if you get sent there for computer crimes you might get the worst sentence: Teaching those “tech skills.”

Hehe I think you might have been replying to a different thread. :)

It might be some way, however not easily. My mega-corpo ISP blocks incoming connections on common hosting ports, because they want to keep the network safe sell expensive home-business plans. Lol

I’m also very amateur at this as I go along, and I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with the fallout of missing some security step and getting my server botted or ransomwared lol.

I haven’t done the hardware stuff with setting up my own router/firewall box either, for instance.

So Tailscale works really well for me by seemingly magically bypassing a lot of that nonsense and giving me less to worry about. They allow 3 users for free, but have a relatively inexpensive family plan for like 6 users as well, if that becomes necessary.

I mainly just need to tell them not to try and use my server as an exit node if they’re across the country 😂.

But yeah definitely, I’m using this as a way to test the waters for running service alternatives as the web we knew collapses around us lol. I’m not ready to be running something people really rely on yet, though. :)

Thanks! This is very helpful! I really appreciate it! :D

I have a family member across the country that wants to break from Google and really isn’t the type to self-host themselves, and I connect to my self hosted NextCloud solely through TailScale.

NextCloud permissions seem easy enough, but I’m researching how to add them to my Tailnet safely to avoid potential compromise of my network if something happens to their system.

Presuming this involves ACLs, which look intimidating, but I’m doing some research on that.

I don’t have any backups.

Horror story, stranger. Oh no!

If this is stuff that you can’t afford to lose like family pictures, music library, or 90’s memes or something, I’ve had decent luck with iDrive for my offsite backups. 4TB relatively cheap, works with Linux (using some Perl scripts they made), and you can define your own encryption keys so not even they can see your stuff.

It reliably backs up my NAS.

They’ve usually got a crazy cheap deal to start with on their homepage or if you look around, for the first year. So maybe that could be helpful until you get some other storage. :)

(I think we pay $100 a year now for 4TB)

That’s definitely one of those things I found bizarre and awful yet…entirely unsurprising. I can see how selling that data probably sounds like such a lucrative edge to marketing companies.

how did we as society come to accept this?

By not establishing ethical lines high-voltage containment fences on the advertising industry quickly enough, and letting them convince us “this is just how business works”, when their entire existence is about finding the scummiest ways to hack free will for profit.

This may sound dumb or be helpful so I’ll toss it in just in case:

Depending on when they’re built, a lot of houses’ RJ-11 phone jacks are actually using CAT-5E. If you’re lucky, they’re individual runs and not daisy-chained!

The way they set up the runs here is weird though, they’re cat-5E but we have no fancy junction box. It all runs to some hatch on the side of the house presumably for telecom/satellite TV installers. So you might have secret ethernet cable behind your landline jacks, even if there’s no tidy junction box! :)

It was cool finding out there’s already capable infrastructure in the walls, but you gotta replace the wall jacks with RJ-45 using a tone tool to label which one goes where, and then the next trick is figuring out an affordable switch that can handle a garage that could get to 100ºF + in summer…

But anyway, worth checking before you start getting too deeply sunk into other solutions. :)

100%

I don’t understand this “Installing stuff on Linux is complicated :(” meme when the user-friendly distros have “app stores” and the terminal commands for app management are simpler than 80’s text adventure inputs. (Apt / zypper / yum / whatever + search, then install and “Y”. You can even install multiple packages by separating them with spaces! Doesn’t require an MIT degree here…)

And the sheer convenience of one single update process to update all your software on your machine at once! This is literally what mindless-consumption devices like smartphones do, and people seem to like it.

Windows fans need Chocolatey to “mimic a fraction of our power!!”(Lol j/k. meme.) And while it’s cool, I found it more complicated command-wise. (There’s also GUI front ends I think to be fair but I digress.)

On Windows if your app doesn’t auto-update, you’ve gotta download a new .exe, or .msi or .zip (“so many formats! Not simple! :(” heh) for EVERY update.

And lastly, when something goes wrong:

Personal experience here but I’m glad I can run any app in Linux with a terminal window and see some computer-speak as to what went wrong. Even if I don’t understand it, somebody will!

Windows often just tells me “No.” and the only option is: “OK”. Or blue screen errors are purposely obfuscated, and worst case advice is “Hi my name is Josh D. A Microsoft support volunteer. Have you run Windows Update? Updated drivers? Reinstall the whole OS to be sure, I guess.”

I’m sincerely not trying to be smug here. The aversion to the terminal is like 99% psychological. People ideally read manuals to figure out how to use their new air fryer, so I don’t think it’s too outlandish to say “Hey learn a couple simple phrases to install and update your system.”

And that’s even if you need the terminal at all.

So many people are so happy to help if Linux is new and different to you, but I’m so done with people mocking it as “not ready” and “unusable by the average person” because somebody tried installing an .exe in Ubuntu or loading up Gentoo once without reading anything, and ran screaming back to Windows.

Human brains are incredible things. I think we’ve just been stuck in some weird culture that makes learning scary and intimidating because it’s easier to sell us push-button-o-matics (with trackers and ads of course!) that way.

P.S: My entire games library, even my discs Windows won’t even bother with, run beautifully, on Nvidia, using Wayland, with 2 monitors, on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

P.P.S: Also I do plenty of art, sometimes even get paid for it, and hereby proclaim that Adobe, Autodesk, and their ilk can go screw themselves. Great software, but It’s not worth the headaches of user-hostility and gouging subscriptions. I don’t miss them.

That’s rad! Thanks so much for sharing that! Definitely gonna give this a read. Very much appreciated. :)

portforwards every experimental piece of garbage across their router…

Man some of those “It’s so E-Z bro” YouTubers are WAY too cavalier about doing this.

But it was kinda cool to be able to SSH from Thailand back home to Sweden and browse my NAS, it was super slow, but damn cool…

That feels like sorcery, doesn’t it? You can still do this WAY safer by using Wireguard or something a little easier like Tailscale. I use Tailscale myself to VPN to my NAS.

I get a kick out of showing people my NextCloud Memories albums or Jellyfin videos from my phone and saying “This is talking to the box in my house right now! Isn’t that cool!?” Hahaha.

I’m almost glad I had to go that route. Most of our ISPs here in the U.S will block outgoing ports by default, so they can keep the network safe sell you a home business plan lol.

Yeah I’m honest with myself that I’m a security newb and don’t know how to even know what I’m vulnerable to yet. So I didn’t bother opening anything at all on my router. That sounded way too scary.

Tailscale really is magic. I just use Cloudflare to forward a domain I own, and I can get to my services, my NextCloud, everything, from anywhere, and I’m reasonably confident I’m not exposing any doors to the innumerable botnet swarms.

It might be a tiny bit inconvenient if I wanted to serve anything to anyone not in my Tailnet or already on my home LAN (like sending al someone a link to a NextCloud folder for instance.), but at this point, that’s quite the edge case.

I learned to set up NGINX proxy manager for a reverse proxy though, and that’s pretty great! I still harden stuff where I can as I learn, even though I’m confident nobody’s even seeing it.

Also “move objects on”

Just gonna delete these bills here… Hey why not the whole mailbox?

I also once had a sim make enough garden gnomes to fill every single tile of the street… Then he kicked one. 😂

It depends on the notes, for me:

I’ve had an oddly long-running obsession with Tiddlywiki!

It has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s VERY flexible. My favorite part being that by default it’s just a single, portable, HTML file. No special app required besides a browser, no accounts, and you can just sync it like any other file. (Syncthing, Nextcloud, and friends)

There’s also an app called Tiddloid for Android to make managing and saving a little easier, but they open in any browser.

I have a Tiddlywiki that I use like one might use Obsidian, where I just stash stuff I’ll want to remember and maybe link between similar ideas.

And then I’m currently trying to use it to make a solution to sketch out my Savage Worlds RPG campaigns. It gets a little tricky but you can make templates, script buttons, and that kind of thing. If you’re already comfortable with web stuff you’ll probably catch on WAY better than I have.

You can also host it as a website, or on your server or whatever, to use it like any other wiki. There’s also plugins to use Markdown instead of “wikitext.”

There’s also an excellent guide to learning it at https://groktiddlywiki.com/read/ . It’s basically an online workbook using Tiddlywiki itself!

The community is also super helpful. I do wish it had a little more out of the box, but something about a customizable, portable, digital “notebook” that doesn’t require an account or hopefully-supported-in-5-years application is SUPER appealing to me. It’s quite underrated.

Also just for fun I wanted to share my favorite example someone’s been working on for quite some time now, a heavily customized D&D wiki

https://intrinsical.github.io/wiki/index.html

Tiddlywiki can be a bit dense and the documentation is slowly improving, but there’s so much potential!

Which is both entirely understandable, and also tragic because Canada’s indigenous written characters are so cool. :D

But also, it’s gotta be neat having a name among your people, that “the state” has nothing to do with…