Running a Linux Server for Fun and Non-Profit
· ☕ 1 min read
For the last couple of months, I’ve gradually been weaning myself from some Big Tech services, and reimplementing these services on my own Linux VPS (virtual private server) on Linode. I now have a server that I use for: Running my email client. This blog, formerly hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech, a very fine BSD-based hosting service. The FreshRSS RSS reader. The Vaultwarden implementation of the BitWarden password service. Using Postfix to receive email from the Pobox redirection service.
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Publishing source code with Cgit
· ☕ 4 min read
As part of my continuing work to free myself from Big Tech, I recently moved most of my source code repositories from Gitlab to Cgit on my own server. There’s nothing particularly wrong with services like Gitlab or Github, but they are far more powerful than I need. My source code projects are a one-man show; virtually nobody else is interested in them. So I don’t need all of the fancy collaboration tools offered by the big Git sites.
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Clonezilla and Windows 7
· ☕ 2 min read
I manage the computers at our local library, and unfortunately, most of these run Windows – Windows 7, to be specific. This operating system can be terribly slow at times, on our slightly old desktop computers that use hard disks instead of SSDs. When booting, it often takes Windows a minute or two have a fully working desktop, and you have to watch a spinning hourglass during that time. Also, when Windows puts itself to sleep after some idle time, the wake-up process is so slow and disk-intensive that you might as well go to lunch while waiting for it.
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Implementing the xBrowserSync API
· ☕ 3 min read
For about a year, I’ve used the Brave browser, mostly due to its built-in ad blocking and its bookmark sync feature. I have been using Brave on four different devices (three Linux laptops and one Android phone running GrapheneOS), so the bookmark sync feature is very useful. But this article on the privacy features of numerous browsers is rather scathing about Brave. So I decided to try Ungoogled-Chromium, along with the uBlock Origin and uMatrix extensions.
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Vermont Vaccination Data
· ☕ 2 min read
The Vermont Department of Health has published a document titled COVID-19 Vaccine Data. It gives data on the “[c]ompleted primary series and updated (bivalent) booster data as of April 11, 2023”. There are a number of interesting things to note about this data. First, we can see that Pfizer makes up the majority of the jabs: 60% in total: Overall Doses The poor J&J made it into only 3% of Vermonters’ arms.
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Put Brave Browser Cache in RAM
· ☕ 2 min read
The Brave browser is constantly writing large amounts of data to its cache, which is a concern when your storage device is an SSD. The solution is to put Brave’s cache on a RAM disk, i.e., a tmpfs device on Linux. Some Linux distros, like Arch, mount /tmp as tmpfs, but Linux Mint 21 does not. Mount /tmp as tmpfs So the first step on Mint is to change /tmp to tmpfs.
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Force a Wi-Fi Login Page to Appear
· ☕ 1 min read
Some public wi-fi networks require you to log in to their network using a browser. This is an annoying feature of hotel wi-fi, in particular. Some browsers, like the Brave browser on Android, detect this situation and redirect you to the login page the first time you try to use the network. But the Brave browser on Linux doesn’t seeem to be able to do this, and won’t bring up the login page.
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Using Pobox.com with Postfix
· ☕ 4 min read
As part of my plan to reduce my dependence on Big Tech, I recently made an effort to self-host an email server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This is normally a really terrible idea, for a number of reasons. Receiving email is hard, but can be done with spam filters and other security tools. The much worse problem is related to sending email. As the linked article above says, it’s just too easy for your server to get on blacklists and then be blocked forever.
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Installing Vaultwarden Without Docker
· ☕ 6 min read
I recently switched from using LastPass to BitWarden as my password manager. LastPass has always worked well enough in browsers, but there was no easy way to get it to work on so-called “smart” devices like Android phones, and there was no Linux application for managing passwords. I’d been using KeePassXC on Linux in parallel with LastPass, but keeping the two synced up manually was an error-prone annoyance. Bitwarden solves these problems by providing Linux and Android applications, a web interface, and browser extensions that synchronize with each other.
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Postfix + Maildrop = Failure
· ☕ 3 min read
I’ve spent most of the last two days struggling to get first chasquid (a minimalist SMTP server) and then postfix (the ubiquitious SMTP server preinstalled on my Ubuntu VPS) to work with maildrop (a mail delivery agent). The reason I was attempting to do this was so that I could have maildrop pass emails to notmuch-insert. I use notmuch as my mail store, and I thought that it would be more efficient to have notmuch-insert process emails as they come in, instead of having notmuch-new process them in a big batch.
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Sudden or Unexpected Deaths in Vermont
· ☕ 1 min read
Coquin de Chien (John Paul Beaudoin, Sr.) has written a very informative and useful article about the occurrences of the words “suddenly” and “unexpectedly” in obituaries in the United States. Please read the article for the details and the alarming graphs, but the idea is that you can use Legacy.com’s obituary search engine to see how often these terms were used for particular date ranges and regions. The article shows graphs for the United States as a whole, and for several states individually.
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A Safe and Effective Message from the White House
· ☕ 5 min read
Greetings, Virtuous Voters! We at the Ministry of Truthiness want to call your attention to a propaganda message that we had the White House deliver for us. It’s called the National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan. It’s so sciency and scientific that we wanted to go over a few important points and translate them into simple language so that even you feeble-minded but obedient serfs can understand them. Let’s dive into this awesome document.
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Tagging Ogg Vorbis music files for classical music
· ☕ 3 min read
Fifteen years ago, I started ripping my CD collection into digital form using the patent-free file formats FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. I used FLAC for the first stage of ripping, because it is lossless. But FLAC is also quite bulky, which is a problem when using the files on space-limited portable devices. So the next stage was to convert FLAC to Ogg Vorbis, which is compressed, lossy format similar to MP3, but free of patents and royalties.
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