I ran Matrix for like a year, and pretty much hated every minute. It was fragile, complicated, and incredibly, bafflingly resource intensive. Matrix is an overengineered nightmare in my opinion, and it seems to be quickly distancing itself from self-hosters while pursuing enterprise usage. Neat technology, horrible implementation, misguided company.

XMPP is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Just like we still use email everywhere (even for authentication nowadays, fun!), XMPP is not obsolete simply because it’s older. It’s a solid foundation, plenty extensible, and does almost everything I can imagine needing to do without unnecessary complexity.

Matrix’s bridges are its killer feature, and it’s nice… when it works. But it’s simply not worth the headache of dealing with Matrix, in my opinion.

If the polls are rigged, does that imply that most Israelis don’t support the genocide? So … you think you’ve got a majority of people who don’t support the genocide and with that majority you plan to do … nothing? Just gonna … let the minority do what they want?

There’s a word for that, the word is “support”. You might not think you’re supporting it, but if you’re not doing something to fight it, then yes, you are supporting it. Get to work. Nobody ever promised that doing the right thing has to be easy.

We are so, so, so thoroughly cooked. I can’t even.

Lots of enabling in your comment.

People like you, with no control over the big decisions. Just like Palestinians can’t control Hamas, Russians can’t control Putin, US citizens can’t control Trump, and so on.

If people can’t control their own governments, who can? Who should? Other people’s governments? Is that how you think it’s supposed to work? That’s why Israel is obliterating Gaza? Because Gaza can’t get rid of Hamas themselves so Israel is going to do it for them? Do you think that is justified and the right way to do things? Is it Canada’s job to rescue the US? Is it Europe’s responsibility to stop Russia?

Are Iranians responsible for the Iranian regime? Yes, they are, that’s why they’re fucking protesting and dying in the streets right now. Resist, fight back, don’t comply, undermine your illegitimate government until they can be toppled.

Take responsibility. I am responsible for the actions of my government and my country. And so are you. You will be held responsible. And you should be. Other countries are not responsible for fixing your shit. You are. Fix it. Figure out how. Stop acting like it’s somebody else’s problem and you are just a humble peasant. Humble peasants can start revolutions. Lazy citizens who are happy with the status quo while pretending they don’t agree with it do not start revolutions. Which one are you?

I don’t want the free petition websites online getting my personal network’s info and sharing or selling it, hence the interest in self hosting.

So either you’re creating a petition with a size of exactly “1” or you’re asking other people to trust YOU with their personal info instead, or you’re asking for a federated solution (extremely difficult to establish a verifiable web of trust framework, and STILL shares your “personal network’s info” whenever it federates or validates its data to dozens of other servers).

None of these scenarios are viable for creating a petition that anyone is going to take seriously (to the extent that anyone takes petitions seriously at all)

fail2ban mainly, but also things like scaling login delays (some sort of option often built into the software you’re running, but just as often not configured by default), or if you’re feeling particularly paranoid account locking after too many failures, and in general just not using default, predictable, common usernames or weak passwords, and honestly it’s even helped a bit by having slow hardware and throttled network bandwidth.

The goal is to make it so that someone can’t run a script that sends 100 million login attempts per second for common or stolen usernames and passwords and your server just helpfully tries them all and obediently tells them none of those worked… until one of them does.

Not only does this encourage them to TRY sending 100 million login attempts per second because your server isn’t refusing it, which is a huge waste of bandwidth and resources, it also makes it really likely that they’re eventually going to guess one right.

It’s basically a free single-player demo with extra steps. Not being able to play on legitimate servers is realistically a huge drawback, honestly. And also, Microsoft knows it’s a huge opening for “piracy” which is why they’ve created Bedrock edition which is where all their monetization efforts and future content updates will be increasingly directed.

Neither you nor I are supposed to ever care about Bedrock, or are ever expected to pay a cent for Minecraft. We are a tapped resource financially with nothing left to give and trying to get more money out of us and our community would be like trying to get blood from a stone. But that doesn’t mean we’re not important. Our role, even as free-to-play pirates in the Minecraft ecosystem, is to create content and create brand awareness, to keep it trending and on people’s radar, so that when children and whales are drawn to it, Microsoft makes sure the first thing they see is some Bedrock edition thing and they can start shelling out cash immediately.

The whales, children, and naive parents are where the free money is. We’re just part of the advertising pipeline aimed at those demographics. We create buzz, they buy.

That’s the problem, When you’re running too many services as it is, you will be staring at a terminal at home sooner or later. Maybe you’ve gotten lucky and haven’t been ravaged by the cruel gods of fate yet, but it absolutely happens, and eventually it will happen to you. When you’re relying on family notifications and disaster response, you don’t get to choose when that happens, and sometimes you’ll have to spend a LONG time staring at a terminal at home. And when it happens often enough, or badly enough, you end up not just staring at the terminal at home, but also thinking about the terminal at home, and losing sleep over it, and that’s just not a great way to live your self-hosting life. I’ve been there.

Making the investment in repeatable, reproducible, maintainable infrastructure now means you get to decide WHEN you’re staring at a terminal, and for exactly how long. Even when you don’t make it through as much progress as you wanted to, you can just close it down without any stress, get back to your life and continue from where you left off next time. You can’t do that, at least not without some significant consequences when your server got hacked and is sending spam or your entire server is refusing to boot and you need the files on it.

You may still have to hit the terminal sometimes when you don’t choose to, but it’s going to be less often, and less complex when you do. That’s when the investment pays off, and your return on investment is the goal of having ultimately less time spent at the terminal at home, and that payoff is especially rewarding if you’re good at prioritizing the time you do choose to spend on the terminal at home, to find low-value moments to effectively repurpose for this hobby, and save the actually valuable times of your life from ever having to be used for emergency maintenance.

“Please fill out and sign this credit card application form to prove that you are human.”

Speaking as a left-handed person it absolutely is a struggle, and given that the majority of the world is right-handed, for practical purposes it actually does need to be a struggle, otherwise ALL non-ambidextrous things would be a struggle for right-handed people instead, and that would be an even stupider way to run the world (as funny as it would be to see everybody else suddenly struggle with the things we struggle with on a daily basis, that’s not a fair or sensible way to expect any civilization to function)

The things that left-handed people struggle with are due to subtle design issues caused by things that require asymmetric designs, you won’t notice an obvious problem with the asymmetry as a right-handed person, but they’re real struggles. Things like the shape being uncomfortable is only part of it, with scissors for example, the strength is coming from the wrong side, it won’t cut properly, for things like writing, our hands smear the ink as we go or have to be held hovering above leading to strain and poor penmanship, spines and bindings immediately get in our way the moment we start trying to write, many things don’t fit the way they’re supposed to, don’t have the correct angles when used in the left hand, or often they will block our vision or put our hand in a place that blocks our vision, whereas a right-handed person’s hand does not block their vision using the same tool. The issues are complex and subtle, but they’re significant, and they are not necessarily solved by simply making things symmetrical or reversing them. As much as lefties might enjoy a language that is written right-to-left, it’s not a practical solution to the reality that we are a minority where things are designed for the majority.

Ironically the languages that DO write right-to-left, actually did not do it for the benefit of left-handed people, but did it to benefit right handed people, when they’re chiseling into stone tablets as the hammer (in their left hand) would block their view. So if you want to know how it feels to be left-handed, go chisel some essays on a stone tablet. It’ll make me feel better.

If you need low latency audio (ie, live music) Windows programs have to do a lot of ugly tricks to do this efficiently on Windows, and it’s different from the ugly tricks you have to do on Linux, and even if wine can attempt to translate the tricks from one to the other you may struggle trying to make this work well cross-platform to in Linux AFAIK.

However if you’re just doing all-digital production I don’t see why wine wouldn’t work. Other people seem to have had success minus the latency issue I mentioned. And most of that was years ago, it mentions people are working on improving it, and honestly, Wine has come a really long way in the last 2 years. I’d recommend giving it a shot and see how it goes.

FWIW I don’t find Apache dated at all. It’s mature software, yes, but it’s also incredibly powerful and flexible, and regularly updated and improved. It’s probably not the fastest by any benchmark, but it was never intended to be (and for self-hosting, it doesn’t need to be). It’s an “everything and the kitchen sink” web server, and I don’t think that’s always the wrong choice. Personally, I find Apache’s litlte-known and perhaps misleadingly named Managed Domains (mod_md/MDomain) by far the easiest and clearest way to automatically manage and maintain SSL certificates, it’s really nice and worth looking into if you use Apache and are using any other solution for certificate renewal.

All this bullshit about phones with folding screens nowadays when what I really want is a phone with a folding mechanical 104-key :P

Early-model Cylon.

It can’t be, I haven’t paid for WinRar yet.

I moved one old laptop to Linux over about a year ago, and committed to an effort to actually make it do the things I wanted to do, like play games, and run Windows-only tools or find viable replacements. To say it went well is an understatement. Within a few months I had switched every computer I owned, and I’m never looking back again.

Granted, I was already quite familiar with Linux on the server side. This was not my first attempt to use Linux on the desktop, either. But it was my last, because I’m never going back to Windows ever again now.

It’s so much like watching that Silicon Valley show, but a lot less funny.

Lenovo Thinkpads are the only reliable choice pretty much and even then it’s a bit of a crapshoot whether they include them or not. HP Elitebooks used to have them too but it seems like they also stopped in 2021. Apple’s never had them as far as I know. There’s a few other one-off small-run options here and there too but they’re few and far between.

I realize I’m in a very significant minority, but personally, having access to the mouse pointer for short jogs here and clicks there without my hands leaving the keyboard home row is a gamechanger and a non-negotiable feature to me. I’d never claim it’s a great way to move the mouse, but it has extremely high utility due to its convenient positioning, it’s always available even in tight quarters, and anytime space permits it pairs well with a secondary, traditional mouse for movements that are more numerous or complex or need more precision, it works very well with a text-heavy workflow.

It’s a mouse for people who would rather minimize their mouse usage, and I guess that’s me, or at least that’s the workflow I’ve gravitated to all my life. It’s not an ideology thing, it’s simply the fact that it’s deep muscle memory now, and whenever I try to use any computer without one I struggle so much, and I’ve actively tried more than once to wean myself off it, I can’t, it becomes a constant irritation that any other mouse feels so disconnected from my typing.

Touchpads are just insanely frustrating to use, I have no idea how some people tolerate using them daily unless it’s all they’ve ever known, and touchscreens are even worse in some ways since your fingers block the screen exactly where you’re trying to press, not to mention getting fingerprint smudges all over it even with the best techno-magic coatings. I loathe them both.

No clit-mouse, no deal.

(There are dozens of us. Dozens!)

Huh, I already built my own (very janky) Python wrapper around OpenSCAD’s horrible syntax and editor, but that looks like a much better solution. Thanks!