I feel you, been there. :) I now use Gentoo on my Pi and it is stable, but I can’t recommend that to anyone who is not already used to Gentoo, it’s challenging to install it by itself.

Regarding the SD card, I have no problem anymore since I stopped using the cheapest brands. I now use only Sandisk Ultra microSDXC, and the oldest ones have been working for four years without issue. It’s still basically a NAND (same stuff than in SSD drives) soldered on pins, though, so it’s very fragile. Care should be taken to neve bend them : they look flexible, but the NAND really isn’t.

It’s also a good idea to backup the whole card. As they usually weight way less than hard drives, it’s easy to backup on your system and flash them back, mounting the sdcard on your desktop/laptop:

lsblk # find the device name, let's say it's mmcblk1 
dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 of=./backup-file bs=1G  # making a backup
dd if=./backup-file of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=1G  # restoring the backup

if means “input file”, of means “output file” and bs is the buffer size (how many bytes are copied at once, the more the faster, but it will use that amount or RAM at each iteration). dd is just copying input to output, bs bytes by bs bytes.

If you do that regularly, even using cheap sdcard that fail after a year will be less of a setback : you can just flash the last saved version of the system on a new card. It’s probably better, though, to keep only the OS on the sdcard, and store important daily updated data on a usb drive or key.

That’s true, but only initially. Once you get SPF/DKIM right, that you domain name grows a few years old (enough to be considered established) and that you nailed your configuration, there is no issue anymore. I’ve been running my own Postfix on a Pi in my home for about 5 years, and It Just Works ™. The only maintenance I do is updating the software (done when updating the rest of the OS), and I don’t get shadowbanned mails anymore, even when sending to outlook.com (which is. by far, the worst peer when self-hosting emails).

EDIT : by the way, fun fact : it seems not as related to IP reputation as it’s often said (well, unless the IP has bad reputation, of course). I changed my ISP late last year (thus changed my IP), I was very afraid I would lose my good reputation and have to start over with getting my mails shadowbanned, and… nothing happened. My mails just got delivered as usual. So I bet the domain name is at least as important as the IP.

(sorry for the double post, the instance I’m on was throwing errors)

Gotcha, thanks for satisfying my curiosity. :) Of course, you can plug a usb drive on the Pi, but you know better what your needs are. Good luck!

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Max-P already provided good options, but I have to ask what I, and probably other people, wonder : why don’t you just run that scrapping program from your home server, then?

I believe it is something like that. Or it is not mounting the drive correctly and not finding it, or it is something else.

Yes, that’s what I had in mind. I already had similar problems with initramfs, because it was responsible to load the drivers needed for mounting the disk where the kernel was, so a bad initramfs caused the boot to fail from the get go failing to mount the partition.

That being said, I’ve looked at my Pi, and I have no idea what would serve as an initramfs in all those Pi specific files in /boot, if any. If you really want to understand what happened, I guess a possible path would be to find resources on the web explaining in details the Pi boot process, since it’s different from usual linux boot process (it’s not just the Pi either, I played with other ARM devices, like the stuff from pine64, and they all had their own way to boot).

Sorry to hear that, booting problems suck and are horrible to debug.

The next step I would try would be to boot an other install, like a liveusb or a raspbian, on the same usb port, to completely eliminate a hardware problem if it boots properly.

If it is a software problem, it seems to happen very early in the boot process, so my bet would be a corrupted initramfs/initrd (or what is equivalent on a Pi). No idea how you could debug and fix that on Ubuntu, though (especially on a Pi where /boot is… different). Maybe installing an other Ubuntu on an other disk or stick, then copy the boot files (making a backup of the original files to restore them if it doesn’t help, no need to pile up possible causes of trouble). Throwing it here in case other people know better.

Solving it the unix way:

ls -1 | sort -R | sxiv -f -s f -S 5 -

So it’s ls -1 to list the content of current directory (presumably where your pictures are), with one file per line, so we can then pipe it to sort, with the -R option to sort randomly, then piping the result to sxiv, a lightweight image viewer available on most distro (I just checked, it’s available on Debian). For its options : -f means it’s fullscreen, -s f makes it scale to fit the image on screen as well as possible, -S 5 tells it to start in slideshow mode and change picture every 5 seconds, and - is to tell it to take the files list from stdin (thus from the ls and sort commands).

This won’t work for videos, though, only pictures.

You’re going to have a pleasant surprise, then. :) There are RSS feeds for basically everything, on Github : a repository commits, an issue/pull request activities, a user activities, your social feed (the homepage), project releases, etc. Same for Gitlab. Gitlab even recently added a RSS feed for topics, allowing to get notifications when a project matching given topic is created (example: the feed for 3d printing projects). Too bad they don’t have as much activity than Github.

While it’s not articles, you probably want to follow your favorite projects using Github and Gitlab’s RSS feeds for repositories, especially the releases feed. I often learn more about actual trends (not just things people talk about but do not implement) by reading releases changelogs than by reading medium or press articles.

Otherwise, Hacker News (mentioned by temp_user) and Lobster (rss) both are good ways to follow news. HN is more verbose. Lobsters filters what they think is the best content from HN, but it usually comes a day or two later. One interesting aspect of those aggregators is that they help you discover websites that may contain their own rss feed.