really shines. Using a terminal on the phone is not impossible, but boy is it annoying. In RaspiCheck you can define commands, with placeholders, which allows you to send those to the RPI just by tapping them. So for example I got my backup set up that I can mount the backup drive with one tap, a second tap runs the right backup script (I have several I can choose from by filling the placeholder I leave in that command) and then unmount with a third tap.

I got other commands I like to reuse a lot set up in it and its really useful to me, let's me manage the RPI from my phone in an easy way.

So back to the question at hand, is there anything else like this out there for Android? If possible one app, FOSS preferred. I am pretty sure there are browser-based solutions, if there is no dedicated app other than this, then I guess that's the next best thing. What are you using in your setup that you can recommend?

I guess most people know about the movie web app site, which pulls videos from various sources.

Recently they added a request to download an extension to your browser, for optimal perfomance and better quality.

It is featured on the firefox android extensions site from Mozilla, it has a github page. What I read online is that it seems the extension wants access to everything you do in your browser, which seems kind of sketchy.

What do people here think about it? Anyone installed it and can say more?

Edit: thanks for all the comments, looks like less people knew about this than I thought.

I need some help with some new suggestions for what I want from my tiny homeserver, made up by a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB (passive cooling case) and an external hard drive. That server will not be reachable from outside my home network, if that makes a difference for suggestions.

I am looking for an easy solution that works well on the limited resources of the Rpi. What I mostly need is an app I can self-host that has a nice and well performing gallery function, I got tons of old photos from when I still used digital cameras a lot. Those are already sorted in folders, and I want that app to not mess with that at all, just read them basically.

What I also need is for that app to be able to auto-upload new photos from my phone regularly, so I can include them more easily in backups of my server. I also do not want them to be weirdly hidden in some strange folder structures, so that they remain accessible if I want to change apps again down the road.

Here is what I tried already: Photoprism - loved it in general, but all the indexing was super slow on the Rpi of course. I didn't really need the AI features of it either. It also made quite big thumbnails for the image analysis so it would really add a huge requirement of a ton more storage space just for features I did not want to use, I understand those could be downscaled but the process seemed tedious and resource-intensive. Overall wasn't practical for the Rpi, if I had a stronger server I'd try again.

Nextcloud - thats the current solution I am looking at, since it got all I want. Auto-upload, easy access, no resource-heavy features I don't need. But overall, it is pretty slow on the Rpi for scrolling through photo libraries. I found today the NC Photos app on Google Play Store, which seems to work better than the Nextcloud App to look at galleries, but still seems slow.

Aside from that I found out about Immich, but cannot test it right now since my Rpi runs on 32bit. But it sounded to me like a lighter type of Photoprism app, maybe not fair to say, I know its supposed to be like Google Photos. But the stuff it does for face recognition and what else makes it sound again like a choice I won't enjoy using on the Rpi. Maybe that is an unfair view? I see recently the feature that allows external libraries in it, was added, so that fits my needs.

Anyway, thanks for reading all this, I will end with the question, are there any other solutions that I haven't considered so far?

Trying to get my child to go out and run a bit with me, worked ok so far but I know it might get boring at some point.

So I was looking for any kind of children friendly app that either counts distance or steps just for a run, so not at all times, and then gives some kind of reward for that. Like a dog growing up or whatever, something ok for kids. Zombie run comes up often but I don't think my child is into that, bit too scary maybe with the zombie theme.

Other apps I found are counting steps continously, or there are some elaborate minigames connected. I really don't want my little one to spend more time on a screen, so thats not great either. Like Pokemon Go, not into Pokemon yet anyway but its too much aside from the actual running/walking.

Anybody got a good suggestion that goes in that direction?

I know that if you want to get around geoblocking content, normally you just use a VPN from the location you need.

Now I am using a streaming app on Android from a tv program of my home country, they implemented geoblocking already long ago on their website but now the app is also going the same way. Much of the content is blocked now.

Is there an simple way I can have a VPN connection open just for this app on my phone? Or are there other ways to fool the app into thinking its in the right location?