stephenc

Want to know what is worse than GoDaddy? Network Solutions.

I like Ubuntu Server. It’s got a nice installer that is simple and straight to the point, and lots of documentation. I’m also very familiar with it if I need to troubleshoot.

That said, I don’t like snaps and every new version pushes them harder. I’m currently learning openSUSE to see if it can become my new go-to for servers.

I always run Linux servers headless, so how the distro does GUI (if an option) is not relevant to me in this scenario.

I have always been a laptop guy my whole life because the portability, flexibility and comfortability of them.

Decades ago, I would say that laptops didn’t really have these attributes. Back in the day, they were heavy, most had short battery life, and were very slow compared to a decent desktop. Laptops have come a long way in three decades. :)

This is my least favorite part of Seafile. If there were a competitive alternative that used a flat file storage backend then I’d switch to that in a heartbeat. But alas, I still have not found one, so I will continue into my 6th year of using Seafile…

Worth noting in 6 years I haven’t had any actual trouble with Seafile’s storage, and the few times I’ve needed to I’ve been able to export data to a normal file system using seaf-fsck even if Seafile isn’t running. I’m just not 100% comfortable with it anyway so I understand the apprehension. I’d rather use a standard filesystem and be able to use standard tooling on it.

And the clients are actually really great, competitive with the features of the best cloud storage clients.

I use Seafile… can give a partial recommendation

I bounced around a bunch of different apps after leaving Evernote myself some 6-7 years ago. Evernote was cool, but started getting worse. I can only imagine how bad it is now. I also learned that migrating away from Evernote’s walled garden is a bit difficult.

I don’t have any recommendations for ones with a web editor. I specifically wanted a local app for my notes, which Evernote seemed less interested in and more interested in pushing their web app. After Evernote I’ve been using a folder of plain-old Markdown files, synced to my home server, and using various editors for those Markdown files. Things I’ve tried include VSCode, Typora, and QOwnNotes.

Today I use Obsidian and haven’t hopped around for the last 2 years. I love Obsidian and have basically no complaints about it. Again no web editing, but if you just want local files (that can sync across devices) then Obsidian is excellent.

My dad used to name each machine after a different character from Transformers.

I do the same, except with Seafile. On my phone I use Keepass2Android which has built-in support for syncing a database over WebDAV. Works flawlessly.

I still like individual forums and use them on occasion. For me, the reason why Reddit was better is because of the UI. The default phpBB skin is awful for following a dialog in my opinion; Reddit’s much more compact threads free of annoying signature blocks and giant user profile panels is much nicer. Personally I’d be perfectly happy to go back to the days of individual forum accounts if the forums had nice UIs like Reddit or Lemmy. Even Flarum is an example of a traditional forum software with a decent UI. The big missing thing though is threaded conversation which I much prefer over a flat forum, something that Lemmy offers.

I just use a folder of photos and then use digiKam to manage them. But it’s just me, I don’t need to share photos with anyone else. I like digiKam but it doesn’t play great with concurrent users out of the box. I think there’s a way to use a shared database though.

Love mdadm, it’s simple and straightforward.

I am also pretty interested in btrfs. I recently redid my laptop and did btrfs for everything there. No btrfs on my server yet though. Ext4 is just really optimal for data recovery. Maybe if I redo my server sometime in the future I’ll start with btrfs.

My Grafana dashboard says 81 watts at the moment. This includes a slightly beefy Intel computer running Proxmox, with a Kubernetes cluster inside, a few other small ARM servers, and my networking stack which is a router, 1 switch, 1 AP, and a modem. Also the main server is full of spinning rust disks. I haven’t done much to optimize power consumption.

Uh… Google Domains… damn.

Well actually it depends, I have things spread across different registrars for different things. For all my personal stuff I have been using https://www.namesilo.com/ for over 5 years with not much to complain about. They generally have good prices and support quite a few TLDs, and no nonsense. Though they’ve been in a control panel redesign limbo for like 2 years which is pretty annoying, especially since I liked the old one better.

For IT stuff that I do for nonprofits and other orgs I’ve used Google Domains, but I guess that will have to change. Mostly because it integrates well with Google Workspace. I already use Cloudflare for a few of these things, so maybe I’ll just move the domains to Cloudflare too. Generally I’m pretty happy with most things Cloudflare.

I hear excellent things about Porkbun but have never used it myself.

I’d love a desktop client. :P No web shenanigans, maybe GTK or something.

And talk about it on a self-hostable platform, no less.