solrize

I just use directories but yeah it would be good to have some kind of metadata repo. Calibre is ok if you sit around curating it. Trouble is a lot of my downloads are arxiv PDFs with nuneric filenames and cataloguing them would take some effort. Meh.

Proxy through a VPS, or use dynamic DNS if you don’t mind occasionally waiting for TTL expiration when your address suddenly changes. You can set it to 1 minute and that often works these days (it didn’t always).

Will your ISP give you a static IPv6 block? It’s v4 that’s scarce, but if it’s just for your own stuff and you aren’t worried about users on old v4 networks, it’s fine to just use pure v6.

There might be other buses ahead of the one you are on, en route to that stop. You really want the phone GPS and sometimes the bus number, to figure out where you are on the route.

It doesn’t seem so technically difficult if you can get the transit data. The phone GPS supplies your current location for the bus version, or alternatively you can just identify the most recent stop you saw. San Francisco has around 1000 city buses (I looked that up a while back) and you can put fairly precise coordinates, bus number, and route number of a bus into 4 or 5 bytes. So the complete locations of all the buses is around 20K which is less data than the javascript bloat that nextbus.com sends on every new visit. You do want the route maps (from transit agency) and street maps (openstreetmap) but overall it’s not huge.

Another idea I haven’t pursued: something that monitors the schedules of local transit (BART trains, and buses) so I can check their ETA’s and locations from a phone browser. There are existing apps and sites for this but they unfortunately suck. They always answer “when will the next bus/train arrive at stop XYZ” which is almost never what I want to know.

What I want is usually either “I’m on the #123 bus RIGHT NOW and want to get off at XYZ, how many more stops do I wait?”, or else either “my friend is on BART and just passed station X, when will she get to station Y where I’m supposed to meet her?”. Anyone implementing anything like that, please take it into account. The transit agencies usually have API’s to get the relevant data.

I didn’t implement this because it stopped being needed, but a text to print converter for my hearing impaired and non-techie elderly mom. Basically an email gateway running on VPS so if she got an email or text from a family member, a raspberry pi in her bedroom would immediately print out the message on a receipt printer where she would see it. I was going to use a cheap thermal printer but another family member objected (I guess reasonably) to the toxic crap in thermal paper, so I found someone selling a cheap impact receipt printer on craigslist. Nothing much actually happened with this, but I liked the idea.

By the end of June 2026? Old news.

Data storage: you can do pretty much whatever, they won’t look at your stuff unless you do something that attracts attention. Of course encrypt it anyway.

Streaming: yes that attracts attention if you stream to the public. If it’s edgy or pirated content you can’t use the big providers. If it’s your private collection that only a few people know about, it’s like the situation with storage.

I’m sorry but this is kind of a wtf to me. What’s wrong with a text file? I thought I was being fancy by using org mode, which is just a text file with some markup. If you want to be really fancy you could use a bug tracker. fossil-scm.org has a built in one that I might try sometime.

Maybe you’re right and you could implement something like MLS in JS and/or WASM. I don’t know if those can open raw socket connections instead of using websockets. You’d need a raw socket connection to interoperate with other apps like Signal, but with websockets you could implement similar functionality non-interoperably, maybe even using a server side proxy to route to a Signal server (the proxy would never see plaintext).

There’s still the matter of making sure that the JS or WASM download isn’t tampered with. You have to trust the server that send it to you, which is in conflict with the E2EE notion of not trusting the server. There could possibly be a MITM attack by someone with a signed TLS certificate. Worst is if it’s served from a CDN. CDN’s have alway seemed to me like supply chain attacks waiting to happen.

Mxroute.com .

Yeah it kind of sucks but it exists. I’ve used it for a very small server, like 3 users. I won’t say “avoid” but unless it’s gotten a lot better since I tried it, you probably should look elsewhere for a long term solution.

E2EE with large groups is a hassle because you have to do messy key changing protocols every time somene leaves the chat (since you want to invalidate their keys when they leave). If you don’t mind the server (self hosted) seeing the plaintext that’s a lot simpler. Tbh I’ve simply used nextcloud chat or irc for stuff like this. I can’t really recommend nextcloud for various reasons but it was easy for me to set up a chat when I wanted one, since I already had a nextcloud server. Matrix is supposed to be the post-IRC IRC so I’d check into it, but I haven’t used it so far. I’m of the impression that Matrix isn’t E2EE (the server can see the private stuff) but maybe I’m wrong.

Shorter version: instead of wiki software, use a static site generated from a git repo. It’s a valid approach. Note that Gitit uses git for version management, so among other things you can copy your whole wiki with git clone. But it also has a built in web editor instead of just relying on git push.

You might try Fossil then. It uses something like 2MB of server ram instead of gigabytes. It makes me wonder where we all went wrong.

Is it public facing in the sense that randos will edit it? If not, the simplest thing is probably fossil-scm.org which is very light weight, but it’s actually a version control system with a built in wiki, so its editing interface is a bit weird compared with Wikipedia. It is pretty fast though I’ve only played with it, not run anything public facing from it.

Setting up Mediawiki is more complicated but it does have a familiar interface. I don’t know how much tuning and configuration you have to do to allow it to handle a lot of traffic, but obviously with enough caching and stuff, it scales all the way up to Wikipedia level.

I’ve also used Gitit and I think MoinMoin but not with any significant amount of traffic.

If my underwear got buried, it would dig its way out of the ground and say “send more cops”.

Ariely has been in a heap of scandals about this sort of thing. Becoming a celebrity addicted to attention will do that to you.

Paywalled but seems to be about FTM getting existing boobs removed, rather than MTF getting new ones installed.

I think that isn’t really a thing. Usually you would have a tape drive in a backup server for a network, and the backup server would have its own HDD, so you’d back up over the network to the HDD and then dump HDD to tape locally at close to the transfer speed of the disk. Higher capacity tapes have fast transfer and if your data source can’t kee up, the tape has to start and stop all the time, which slows everything down and wears everything out.

“Some TB’s” = single digits? Probably just back up to remote storage if you have enough network speed.

Which projects?

Can you look at the source code in the repos and make any sense of it?

Are there open issues connected to the repo, that you think you could make some headway with?

If you have 0 experience writing code, I think contributing to an existing project isn’t a good way to start. Better to text a textbook and work through some exercises, and do a few small projects of your own, before trying to join an existing team where as a total newbie, you’ll be a burden. Note that “small project of your own” can involve forking something that exists and making your own changes or additions. That doesn’t require much attention from other people.

Then, contribute once you feel you are ready to contribute.

What do you want to do with the HDD’s? I have a bunch of crap saved on mine, but nowhere near 12TB. Also I rent some drive space (Hetzner Storage Box) for server backups. That adds up over time but you don’t have to spend a big chunk all at once, and HDD prices might eventually drop again.

Feel lucky that you want HDD rather than SSD. SSD prices have tripled or quadrupled while HDD has not even doubled, per the graph someone posted.

Well thanks for at least explaining what it is, but isn’t Matrix already self hostable? Anyway what’s wrong with IRC?

That leaves you with 17 more of them though.

These are mini PCs right? So you want something with a room full of humans or some type of local online service. Anyway, not a purely computer project.

Library terminals and game room come to mind, but neither are for installing at home.