hendrik

I’ve always backed up my SMS to my E-Mail inbox. With something like SMS Gate or SMS Backup+. I think it’s nice to have all messages in my mail program. Of course that only does one way. To reply and get immediate notifications, I use KDEConnect (or GSConnect which is the same thing for GNOME.)

Maybe something like Joplin, Org Mode for Emacs, Zettelkasten, Getting Things Done? Maybe a boring Nextcloud, that one has lots of individual apps and they’re supposed to interconnect.

I’m not really sure what to recommend here, a personal knowledge management platform, a calendar software… I can see how it’s a lot of different things you need to juggle. And I don’t have a good solution myself. I always wanted to some good system, and we really have a lot of software available which connect tasks, notes, appointments, knowledge. But I think it’s a lot about the mindset. You mainly need some dedication and it needs to be executed properly, or it won’t work well. The tool/software comes on top and just makes it easier. At the same time it’s really nice to have things digital and not just in a paper journal. And sometimes it’s the small things like reminders about appointments on the phone… And that might be difficult with some tools if they’re made more for knowledge than for calendar stuff.

I’m currently making ends meet with the several Nextcloud apps. But I don’t have as much to coordinate. I’ve always wanted to use one of the Wiki-like personal knowledge management systems (Silverbullet), but I’m a bit too chaotic for that.

See to what IP your domain points, and if that’s really the external IP of your router. Might also help to put in your IP address into the webbrowser instead of the domain, to see if port 80 / 443 really go somewhere. Another possibility, do a portscan from the internet.

Btw, how do you access Wireguard? I mean that’s also somehow able to access your network from outside…

Some people do it. For example we have this solar-powered website: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

You’d need an energy source like a solar panel, a battery and some computing device. Like a single board computer (Raspberry Pi) you can also run webservers on smartphones, or even a microcontroller. The server part works without an internet connection. But you obviously need some way to connect to it. A wifi (router) or a computer connected via an ethernet cable.

The tech isn’t too complicated. Just install nginx if you have a raspberry pi, open a wifi and put your website on it. If you choose a phone, try Termux and a supported webserver. Both Linux and smartphones are designed to even work without an internet connection ;-)

Not really. I could use some good selfhosted search engine. I mean all the existing projects (which is just YaCy, to my knowledge) are a bit dated. Nowadays we only got metasearch engines and we’re relying on Google, Bing etc.

But I don’t need any chatbot enhancements. That’s usually something I skip when using Google or Bing because it doesn’t work well. The AI summaries tend to be wrong, and it’s bad at looking up niche information, which is something I need a search engine to be able to find. The AI just cites the most common slop, or at best the Wikipedia article. But I don’t really need any fancy software to get there… So for me, we don’t need any AI augmentation.

And I think the old way of googling was fine. Just teach people to put in the words that are likely to be in the article they want to find. That’d be something like “Rust new features 2023” or “homelab backup blog”. Sure you can strap on a chatbot and put in entire natural language questions. But I think that’s completely unnecessary. We have brains and we’re perfectly able to translate our questions into search queries with little effort… If somebody teches us what to type into the search bar, and why.

I’ve also printed a few thingies for the car and my experience is, PLA deforms on the first hot day and you can throw it out. PETG lasted 2-3 years for me until it became brittle and broke.

I’d go with the Full Disk Encryption. You can be sure everything is encrypted that way. Any additional complexity adds ways to mess up and compromise security. Entering the password is a bit cumbersome. But that’s part of the deal. I just carry my computer keyboard to my NAS and enter the password each time I need to reboot. Which doesn’t happen that often. There also used to be some tutorial somewhere on how to put a Dropbear SSH server into the initrd so you can enter the password over network.

inwx.de

I use KaniDM and configured everything with OAuth2. That was the easiest and most straightforward I could find. But I don’t think they bothered implementing LDAP. Other platforms I tried are Authentik, Authelia, Keycloak, Zitadel… They’re all a bit heavier and have other/more features, but there wasn’t one I really fell in love with.

I’d say use something like zeroconf(?) for local computer names. Or give them names in either your dns forwarder (router), hosts file or ssh config. Along with shell autocompletion, that might do the job. I use scp, rsync and I have a NFS share on the NAS and some bookmarks in Gnome’s file manager, so i just click on that or type in scp or rsync with the target computer’s name.

I’m not sure about anything useful. Best thing would probably be to install Linux and donate them to people in need. For experimentation, sure, set up a Beowulf Cluster, learn FreeBSD, Orchestration, Kubernetes, Ansible… Use them to test your microservice architecture software projects, software-defined networking…

I get a lot of ads everywhere. And trackers. On most of the news sites, social media platforms, my email provider, .places where I look up information, … The majority of the internet is commercial and financed through advertisements. With few exceptions, like personal/indie blogs and places like this one. I mean if you read just blogs and Wikipedia, you might already be alright. But that’s not how 99% of people use the internet.

Yeah, Youtube ads won’t be blocked by a DNS blocker. You need a browser plugin for that. I use Firefox, uBlock and Sponsorblock. That removes most of the ads everywhere, including Youtube.

It means AI can recite information from a domain that PhD-level people are concerned with. This doesn’t mean it can draw correct conclusions, rephrase emails properly or do any heavy-lifting like come up with computer code beyond boilerplate templates and tech-demos. It’s mainly just hype. AI is useful. But not very bright as of today.

Well, it’s a mass-produced, embedded device, designed to do one specific task. I guess lots of the video related stuff is assisted by hardware and they usually strip down the embedded Linux to the minimum needed. Because every Megabyte of storage costs extra and they need to hit some 99,- or 89,- price point. Furthermore, they don’t want it to boot for 20 seconds, so these devices generally don’t contain any extras. Similar things happen on wifi routers, the ones below $100 usually contain similar amounts of memory (or less). At least the last time I bought one.

Google the product name and Linux. If nothing turns up, you need to find the name of the SoC / processor and google that. Find out if it’s supported by Linux and what other people did to install Linux. You might need additional hardware though, like a serial or JTAG adapter and a soldering iron. Plus the required expertise. And I must warn you, that thing has 1 GB of RAM and 256MB(!) of flash storage. You won’t be able to do much with those specs. Like a slow FTP server or one small website or a few other tiny services which don’t use a lot of resources.

I think Baikal or Radicale would be the usual contenders for that

I halfway agree, but the issue with that is, that’s not what happens in reality. In reality these things don’t run on renewable energy. And not utilizing datacenters at capacity is just a waste of resources. And they could find people who donate their voices, which would be fair… But they’re not doing that. So I think half the arguments still apply. It is innovation though, we shouldn’t be opposed just for the sake of it. It needs some proper argumentation.

SATA is more reliable than USB. And SSDs are faster, but more expensive than a harddrive. In the end all of this is possible. You need to see how much space you need and what you can afford. Unless you need it to be quiet/silent or super fast, a regular harddrive might do.

I think as written, I’d say these words are more FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)

And I’ve been running servers for quite some time as well. SearXNG seems rock solid. And it’s tested. And when I had security issues in general, it was because we didn’t do timely updates. I haven’t really ever been affected by zero days in my hobby linux endeavours. Okay, we had a few nasty things in some more fundamental building blocks and sometimes people using slower distributions had been fine… But I don’t think it applies here. With these kinds of things, the latest stable release is your best bet. Not a previous version with bugs in it, which have been fixed since. And especially not an unmaintained project.

They’re likely referring to the sentences outlining the differences between searx and SearXNG in searX README (archived Github repo). I think it was about some feature to report bugs to the project. And NG having a faster pace of development.