Foster Hangdaan

I use Arch for personal and gaming, Debian for self hosting and hacking, Alpine for containerized cloud deployments.

Pretty much the same for me: bleeding-edge Arch for my workstation, rock-stable Debian for my server.

No license?

I maintain a rule that all files above the repo must be inside a folder, with one exception: a README file. Including the code folder, this typically results in no more than 5 folders; the project folder itself is kept organized and uncluttered.

Don’t forget: entrepreneur, playboy, philanthropist.

They are the project’s subfolders (outside of the Git repo):

• code contains the source code; version-controlled with Git.
• wiki contains documentation and also version-controlled.
• designs contains GIMP, Inkscape or Krita save files.

This structure works for me since software projects involve more things than just the code, and you can add more subfolders according to your liking such as notes, pkgbuild (for Arch Linux), or releases.

I tend to follow this structure:

Projects
├── personal
│   └── project-name
│       ├── code
│       ├── designs
│       └── wiki
└── work
    └── project-name
        ├── code
        ├── designs
        └── wiki

From a time when websites used <table> or position: absolute; to place elements on the screen. That website is just one big table.

• Free Software Foundation
• GNU
• Richard Stallman’s Personal Blog
• Savannah

And pretty much the rest of the FSF and GNU websites.

Where the dotfiles at?

Just bookmark the repos you like; no Github account needed.

Definitely best to get that done ASAP. Forgejo being a drop-in replacement for Gitea won’t be guaranteed ever since the hard fork:

To continue living by that statement, a decision was made in early 2024 to become a hard fork. By doing so, Forgejo is no longer bound to Gitea, and can forge its own path going forward, allowing maintainers and contributors to reduce tech debt at a much higher pace, and implement changes - whether they’re new features or bug fixes - that would otherwise have a high risk of conflicting with changes made in Gitea.

I’m in the same boat and also looking for a privacy-respecting platform for communicating with family and friends. So I’d also like to add items that are not yet mentioned to the list of suggestions:

• Jami
• Peer Calls - can be selfhosted; you can try it out straight away using their flagship instance located here.

I wonder sometimes if the advice against pointing DNS records to your own residential IP amounts to a big scare. Like you say, if it’s just a static page served on an up to date and minimal web server, there’s less leverage for an attacker to abuse.

That advice is a bit old-fashioned in my opinion. There are many tools nowadays that will get you a very secure setup without much effort:

• Using a reverse proxy with automatic SSL certs like Caddy.
• Sandboxing services with Podman.
• Mitigating DoS attacks by using a WAF such as Bunkerweb.

And of course, besides all these tools, the simplest way of securing public services is to keep them updated.

I’ve found that ISPs too often block port 80 and 443. Did you luck out with a decent one?

Rogers has been my ISP for several years and have no issue receiving HTTP/S traffic. The only issue, like with most providers, is that they block port 25 (SMTP). It’s the only thing keeping me from self-hosting my own email server and have to rely on a VPS.

If you want a similar editor on Linux, then I suggest Kate. If Vim and Emacs didn’t exist, I’d be using Kate.

Notepad++ is a fabulous software program that had no complete alternatives on Linux. I used it for scripting, text manipulation, note taking, dumping and editing thoughts. Scintilla-based equivalents Geany, SciTE exist, but do not come close.

Really? No alternatives on Linux? Have you tried Emacs? I think Emacs with Org mode blows Notepad++ out of the water in all the uses you just mentioned.

I self-host everything from my home network including my website. I like to keep all my data local. 😁

It’s a simple setup: just a static site made with Lume, and served with Caddy. The attack surface is pretty small since it’s just HTML and CSS files (no JavaScript).

First of all, doesn’t Navidrome have authentication? So, I don’t see why exposing it to the public is a problem.

Second, some reverse proxies support basic auth. This way, you can password-protect some services and is useful if the service does not have its own authentication. Here as an example snippet for Caddy:

example.com {
	basic_auth {
		# Username "Bob", password "hiccup"
		Bob $2a$14$Zkx19XLiW6VYouLHR5NmfOFU0z2GTNmpkT/5qqR7hx4IjWJPDhjvG
	}
	reverse_proxy myservice:8000
}

You’ll have to look up the docs for other reverse proxies.

That would be nice but what other alternatives are there? It’s either Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, or clones of these browsers.

Probably or probably not. The only way to find out is to try. I’ve installed RetroPie on a number of old laptops; the oldest one being a 2002 Toshiba laptop. I got to play GBA games just fine with it.

You can try turning it into a retro gaming station by installing RetroPie. Some have got it working on as little as a Pi Zero. Of course, that laptop won’t be able to run the more demanding emulators.