I’ve been self-hosting my blog for 21years if you can believe it, much of it has been done on a server in my house. I’ve hosted it on everything from a dusty old Pentium 200Mhz with 16MB of RAM (that’s MB, not GB!) to a shared web host (Webfaction), to a proper VPS (Hetzner), to a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster, which is where it is now.

The site is currently running Python/Django on a few Kubernetes pods on a few Raspberry Pi 4’s, so the total power consumption is tiny, and since they’re fanless, it’s all very quiet in my office upstairs.

In terms of safety, there’s always a risk since you’re opening a port to the world for someone to talk directly to software running in your home. You can mitigate that by (a) keeping your software up to date, and (b) ensuring that if you’re maintaining the software yourself (like I am) keeping on top of any dependencies that may have known exploits. Like, don’t just stand up an instance of Wordpress and forget about it. That shit’s going to get compromised :-)

The safest option is probably to use a static site generator like Hugo, since then your attack surface is limited to whatever you’re using to serve the static sites (probably Nginx), while if you’re running a full-blown application that does publishing etc., then that’s a lot of stuff that could have holes you don’t know about. You may also want to setup something like Cloudflare in front of your site to prevent a DOS attack or something from crippling your home internet, though that may be overkill.

But yeah, the bandwidth requirements to running a blog are negligible, and the experience of running your own stuff on your own hardware in your own house is pretty great. I recommend it :-)

Canadaland recently did an episode on this very subject and as a once-supporter of these sites, I found it eye-opening.

Oh boy are you going to love-to-hate this then. It’s best viewed on a proper computer, but you’ll get the gist on mobile too.

To be clear, I’m not throwing shade. That’s an impressive piece of software. It’s just, given the number of stories I’ve heard (and experienced) about Bash’s tricky syntax leading to Bad Things, I’m less comfortable with running this than I would be with something in a language with fewer pitfalls.

But if others take the chance and it sticks around a bit, I’ll come around ;-)

Thanks for the contribution! It’s a great idea, and with Google fucking about with blocking things like NewPipe, a project like this is a great answer to that.

That looks really impressive, but at nearly 1000 lines of Bash, I’m afraid I’m not comfortable running it on my machine. My Bash-foo isn’t strong enough to be sure that there isn’t a typo in there that could nuke my home folder.

It really doesn’t. See my other comment here for more detail.

Let me tell you how primary lane travel works in civilised countries: drunks and the others you mentioned end up in a canal, stranded up on a meridian, or crashed into a bollard.

That’s because they do more there than just say “share the lane” and call it a day. They narrow the road to almost exactly the width of a typical car using unforgiving barriers like bollards, medians, and 5m deep canals. They restructure the roads so they aren’t straight throughways, but brick-paved, winding pathways through the city.

They turn roads into obstacle courses, calming traffic, because as we all know, drivers may not be worried about killing cyclists, they’re horrified by the idea of scratching their paint.

They still have drunks of course, but they’re typically on bikes (since driving is so impractical), and they too often end up in a canal.

Here’s a decent example from Amsterdam where they effectively have 3 classes of road:

• Highways where no bikes are permitted but there are always entirely separate cycle path options to travel the same distance.
• Wide through roads with level asphalt paving and typically a curb, a row of trees, a tram, or other safe barrier between cars and cyclists.
• Narrow, often winding shared roads where traffic is naturally calmed by the terrain: bollards, canals, bricks or cobblestone, big speed bumps, raised crosswalks, or other oncoming cars in a space clearly designed for a maximum of one. Even the traffic lights here are configured to reduce speed by defaulting to red in all directions.

That last category is the majority over there, and a big reason why the city is so safe and quiet… unless it’s King’s Day or New Years eve. Then these spaces are flooded with loud, drunk pedestrians or children shooting fireworks at random. On those days I recommend trips out of town ;-)

This could actually be good news. At the end of the day, bike lanes are car infrastructure. If you want a cycling city, what you need are narrow, slow, winding roads that’re car-hostile. If you can’t have bike lanes, then this could be the opportunity to restructure the roads so that cycling in the primary lane is the default option for everyone.

This is one of the most infuriating things about the left. Automation is fantastic! Why the hell should we rail against something that reduces the amount of work people have to do? Why oppose something that reduces risks we have to take in our daily lives?

There’s no dignity in human labour. We do it because our survival depends on it. The problem is that the automation of that labour is treated by capitalists as a net profit to the owning class.

We should not be fighting to “maintain employment” FFS. We should be fighting for a reasonable share of the fruits of our community. If your job is automated, you should get a share of the company profits for life and then happily leave for new and different work, not try to prevent the automation in the first place.

Yeah that was the big strike against it for me too. I found that you can sort of perch it over a crossed leg and it’s sort of serviceable that way, but yeah… no coding on the train with a Surface.

The Surface Pro keyboard is actually quite good, with the added bonus that it’s also easily detachable.

This too is an excellent take. “Artificial pain points” for capitalism, or “learn some shit” for Linux. Love it.

At the firewall level, port forwarding forwards traffic bound for one port to another machine on your network on an arbitrary port, but the UI built on top of it in your router may not include this.

If it’s not an option in your Fritzbox, your options are:

• Make the service running on your internal network listen on one of those high-number ports instead.
• Introduce another machine on the network that also performs NAT between your router and your machine
• Try to access the underlying firewall in your router to tweak the rules manually. Some routers have an admin console accessible via telnet or SSH that may allow this.
• Get a new router.

The first and last options on this list are probably the best.

You make an excellent point. I have a lot more patience for something I can understand, control, and most importantly, modify to my needs. Compared to an iThing (when it’s interacting with other iThings anyway) Linux is typically embarrassingly user hostile.

Of course, if you want your iThing to do something Apple hasn’t decided you shouldn’t want to do, it’s a Total Fucking Nightmare to get working, so you use the OS that supports your priorities.

Still, I really appreciate the Free software that goes out of its way to make things easy, and it’s something I prioritise in my own Free software offerings.

What site are you using to book night trains?

The Liberals are happy to lose elections if it means that they’ll get their turn again in a few years when FPTP guarantees another run for them.

Fuck yeah. More of this please.

Oof, that video… I don’t have enough patience to put up with that sort of thing either. I wonder how plausible a complete Rust fork of the kernel would be.

In my experience, the larger the company, the more likely they are to force you to use Windows. The smaller companies will be more relaxed about the whole thing.

The largest company I’ve worked for that allows Linux had a staff count of hundreds of engineers and hundreds more non-nerds. In their case though, the laptops were crippled with Crowdstrike and Kollide and while the tech team was working hard to support us, we were always aware that we made up around 1% of the machines they manage and represented a big chunk of their headaches.

The response to this you usually hear (from me even) is that “I don’t need support, I know what I’m doing”. Which is probably true, but the vast majority of problems is in dealing with access to proprietary systems, failures from Crowdstrike or complaints about kernel versions etc.

TL;DR: work at a small company (<100 staff) and they’ll probably leave you alone. Go bigger and you’ll be stuck fighting IT in one way or another.

National Film Board of Canada represent! 🇨🇦

I remember seeing this in school as a kid. I’m 46 now.