There’s plenty of good stuff made by decent people out there, I’m fine with dropping someone awful. I also like to think it helps me avoid picking up bad behaviors or internalizing shitty ideas.

I’ll show you why they put “cum laude” on my diploma

Birdwatching goes both ways

All of them, it’s a rainbow 🌈

I’ve used Duplicity in the past for my desktop but for my servers I hadn’t tried anything else before.

Mainly that the configuration is (mostly) in a single well-commented file, and good online docs. I don’t have much experience with backup systems and it looked like Borgmatic made it easy and had some useful features like the healthchecks integration (I already use healthchecks elsewhere). And since Borg dedupes backups, I can run it on a pretty aggressive schedule while keeping my BorgBase bill pretty affordable.

I use Borgmatic uploading backups to BorgBase and an external drive, and I monitor them using Borgmatic’s hooks for healthchecks.io. Everything was very easy to set up.

You might want to ask the selfhosted Lemmy community https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted

Sometimes it’s gotta happen. And working with the terrain adds some nice challenge and visual variety.

I like to program as a hobby (though I also do it as a professional, so I get a lot of paid time to learn this stuff too) and so much stuff is just freely available online. Tutorials, documentation, tools, whatever, mostly open-source which means free to use and play with as you please.

You can make web pages with nothing but a text editor and any one of a million guides on web programming. Just put HTML code in a text file and open it in your browser, and bam you’ve got a web page. You can gradually learn stuff like CSS and JavaScript to make them look neat and do cool stuff. Then you can use GitHub Pages to deploy your pages to the internet for other people to see and use. Or learn a programming language like Python to build a web server that serves up that HTML you learned. You don’t need a beefy machine at all to write code.

I’ll throw in another vouch for simple Zigbee buttons, if you don’t want to mess with rewiring or installing new light switches. The Thirdreality buttons work great and are super affordable.

I’m running Prosody and it was easy to set up and the docs are good.

That’s fair

Matrix is an option but it’s slow and breaks all the time. I’m a big fan of XMPP myself but good luck convincing anyone else to make an account 😔

Computers are just modern clockwork made with silicon and electricity instead of brass and we’ve used them to build a global network where people and machines can communicate near-instantly and automate so much work. We tricked the rocks into thinking and I think that’s incredible.

I host it as a docker container and the maintenance has been painless

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is my top recommendation for folks new to anime, it’s one of the best out there.

I self-host https://woodpecker-ci.org/ and I love it. It was easy to set up, and I never have to worry about CI/CD minutes.

It’s been continued in another repo https://github.com/sysadminsmedia/homebox

Homebox is great, I bought a usb label maker specifically for it

There are always more cool tricks and great plugins out there, have fun!

Also I’d recommend Neovim, it’s exactly like vim except it supports Lua scripting, so there are lots of powerful plugins that aren’t available on vanilla vim.