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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • the tech community keeps waiting for everyday people to take the baton of self-hosting. They never will—because the effort and cost of maintaining self-hosted services far exceeds the skill and interest of the audience.

    The same argument could have been used a century ago to claim that everyday people would never switch from trains to private cars, because the effort and cost of maintaining a car exceeds the skill and interest of most travelers. That may have been true at one point, and may be true again in the future—but it’s contingent on changing circumstances, not a categorical truth.






  • If you didn’t map a local config file into the container, it’s using the default version inside the container at /app/public/conf.yml (and any changes will get overwritten when you rebuild the container). If you want to make changes to the configuration for the widget, you’ll want to use the -v option with a local config file so the changes you make will persist.





  • As a casual self-hoster for twenty years, I ran into a consistent pattern: I would install things to try them out and they’d work great at first; but after installing/uninstalling other services, updating libraries, etc, the conflicts would accumulate until I’d eventually give up and re-install the whole system from scratch. And by then I’d have lost track of how I installed things the first time, and have to reconfigure everything by trial and error.

    Docker has eliminated that cycle—and once you learn the basics of Docker, most software is easier to install as a container than it is on a bare system. And Docker makes it more consistent to keep track of which ports, local directories, and other local resources each service is using, and of what steps are needed to install or reinstall.


  • Was it RAID 0 (striped), or RAID 1 (mirrored)?

    In general, a mirrored RAID is best for minimizing data loss and downtime due to drive failure, while separate volumes and periodic backups is best for recovering from accidental file deletion or malware. (I.e., if a RAID gets told to write bad data, it’ll overwrite the good data on both drives at once.)

    If you want the best of both worlds with just two drives, try zfs—you can mirror the drives to protect against drive failure, and make snapshots to protect against accidental data loss. (This still won’t protect against everything—for that you should have some kind of off-site backup as well.)





  • It may be overkill for most—it’s not the easiest thing to set up and it’s got a high learning curve—but for heavy research and world-building I’ve found Semantic MediaWiki revolutionary.

    You can create auto-generated and auto-updating maps, timelines, tables, etc., and make live queries that pull information from all relevant pages. (For instance, if you write pages for a bunch of events and annotate them with dates, locations, and which characters are involved, you can create a map and itinerary for each character and a list of all the characters they’ve met or interacted with. If two characters meet in a particular place, you can generate a list of the most recent events that happened to each character, recent events at that location, past events where both characters were present, people and places they know in common, etc. And if you decide to shuffle events around, everything updates accordingly.) It’s also great for collaborative writing, it can be accessed through the web from any device, and it has automatic versioning. It’s almost insanely powerful, and of course it’s FOSS.