💥PoW! Bot Deterrent, blog comments updates

Using v2ray with Caddy to Access the Internet in China

I did witness some of my co-travelers getting blocked at various points, but even after that happened, onboarding them to my system solved these issues and did not precipitate any issues for them or for my services.…

Bonavita 1L Electric Kettle Repair

it worked for years and years... started getting harder and harder to power it on; I would have to press the power button down for longer... Eventually it simply wouldn't turn on anymore at all.…

Cross-Platform Statically Compiled Way to Read HEIC Images

There are tons of excellent peices of software out there for handling images -- Krita, ImageMagick, and others. However, as far as I can tell, none of them natively support HEIC images. Frankly, it's a very bad vibes situation.…

Words in a base64-encoded string... Which decodes to the same words in ascii

... so if you imagine f is the computation you want to remain the same regardless of whether it's operating on a base64'd input or not, and g is the base64 function, and x is a not-base64'd input, then f(g(x)) = g(f(x)) ... Oooooohhhhh yes so f = user reads the word 'example', g = base64…

Matrix Synapse Out of Disk Space state_groups_state

You log in with your matrix account, And then you can see what's using disk space. if there are any big rooms, you can delete them, including deleting the state_groups_state rows…

I was wrong about SBCs (Single Board Computers)

I can't think of a more compelling story for the hardware of the community-hosted internet revolution than that it was essentially dumpster-dived from behind a Cisco office park somewhere.…

Federation vs. Clustering: Self-determination vs. distributed computing?

Self-hosting is such a shitty term because it sorta implies that you do it all by yourself. Not only is that unrealistic, it's also a lot less fun... I'm still trying to figure out what I want to build, let alone what to call it.…

Greenhouse Retrospective and Future

I think the short, pithy description on homebrewserver.club might summarize it best: Take the ‘home’ in homebrew literally and the ‘self’ in self-hosting figuratively…

When It Does Not Listen for Thee, Ask for Whom the Server Listens (Understanding Listening Addresses)

Why isn't it working? Why can't we connect? .... The first step is to figure out whether or not the application is listening or not, and if so, what listening address(es) it's using.…

Homebrew Unsweetened Grapefruit Energy Drink

No, I'm not changing this into a food blog, but I have been taking a break from working on my software projects for a couple months now while I'm trying to take care of my health..…

What is a Process? (Operating Systems)

All typical operating systems (MacOS, Windows, Linux, BSD, and others) have a notion of a "Process", and there are far more similarities than differences...…