I use wireguard as my main VPN to connect to my homelab from my phone and my laptops.
I also have an OpenVPN as a backup option, running behind sslh.
My same port on my router (443) serves both a webserver hosting photos, and that OpenVPN instance. This allows me to VPN into my home in most firewalled office networks.
i’m assuming because of the “web server hosting photos”. Probably Immich if i had to guess?
tailscale is fine if you’re somewhat tech savvy, but it’s annoying to show all your friends and family how to “correctly” access your web server. Too much friction. First download the tailscale app, sign in, blah blah. Then you also are unnecessarily bogging down everyone’s smartphone with a wire guard VPN profile which is…undesirable.
I like tailscale and use it for some stuff. But for web servers that i want my whole family (and some friends) to easily access, a traditional setup makes much more sense. The tradeoff is (obviously) a higher security burden. I protect the web apps in my homelab with SSO (OIDC), among other things.
I prefer to gatekeep "entry points" with Tailscale. A server can have HTTP/S exposed to the world, but its SSH can stay behind Tailscale to enable defense in depth.
Keeping Tailscale as the only security layer will be foolish of course, but keeping the entry points hidden from general internet is a useful additional layer, if you ask me.
As a matter of principle, I like keep the number of open ports to a minimum. Let it be SSH or VPN, it doesn't matter. I have been burned enough times.
I've applied the same principal to my network. Though, I do have plans to re-open some additional ports beyond just SSH / VPN.
Thinking through how I would achieve this introduced me to the concept of a DMZ-zone. The DMZ places publicly accessible services in a highly locked down environment.
DMZ is a very old concept, and applying it is easy when everything is in a single room, connected to a single network, and everything can be isolated there.
When the network is distributed on multiple sites, things get exponentially harder if you don't own a dark fiber from site to site and have essentially a single network.
I personally manage enough servers to scratch that itch, so I yearn for simplicity. If Tailscale gives me that isolation for free (which it does), I'd rather use that for my toy network rather than an elaborate multi-site DMZ setup.
My requirements were:
- ability to sync the TODO lists between devices (web and android).
- ability to have sub-items, so that I can organise my complex lists into magnificent trees of tasks. I sometimes have 5 levels of details on some travel checklists.
- ability to handle periodic tasks, and ability to create a task and hide it until a specific date (topics for my future self)
- ability to be self-hosted.
I'm now using Vikunja, and Tasks.org for the Android side. That setup has worked for me wonderfully for a couple years now. Vikunja has a ton of features I don't use, and that's fine. They don't get in the way.
You shouldn't root Graphene, it breaks its security model and is certainly the reason why Revolut doesn't work on your phone. It works like a charm on mine.
OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) is protocol in the background. Jellyfin has a plugin for OPDS and works by simply dropping a file in specified directory, but it doesn't support multiple catalogues (i.e. one per library/directory).
Protocol is atom based, chatgpt was able to make a custom OPDS server for my needs within minutes, it took another hour or two to fix and customize generated code.
I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it.
But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).
I used to do that, now I just keep a OneNote with the things that would have been blog entries once upon a time - it's available across all my devices and I can export it to PDF when I do need to share something with someone - and I don't have to worry about someone defacing or hacking the site hosting it.
Same. I keep a couple of blogs on different topics and try to write up any challenge I come across. Not only does it help to cement ideas in my head and expose areas I'm foggy about, but I've referred back to my previous experience this way countless times.
I don't know. I stopped bothering to look, since it's never going to drive income or anything. It's worth it to me because 1) I get to help others, which brings satisfaction and 2) I can read what I wrote from anywhere and send someone a link if necessary.
This happens to me all the time. I could make notes about how I did something and lose them, or I could spend an hour or two extra and convert it into a blog post, and I'll be able to refer to it over and over again.
Same, I created https://softuts.com exactly for this, to write fixes to technical issues I encounter, when I can't find another solution via a Google search.
There starts to be some traffic, I am happy to assume that any person visits my blog for a fix will probably save a good amount of debugging time.
Your intention is still to pass on the knowledge though regardless of traffic otherwise why even publish if it’s just for you? What is the difference from the Documents dir at that point?
I can stay in my browser and use Google, DuckDuckGo, or even my on-site search (I use Apache Solr, I'm a little weird compared to the typical hosted blog) and don't have to go into some webapp or search on some local notes app.
I can also add permalinks to any of the posts from anywhere, and share them in public documentation or bug reports and such, a handy feature.
I do not understand the need to never-leave-the-browser especially with modern window tiling, but I respect it as a preference that other people have. As for syncing I just use file sharing (Syncthing), I hardly live collaborate on documents and if I did everyone else in the group ended up doing the typing. Otherwise it’s write then get reviewed then reiterate. So unfortunately nothing about the online text editors really strike my fancy. I also find the browser almost too distracting and often get sidetracked while using it for research during writing time.
If you nominally have an audience (if you feel like you do, regardless of the reality), you'll perform differently, same as with speaking. This may be a good thing.
The way I've seen OKRs work so far was always the same:
Top management defines a strategy for the company.
Each department (commercial, marketing, product, etc.) create department OKRs from the company OKRs.
The year/term starts.
Each department comes to the implementation teams (product, IT, BI, support, etc.) with a HUGE list of poorly defined objectives or tasks.
The implementation teams only have limited capacity and can only deliver maybe 15-20% of what everyone wants. No one actually thought of checking if the objectives have any reasonable possibility of being delivered at all during the term.
Optional drama to decide what's going to be actually worked on might happen.
When the term ends, and if communication isn't a disaster between the departments, some MVPs are delivered.
A new term starts, and either the previous objectives are continued, or they're simply forgotten in favor of new ones.
I host 25-30 people on my couch each year, and I've had wonderful times with so many different people from different backgrounds.
Some of my surfers had some weird stories about weird hosts, but I've never had anyone tell me anything about drugs, rape, or anything violent.
In my opinion, latency is a super important concept that got forgotten once we moved every application to web interfaces.
I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware. It was quite easy to type fast, move the focus around in the various forms using tab and shift-tab, move from tabs and windows with ctrl/alt-tab; and there was keyboard shortcuts for most things.
I remember being able to execute complex operations between multiple applications using only my keyboard and without having to use any brain power between each step.
Now most things are moved to cloud applications and we interact with them with web browsers. Keyboard shortcuts are (mostly) gone, and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world with a high HTTP latency, and that prevents the brain from chaining them for free.
I remember being able to do almost everything using my keyboard. Now good luck interacting with a web console without switching back and forth from keyboard to mouse for 50% of the steps.
I guess that's also why many developers (including myself) still love the CLI environments.
> I remember the 90s and the 20s, when everything happened locally on the local hardware
I think there's a bit of rose tinted glasses here. You could literally see windows and icons being drawn on the screen in the 90s. Even text UI were slow to draw on screen. We have it good today.
Regarding keyboard shortcuts we are good too. I barely use a mouse nowadays. I use Vimium for Chrome to "click" on elements in pages, i3 keyboard shortcuts to jump to specific applications or workspaces, and the mouse emulator on my keyboard (olkb) to click or use the scrollwheel on the odd thing that doesn't want to work with a keyboard. Luckily many programs have adopted the command palete (most editors, vscode, gimp, etc) so it's easy to quickly invoke commands without memorizing arcane shortcuts.
> and each click or operation triggers a request on the other side of the world
Heck, each keystroke does this on a lot of websites, usually the culprit is some kind of overly ambitious search function. My biggest pet peeve is trying to type something via phone keyboard and losing half the word because it's ignoring inputs made while it's waiting on some http request. I notice the worst offenders are retailer websites (Menards, Target, Walmart, etc)
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