Spyke

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What else should I self-host?

You may or may not be a developer, but I would like to vote for Gitea/Forgejo. Should you ever get a grasp of git, a git forge is great for keeping code and even plain text documents recorded. It’s my favorite self-hosted service by far.

It can even operate as an OIDC server, so you can create a single login for all your services (that support OIDC).

I’ll also recommend Grist, an alternative to Google Sheets (and Notion, I believe?). It’s a web interface to spreadsheets that supports Python code as formulas. (I’ve also tried Nocodb, another Notion alternative, and I much prefer Grist.)

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Anon has a tip

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Nobody else has mentioned this but there have been several times that Bing censored something and it propagated to DDG, most notably when Microsoft censored Tank Man (intended for China, probably) but then Tank Man also was censored on DDG.

Partly because of these incidents, I could never consider DDG reliable.

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TIL - Caddy

If you’re using git to version Caddy configuration, you can use a pre-commit hook to test it, ensuring that you’ll never have invalid configuration. That’s what I do.

caddy validate

There’s some extra command args that may be necessary but that should be an adequate first step.

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The Way Ubuntu Boots on Raspberry Pi is Changing

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This is probably a hot take, but:

I disagree. The OS doesn’t run a mainline kernel, and the Raspberry Pi devs recommend a clean slate on OS upgrades. Granted, they do some trickery for performance with their Zero (not 2) line, using armhf instead of the slower armel, but this doesn’t excuse the fact that Raspberry Pi OS is so brittle. The builds are also still on 32-bit, even though every Pi since 3B can run 64-bit OSes.

I just run Debian on mine. Can’t be assed to clean flash my devices each major update.

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If you have one, how much do you pay for a domain name? Any cheap registrar recommendations?

Beyond just the registrar you pick, try not to pick some vanity TLDs. The ubiquitous ones (e.g. .com and .net) are fine. For example .xyz has a bad reputation (due to its initial low price to register, it became used for many spammers) and might be blocked in unexpected places. Others might lure you in with a cheap first year but charge much higher for subsequent years.

In addition to that, ccTLDs (country code) can be a wildcard, especially if you don’t live in the region served by it. Although rare, the country registry can seize your domain. Most commonly though, many, including .us, do not allow you to mask your personal information (WHOIS privacy). I’ve had a .me for a long time and even though they haven’t been much of a problem, they are also raising the price for renewal faster than an equivalent .com, and so I’ve been thinking of letting that domain go.

If you trust your country’s ccTLD registry and they’re reputable, that’s less of an issue, however.

linux

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Which command substitution do you prefer in shell scripts: backquotes `` or $() syntax?

By some sheer coincidence, I searched this topic today. I’ve been a consistent user of the parenthesis expansion, but never thought of why I preferred one or the other.

I suppose the primary advantage is that $() will expand in a consistent way. You can even nest quotes and more expansions in one, while you’d struggle the same with backtick notation.

So I’ll just keep using parentheses.

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rootless backup of rootless podman volumes?

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In addition to podman unshare (which you would just prefix in front of commands like chmod), you can just temporarily do podman unshare chown -R root: <path> if you backup while the container is down. Don’t try that command on live containers.

For a more permanent solution, you can investigate which user (ID) is the default in the container and add the option --user-ns=“keep-id:uid=$the_user_id”. This does not work with all images, especially those that use multiple users per container, but if it works, the bind mount will have the same owner as the host.

To find the user ID, you can run podman exec <container> id. In most of the images I use, it’s usually 1000.

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What else should I self-host?

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Absolutely! I have used multiple origins for posting my projects to Gitea/Forgejo and GitHub. You can also mirror repositories from one site to another, too, although it requires a clean slate for pulling from another remote.

The biggest use case for me is documenting (as code) my home network setup on my private forge.

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Does anyone use a YubiKey?

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I’ve set this up although I can’t post the exact steps since it’s been so long ago. Here’s a summary.

Have a machine on the same network as the server. Setup dropbear-initramfs on your server to have a SSH server enabled on the luks unlock screen. You’ll have to set the SSH login command to unlock luks in authorized_keys. Then when you need to unlock your server from boot, use ssh with the -J option to jump to the server. Important here: use the local server ip address with respect to the secondary machine. e.g. ssh 192.168.1.1 -J secondary

In that example, 192.168.1.1 is your server address accessible from your secondary machine.

You can unlock remotely through this as well. I’ve setup Tailscale and can unlock my server when I need to reboot for kernel upgrades.

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What else should I self-host?

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I haven’t looked much into the differences, but from my brief research, it appears that Forgejo has just recently updated such that migration from Gitea is no longer possible. I knew that they had become a “hard” fork last year but it has now diverged.

From a feature standpoint, I know that Forgejo is working on Fediverse integration. Beyond that, I think the differences are less apparent.

So to answer your question, I use Gitea and have for a long time. They’ll still remain MIT-licensed even if it’s no longer fully open source. However, the owning company can (and may) cease open source development. If I had known of Forgejo breaking away earlier, or if I were a new user, I would have probably started with Forgejo. That’s my recommendation.