i am not into gardening much, but your photos look great. You seem to have a good microscope, maybe you can buy some stains (not very expensive unless you buy good stuff to quantise) and even do some charecterisation.

Thanks! 💚 Most of the pictures were just shot in macro mode on my phone, I’m a bit ashamed to admit it 😄
But I do have a microscope too, and the pics of the springtails were shot with it.

What stains do you recommend?
I believe I have Methylene blue lying around somewhere, maybe that might be useful for a living-dead-characterization?

But to be honest, I didn’t think much about looking up the stuff under the microscope, because I was pretty sure it was mold. I think you can even see the hyphae on the colony on the picture.

From what I got, you have a mildly basic master batch, which you dilute.

My fertiliser is a two-part solution. I mix them with demineralised water, and the final diluted solution has a pH of 6,2-ish, without pH adjuster. But I didn’t test it with the part A solution, which is the one that got moldy. It is probably moderately acidic.

[…] Adding Peroxide/ other oxidizers

Not a big fan of that idea. On the first glance it makes sense, but my arguments against that are:

1. I highly doubt that the fertilizer is resistant against bleach. There are quite a few chelated minerals in it, and I’m sure that they will get destroyed or at least precipitate out of solution. And
2. Even though mycorrhizae (and bacteria) are not remotely as important in hydroponics as they are in soil, I still highly value a healthy ecosystem of healthy microbes, that keep the bad guys at bay. If I add a oxidizing agent to the nutrient solution, it will kill a lot, mainly the good guys. And then bad things, like root rot, happen.

I’m now trying to mitigate that problem by pressure cooking small batches (a bunch of 200 ml bottles instead of 1 liter) and keeping them sealed until use, which will only last a week or so until used up.

My bigger question is, is this growth really problematic or not

It is. In hydroponics, everything should be as clean as possible. Not sterile-clean, but at least not full of slime or dirty.
If there is (too much) organic contamination, it will attract pests. And those specs are organic matter, and I already got the spring tail infestation from it, as I already mentioned in the post.

Regarding worms: I also have a few pots with organic soil (no-till, cover crops, etc.) outside, with a very healthy ecosystem, and an absolute shit ton of earth worms. If they would be a tiny bit bad for plant health, I would consider them as infestation :D I’m glad they aren’t.

After a rain fall and temperature drop in early winter, there were literally hundreds, if not thousands, crawling around on my super small balcony, just from the three pots or so!

Again, I am a gardening noob, and not a chemist, so what I may have said may as well be shit, please feel free to correct me.

Please! You sound both like a chemist AND someone with gardening experience. You seem to already have quite a lot of knowledge, keep going on! 😊

The instance I’m on is down from time to time, and it has been yesterday too sadly. Now it’s back and everything should load properly :)

?

Yeah, that’s what I was also thinking. We live in a microbe filled world, and even if the content in the bottle is sterilized, opening it up once will result in another contamination.

Awesome! I didn’t know this existed, but I definitely have to check that out. Thanks!

KDE Connect has a remote feature for presentations. Maybe one can create a small interface/ WM for it?

For example, Niri WM, configured with just left, right, and laserpointer as confirmation button. Based on uBlue, so it updates itself. Does that sound practical?

I’m using it for years now to control the laptop from my couch? And it works great.

You could maybe get an advertisement screen. You know, those you find at train stations and stores.

Maybe, you could even get something like those touch panels McDonald’s uses, that would be nice!

The option(s) other commenters gave are great! But just to give you more options, I’ll give you a few additional ideas.

1. KDE Connect: You can still use a normal desktop (preferably KDE or Gnome), set your display scale to 150+%, and then use your phone remotely to control the cursor, media playback, and more.
2. Bazzite: often used to replace SteamOS, it also boots into Steam big picture mode by default, where you can set applications in the start menu. It has a nice console-like interface, and you don’t have to maintain anything, e.g. updating. It also supports Waydroid and webapps by default.
3. An old laptop or mini-PC with Bluefin or Aurora. They are basically like Bazzite, but without gaming stuff. You can set the display scale to 200% and enjoy a worry-free experience. Optionally, you can install Phosh or Plasma Mobile on top, which is made for mobile devices.

I can still recommend you Logseq and Obsidian.

They store their database mostly as plain markdown, so you can just use your sync app of choice (Nextcloud, Syncthing, etc.) to sync everything between devices.

Maybe Logseq offers their sync as self hostable service too, I don’t know.

I find Logseq extremely awesome and would recommend it to you.

I don’t even have a christmas tree 😅

I think having decoration for one special holiday (christmas, easter, etc.) is a bit too wasteful for the small amount of storage capacities I have, especially when it’s single use.

I think decorating for certain seasons (spring instead of easter, snowflakes and stuff for winter, and so on) is cooler and less stressful.

I’m growing a few small-ish indoor trees right now (citrus, banana, etc.), which can be used as christmas tree next year, when they’re bigger 😁

I think my comment was a bit off topic, but if it inspires at least one person reading this it was worth it 💚

I chose to continue with my current setup until I get the time and motivation to upgrade.

I will build a new server from scratch. For that, I bought an used mainboard for a few bucks, which has 6 SATA slots.

What do you mean with “Operating System”?

It is most often installed as Docker container, which isn’t an OS, but just includes all dependencies to run. You still need an OS (like Debian) as host.

I use Casa"OS". It’s fine, but nothing groundbreaking. Cockpit for example can do pretty much the same, and for Docker containers, I nowadays mostly use docker compose.

But hey, it helped me a quite a bit in the beginning, and it’s cool. Pretty basic, but enough for most people, mainly beginners.

Logseq and Obsidian are only similar on the first look, but very different usage wise. Both are very open with a plugin system, and you can modify them to turn them into one eachother.

So, if you want only FOSS, then Logseq is the only choices you have.

But Obsidian is, even though it’s proprietary, very sane. Open plug-in system, active community, great devs who don’t have much against FOSS, and more.

Obsidian

• More similar to a classic note taking app, like OneNote, but with a lot of features. Hierarchical structure, and more of an “essay” style, where you store a lot of text in one page.
• Page linking is only done when you think it makes sense
• Has been a bit longer around than Logseq, feels more polished
• Great sync and mobile app, which support plugins from what I’ve heard

Logseq

• Non-linear outliner. Every page is on the same level, but within a text passage, the indentation matters (parent-child-relationship)
• You create a LOT of more pages. Most of my pages are empty. They are mainly there for linking topics. I rarely create pages manually.
• The journal is where you write most stuff. You then link each block to a page.
• Logseq a bit “special”. May not be for everyone. I for example am a bit of a disorganised thinker, who mentally links a lot of knowledge and throws concepts around all the time. Logseq is my second nature, because it’s more flexible. My GF on the other hand is more structured, and prefers something like Apple Notes, or, if she would care about note taking, something like Obsidian.
• The mobile app isn’t great. It’s fine when I’m not at home, but the desktop version is the “proper” one, and mobile/ iPad a second class citizen.
• Sync is only experimental for now. It will soon be officially supported (hopefully) and self hostable, but it worked fine for me.

I don’t see any problems with that. Even I (and probably most others here), who are FOSS advocates, think Obsidian’s model is fine.

The devs surely get why FOSS is important, and try their best to match the pros of open source. They even stated that if the company goes bankrupt or they stop developing the app, they’ll open source it.

One major thing they do absolutely right is how the notes get stored. On other note taking apps, it’s a proprietary database, often “in the cloud”, where your notes get hold hostage. Here, they’re just Markdown files, and the whole thing is pretty open, encouraging a strong community.

It’s similar to Valve/ Steam. Proprietary, but liked by most Linux people.

Logseq! Right now, you can only self host the database and sync it with Syncthing for example, but the dedicated sync feature is currently in beta and will be self hostable afaik.

Grocy is exactly what you asked for.

I never had any (major) problems with Nextcloud yet.

I just have following “conflicts” with it:

• It doesn’t follow the “Do one thing, and do it right”-philosophy. It tries to do everything at once. File upload/ sharing, media management (NC Photos), RSS, mail, calendar, contacts, and much, much more. I mean, it’s damn convenient and works pretty fine, but nothing is great. For example, Immich/ Photoprism is way better than NC for photo management.
• There’s a lot of abandonware, or buggy/ unmaintained apps. For example, my “News”-feed looks completely broken for months now.
• The performance isn’t good. I mean, the “server” (an old thin client) isn’t fast at all, but the loading times and responsiveness is just awful. The file upload also takes ages, even from the same network.
• It feels bloated. I think, if I would be more into selfhosting and had more time, I would search for alternatives and split all the NC features I use into their own services, e.g. one for file upload, one for document management, one for managing my photos, an own RSS client, and more.

But, as I said, the ease of use and amount of features is still great. I don’t want to spend three weekends just troubleshooting my server and searching for/ installing dozens of individial services. And for that, it’s good enough.

If you have a spare laptop/ PC, I insist you to try Nextcloud.

It’s super easy to install, you actually just download the Docker all-in-one container and it runs in less than 10 minutes. You don’t have much to loose.
I’m relatively happy with it.

I mean, to be fair, NC isn’t perfect. It sometimes feels a bit wonky and tries to do everything, while exceeding at nothing.
But it’s damn comfortable to set up and maintain.

It doesn’t perfectly cover your use case, but everything else (individual services, including web server, database, etc.) is less centralised and more complicated to set up.
Since NC AIO is inside a container, all data are too. It’s a relatively straightforward file system afaik.
Backup also is included, but you have to do it manually by default and it stops the services while doing it.

For offloading large files, you might look into 3rd party tools. NC is basically a remote drive you can connect to with most programs that support it.