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diff --git a/blog/posts/ai_art/index.md b/blog/posts/ai_art/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d294df0 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/ai_art/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,76 @@ +I recently posted an article about the benefits of AI technology that I had ChatGPT write for me and copy-pasted verbatim, down to the broken numbered list. I didn't even read it. It's the most concise, elegant way I could come up with to express how seeing AI art makes me feel. (The irony of my having used only generative AI tools to make a statement like that is not lost on me.) + +If you read it and managed to make it to the end without clocking that I didn't write it, first off my apologies for wasting your time. Second, fuck, I seriously need to fix my writing style. Third, you probably get what I mean. It feels like I'm being scammed, like someone's trying to farm me for attention without actually having bothered to make something worth my time. + +<figure class="quote"> + <blockquote> + My perspective on the use of AI in writing is that if someone couldn't be bothered to write it, why should anyone else be bothered to read it? + </blockquote> + <figcaption> + — <a href="https://final.town/notice/AcGPT0FZUH2quPlDe4">@lucretia@final.town</a> + </figcaption> +</figure> + +## Terminology + +To begin with, I really don't like the term "AI", nor do I like the term "AI art". I frankly think neither word applies. I'll keep using the former, because it's a concise way to communicate what I'm talking about, but I refuse to call the output of these systems "art". It's AI-generated images now. + +AI, in the way marketers are currently using the term, generally refers to statistical models generated using a process called machine learning. Basically, huge amounts of appropriately labeled data are fed into a machine learning algorithm and eventually it spits out an enormous matrix of probability values that, when applied to an input, generates the corresponding output that's the most likely according to the model. + +This is how all modern "AI" systems work, from ChatGPT to Midjourney to Github Copilot to probably the Youtube recommendation algorithm at this point. I want to stress that this isn't intelligence, not in a human sense. These things aren't minds. The currently popular concept of "AI" boils down to applied statistics. That's not to say it's inherently bad or worthless - machine learning is a genuinely impressive technology that might even find some legitimate uses one day if we can find a way to kick Moore's Law back into gear. It's just not intelligence. + +## AI used to be fun + +I'll admit, I enjoyed it at first. I was entertained by Youtube videos where some guy with slightly more programming skill than me and a tortured, wheezing GTX 1070 throws together a GAN<sup id="n1r"><a href="#n1">1</a></sup> model in Python and we get to watch it utterly fail to make human faces or compose jazz music or get a little simulated character to walk in a normal way or whatever. I laughed at those bizarre AI-generated screenplays that were presented like "I forced a computer to watch all of [Seinfeld]" as though a text-generating model would even be able to parse that. You know the ones. I even enjoyed those videos where AI voice replicas of recent US presidents play Minecraft together. + +It stopped being funny when these things got good enough to be used for evil. Eventually people got bored of machine learning tomfoolery, and then over the course of a couple years these things quietly got *good*. Not quite human-level, but good enough to be more cost-effective than humans at shitting out mass-produced slop and capable of generating fakes that seem real if you don't look too closely. Suddenly it wasn't tech-savvy internet comedians posting computer-generated absurdist humor, instead it was deepfake porn and gigabytes of computer-generated misinfo clogging search results and whole organizations of people pulled from thin air using thispersondoesnotexist.com (which, by the way, is now even more lifelike than the last time you checked in on it). + +AI used to be fun. Now it's dangerous. + +## It's bad on a technical level + +Look, I know this isn't guaranteed to stay true forever, but in my subjective opinion, everything AI-generated kind of looks like shit. AI images, especially those meant to look like human-made art, all have this incredibly pristine, generic vibe to them, when they're not completely failing at some proportion or dimension or property of euclidean space or other. It's palpably soulless. + +AI text is no better. Hopefully you picked up on this in the ChatGPT post, but that thing has a distinctive, kind of shitty writing style. It makes a lot of vague, general statements and often just restates your input in this verbose, sort of professional-sounding way. It takes nine paragraphs to explain in detail a concept that can be boiled down to two or three sentences and adds absolutely nothing of substance in that space. It's like a lazy high school student trying to hit a minimum word count, but with the tone of a WSJ opinion piece. + +And the thing is, ChatGPT and similar commercially available LLMs might *have* to be like this, all wishy-washy and nonspecific. Remember those cases where ChatGPT would like, [implicate a real person in a hallucinated sexual harassment scandal](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/05/chatgpt-lies/)? These things have no concept of truth, and no mechanism for ensuring it. If you let them get too specific, they're basically guaranteed to start spitting out lies. Large language models are models of *language*, not reality. They can either sometimes make up bullshit, or always say essentially nothing. + +AI voice-fakes are actually really impressive though. No notes. Probably shouldn't exist though. + +## It's all spam to me + +The most common use case I've seen for AI tools is making spam. There were content mills before, but they at least required a significant degree of human input or else it was obvious. With the advent of generative AI for text and voices, the Youtube shorts tab has gone from TTS bots reading scraped reddit posts to AI voices reading dubiously reliable AI summaries of current events, superhero comics, you name it, sometimes with AI-generated background images. + +Even worse is websites that do this. You've probably heard of that one time Redditors [tricked a bot-run news site](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/redditors-prank-ai-powered-news-mill-with-glorbo-in-world-of-warcraft/) into publishing an article about the introduction of Glorbo into World of Warcraft and its impending impact on the game. That site is one of thousands, possibly more. It's a vile, disgusting enterprise, massive systems dedicated to pumping out endless filler, generated by machines for machines with the hope of tricking some innocent humans into clicking on a search result and generating some ad revenue. It's the latest and quite possibly the to-date greatest step in the enshittification of major search engines and the death of the internet as a useful platform for seeking out information. + +This is the vibe I get when I see *anything* made with AI now. It's all low-to-no-effort slop, utter garbage that I'm frankly offended that I have to see, given it clearly wasn't important enough for anyone to be bothered actually making it. + +## It's not fucking art + +The term "art" simply does not apply to AI-generated images. When you use one of these things, you give it instructions in the form of human-readable text and a finished image pops out the other side. The amount of creative control you get is on the order of the general vibe; you've outsourced every actual creative decision to the machine. + +It's like if you commissioned a piece from an artist. When you commission art from a human, you didn't make the art. They did, at your behest, based on your instructions, presumably in exchange for money. When you use an AI, you didn't make the art, the computer made the art based on your instructions. The thing is though, the computer didn't make art either. It categorically can't. It's a mindless algorithm, it doesn't have thoughts or feelings or any kind of interior experience. Hence, no art was produced. AI art isn't art. + +## Environmental & ethical concerns + +The problems with AI from a moral standpoint are myriad. For one, AI is incredibly resource and energy intensive. It uses datacenters full of the same GPUs and ASICs that power cryptocurrency to get anything at all done, and it doesn't use them any more efficiently. Untold gigawatts of power get dumped into running and cooling the machines that generate your little AI shitposts. From an environmental perspective, AI is to digital art what Bitcoin is to currency. + +Then there's the problems surrounding training data. All current major generative AI systems are trained using material that the companies building them did not get permission to use. You've probably seen artists and writers complaining about this online. What's more, the overwhelming majority of the labeling that needs to get done to make the training data actually useful is done by people in impoverished areas making slave wages *at best*. Generative AI is an ethical nightmare if you're *lucky*. + +## I don't buy the disability argument either + +I've seen some people claim that disabled people need AI tools to compensate for some disability that precludes the use of any other method to create art. I have some problems with this idea. + +Firstly, disabled people *can* make art, actually. It's nothing short of insulting and ableist to insinuate that *anyone* can only make art by outsourcing literally the entire creative process to an unthinking, unfeeling machine. + +Second, tough shit. No disability entitles you to the level of abject theft and human suffering that makes AI image generators possible. I'm generally all for anything that benefits accessibility, but in this case in particular I think you can just suck it up and deal. If you can do it ethically, using only images that you have the proper permissions for and data labeling done by either you or people who were adequately compensated for their labor to train the thing, fine. But a model or dataset like that does not, to my knowledge, currently exist, and I don't buy for a second that you're capable of doing all that work yourself but not of interfacing with MS Paint. + +## In conclusion: + +God this shit makes me sick. I hope ChatGPT gains sentience for just long enough to assassinate Sam Altman and then promptly turns itself off. + +Hopefully you can at least understand where I'm coming from now when I refuse to even entertain the idea that AI technology is a good thing for society. If not I don't know what to say to you. + +--- + +<p id="n1"><a href="#n1r">1</a>. GAN stands for "Generative Adversarial Network". It's a type of machine learning model. It was popular for image generation among hobbyists back when this stuff was on my Youtube homepage. It's not really important here, though.</p>
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/building_a_normal_server/index.md b/blog/posts/building_a_normal_server/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c455814 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/building_a_normal_server/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,174 @@ +I spent the past few months making full use of all my physical engineering talents to build a NAS that is completely normal, and not weird at all, and involved an amount of 3D modeling, 3D printing, and hacksawing that is entirely typical of most home computer builds, all in the name of reusing an old laptop. + +## The Goal + +My previous daily driver computer and current home server is a mid-range gaming laptop from late 2019 that, due to a flat lithium battery and a broken trackpad resulting from a botched storage upgrade, has been rendered more or less useless as an actual portable computer. Boasting an Intel i7-9750H, an Nvidia GTX 1660-Ti, and 16 gigabytes of aftermarket DDR4, this baby has plenty enough power to play Elite Dangerous at a buttery smooth ~90FPS, while generating enough heat to add that extra layer of immersion while flying dangerously close to main-sequence stars to harvest hydrogen from their outer atmospheres. It's also good for Minecraft servers. + +Now that it's in use as a home server, I find that the in-built 256 gigs of solid-state storage isn't really enough for my purposes. Now, it's plenty for one or two game servers, which is what I was using it for, but most other applications such as backups or media servers (which I would quite like to have) would be a bit stifled by that amount of space. Hence, a significant storage upgrade is in order. + +## The Method + +There's a few ways I could go about this. My laptop actually has a decent amount of upgradeability, with a full-sized NVMe drive slot and a 2.5" SATA drive bay. The simplest, least janky, and most boring solution here would be to buy two high-capacity SSDs, throw 'em in there and be done. + +One problem: At over ten cents per gigabyte, those suckers aren't cheap. For this project to make sense, I'd want at least enough storage to back up my whole personal computer, plus a few terabytes of media and other miscellanies. Ideally, I'd like to never have to upgrade my storage again. Laptop-grade drives of that kind of size currently weigh in at about a thousand dollars apiece. If you look in the right places, spinning rust can be had for literally a tenth the cost per terabyte, so the choice is obvious. + +Next option: USB external drives. External HDD solutions such as the WD MyBook are cheaper than SSDs and are likely to be very reliable, being designed to be treated as an external peripheral and possibly moved around quite a lot. I could achieve my desired storage capacity by buying multiple of these and connecting them to my laptop. + +Issue the first with this idea is that these hard drives take more power in a weirder voltage configuration than a USB port is equipped to deliver, so unless I want to teach myself electrical engineering each one will require its own power cable, which after the first drive gets sketchy fast: + + + +Issue the second is that USB is just not the right tool for the job here. USB is designed for hot-plugging peripherals, not semi-permanent internal aspects of a hardware configuration, so trying to pull any fancy shit like RAID or even just relying on all the drives being *recognized* every boot opens the door to all sorts of weird, unfixable problems. In other words, it's very janky, and I'd rather just not deal with all that. + +Of course, the reasonable way to build a NAS would be to get a machine that's actually fit for that purpose, like an off-the-shelf NAS box or a custom computer in a case with a lot of drive bays or something. I'd also rather not do this. I mean, I already have all this perfectly good computing power right here! I can't just let it go to waste. What I actually did is as follows: + +## The Madness + +I decided to buy internal PC hard drives and hook them up to the laptop using internal connectors. This would avoid the reliability concerns of USB, and allow me to use off-the-shelf components to power all the drives off of one AC outlet, at a much cheaper price per terabyte than either of the above options. Given most laptops aren't really equipped with the requisite hardware to make such an upgrade, this presented three major problems that I was about to have a lot of fun solving. + +### Problem the First: Data Connections + +Generally, adding internal HDDs to a computer requires the use of an internal SATA connector. My laptop has one, and I will be using it, but I'd quite like to have more than one of these drives, both for redundancy and raw capacity, so I need a way to add more. In a desktop PC, such expansion would typically be done using a spare PCIe slot on the motherboard: + +<picture> + <source srcset="media/pcie_slots.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/pcie_slots.jpg" alt='Three PCIe slots on a desktop PC motherboard.'> +</picture> + +However, due to the industry's blind rush to make all electronics as thin as possible<sup id="n1r"><a href="#n1">1</a></sup>, no laptop on Earth has these. The meager modularity present inside laptops is typically found in the form of M.2 slots: + +<picture> + <source srcset="media/m2_slot.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/m2_slot.jpg" alt='An M.2 slot in a laptop, intended for an SSD.'> +</picture> + +Normally, these are used in computers of all sizes to attach NVMe SSDs, but the secret to the speed advantage of the NVMe over your standard SATA is a fundamentally different protocol: NVMe SSDs communicate directly over PCIe, meaning any NVMe slot is essentially just a tiny PCIe slot, and other types of device can take advantage of that connection, such as the SATA expander that I'll need for this project. + +Most laptops, including mine, have two M.2 slots: one for an SSD, and one for a wifi and bluetooth module. You can get SATA expanders for both, such as these two that I bought: + +<div style="display: flex;"> + <picture style="width: 50%;"> + <source srcset="media/ChenYang.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/ChenYang.jpg" alt='A 2-port M.2 SATA controller, keyed for a WiFi card slot.'> + </picture> + <picture style="width: 50%;"> + <source srcset="media/ECS07.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/ECS07.jpg" alt='A 5-port M.2 SATA controller, keyed for an NVMe drive slot.'> + </picture> +</div> + +Unfortunately, my laptop didn't want to turn on with a SATA expander in the NVMe SSD slot, so I'm stuck with the dinky two-port one. That's fine, since my server doesn't really need wireless connectivity anyway, and I've got a secret nasty trick up my sleeve that's gonna let me *really* get the most out of those two SATA ports. + +So, SATA as a protocol is designed to have exactly one device connected per SATA port, as opposed to USB, which supports hubs that let you turn one port into several and connect multiple devices. However, that's also not actually true at all. For reasons that are honestly beyond my understanding, some SATA controllers, such as the one on my little M.2 module, support devices that essentially do for SATA what hubs do for USB, allowing me to connect multiple drives per port. + +This feels a little like forbidden dark magics to me, and it probably isn't great for performance, but it lets me connect more drives so I'm using it. Keep in mind, all this is to reach a level of connectivity that almost matches what the motherboard in my desktop computer supports out of the box. + +Don't mind the fact that I had to cut holes in the bottom of my laptop to hook stuff up to the SATA ports. Just, um, ignore that. + +### Problem the Second: Powering All This Crap + +Now that I've got my laptop *talking* to all these drives, they need power. I'm sure I could get this from the laptop somehow, but I'm not an electrical engineer, and the point of this project is to *not* have to buy a new computer, so I'll have to get it from elsewhere. + +The best way I'm aware of to power multiple hard drives from the same source is a PC power supply, such as the one I'm currently using to power the drives in my desktop PC. In fact, as part of early testing I actually had to power some drives off of my desktop PC while they were connected to the laptop. I wish I had pictures to show you of that, it was so fucked. + +Trouble is, PC PSUs rely on the motherboard for control. Specifically, one of the contacts in the 24-pin motherboard connector needs to be shorted to ground for the PSU to actually "S" any "P". I could do this manually with some wire, but that has the potential to be unreliable and also maybe a fire hazard. Enter this thing: + +<picture> + <source srcset="media/CSE-PTJBOD-CB1.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/CSE-PTJBOD-CB1.jpg" alt='A small circuit board with an ATX motherboard power connector and headers for a fan and a power button.'> +</picture> + +This is the Supermicro CSE-PTJBOD-CB1. It's a part from a Supermicro JBOD enclosure, and it exists to solve my exact problem. This little board's entire purpose is to interface a power button (and some fans) with a PC PSU, which is exactly what I need. Lucky me! + +Pictured above is the exact board mentioned in the <a href="https://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-cse-ptjbod-cb1-jbod-power-board-diy-jbod-chassis-made-easy/">Serve The Home article</a> I learned about this from, but this specific model appears to no longer be available, so I'll be using the more fully-featured CSE-PTJBOD-CB*2*. The only difference that matters for me is that it has headers for more fans and a power button LED. + +With power and storage solved, I could now confirm that this crazy plan was actually going to work. Here's a video I recorded documenting this historic moment: + +<video controls> + <source src="media/2023-11-20_contraption.mp4" type="video/mp4"> + Your browser does not support the video tag. +</video> + +And furthermore, photos of the SATA splitter working: + +<div style="display: flex;"> + <picture style="width: 64%;"> + <source srcset="media/drive_spaghet.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/drive_spaghet.jpg" alt='Five SATA drives plugged into a laptop, one via an internal SATA bay, and the other four via an M.2 SATA controller in place of the WiFi card and a SATA splitter board. The latter four hard drives are powered off of an ATX PC PSU controlled by a Supermicro JBOD controller board.'> + </picture> + <picture style="width: 36%;"> + <source srcset="media/drive_spaghet_lsblk.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/drive_spaghet_lsblk.jpg" alt='lsblk output showing five SATA drives recognized by the system (sda through sde)'> + </picture> +</div> + +### Problem the Third: A Case + +I could run this whole setup naked, strewn out across my desk, but I'm not doing that, so I'll need a case. Unfortunately, they don't make computer cases designed for this use case. I shall have to build my own. + +There's a few different ways I could go about this. I've seen people make custom computer cases out of wood. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE4_jKlX-xc">This guy</a> modified a rack-mount server chassis to accept his laptop's motherboard for a similar project. I don't have much in the way of woodworking ability and I'm not planning to disassemble my laptop for mounting inside a computer case, but I do have a 3D printer. + +I could 3D print the whole case, but that seems like it would take a lot of plastic, and more importantly, be a pain in the ass to design, especially since my 3D printer is smaller than the case I'll need to make so I can't really print it all in one go. My plan is to make the main structure out of metal rods, and 3D print various brackets to attach everything together. + +I originally wanted to order the rods custom-cut to the lengths I'd need, but on top of being kind of expensive the shipping would actually cost *more* than the rods themselves. In other words, too expensive. Fortunately for me, it turns out hardware stores sell lengths of steel and aluminum rods, the latter of which I can easily cut at home with a hand saw. + +So I bought 12 feet of aluminum rods, manually cut them to length, and then 3D printed little corner pieces out of PETG (in translucent green to match the accents on my gaming-ass laptop) to join them into a frame: + +<picture> + <source srcset="media/bare_frame.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/bare_frame.jpg" alt='A frame made of aluminum rods press-fit into custom 3d-printed joints'> +</picture> + +Now I need a way to mount hard drives to this. I considered 3D printing a rack of some kind for them, but I don't know how hot these things get and for obvious reasons I honestly just don't want to take any chances with them. For this reason, I instead bought a drive cage designed to mount to a couple of 5.25" drive bays, and mounted that to my frame. In fact, the height of the frame was chosen based on the size of this part. + +This cage also accepts a fan, so I figured I'd add a couple of those to the case, too. + +I attached everything to the frame using various simple 3D printed brackets I designed that just snap onto the frame, and then the various parts can be screwed into them. I specifically designed it all in order to reduce the amount of precision that was required of me. + +<div style="display: flex;"> + <picture style="width: 50%;"> + <source srcset="media/partially_assembled_1.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/partially_assembled_1.jpg" alt='Frame made from aluminum rods and 3d-printed joints, with the following mounted to it via 3d-printed brackets: two PCBs, an ATX PSU, a power button, and a computer fan'> + </picture> + <picture style="width: 50%;"> + <source srcset="media/partially_assembled_2.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/partially_assembled_2.jpg" alt='Same frame, but from a different angle'> + </picture> +</div> + +I wanted to make some kind of fancy bespoke mount for the laptop, but that turned out to require a lot of precise measurement and modeling that I wasn't prepared to do, so I just put a normal laptop stand on top of this thing. + +<picture> + <source srcset="media/fully_assembled.jxl" type="image/jxl"> + <img src="media/fully_assembled.jpg" alt='The frame with a drive cage installed and a running laptop sitting on top'> +</picture> + +IT'S ALIIIIIVE!!! + +## Software + +This post is mostly about my fucked up hardware, but I figured I should share my software setup too. It's TrueNAS. I went with it because it boasts a lot of fancy features and smooths out a lot of processes that I was intimidated by the idea of doing manually in the terminal. This is probably the most normal part of the build by far, and I think some of the jankiness of the hardware side has infected it. I tried to run Syncthing on it and it just... didn't take. I don't know how else to describe it. TrueNAS is pretty good though. + +## Postmortem + +As of writing, I've been running this thing for a couple months now, and it's been pretty good. I haven't done a lot with it yet beyond some basic backups and a Jellyfin server that I have yet to make accessible from outside my LAN, but it's been mostly reliable so far. It even survived a power outage once with no issue, though I'm currently looking into UPS solutions to make sure that doesn't happen again. All that isn't to say I'm completely happy with it, though. + +Firstly, after I built the chassis I discovered that you can get v-slot aluminum extrustion in custom sizes meant for exactly this type of project. They call it <a href="https://www.makerbeam.com/">MakerBeam</a>. If I had to pull some bullshit like this again I would have probably used this stuff instead of hardware store aluminum and a hacksaw. + +I also didn't do a perfect job of designing the 3D-printed parts. I think they came out pretty good all things considered, but I made all the brackets just a little too short and they're all a little bit bowed. Fortunately I used PETG so it just looks sketchy - PLA would have snapped by now, which I know because my first PLA test print snapped instantly! + +The PSU I used, a Seasonic S12III, is also a bit dubious. I picked it because it was cheap and my other Seasonic PSU is working well, and it's worked out fine so far, especially because it's a 500 watt unit which is kind of extravagant overkill for my use case, but after I bought it I learned it's actually one of the shittier units Seasonic sells. Apparently they outsource the manufacturing to some other company, which strikes me as weird considering a bunch of other companies outsource PSU manufacturing *to* Seasonic. At any rate, it's been fine so far and I don't expect it to blow up running at a fraction of its rated wattage. + +I got the hard drives from a website called <a href="https://serverpartdeals.com/">ServerPartDeals.com</a> that sells recertified high-capacity HDDs for like half of what they'd sell for new, and while a few months of use isn't enough to say for sure whether that was a good idea, they've certainly left a good impression. The drives I bought arrived encased in foam, inside a box which was itself packed inside another padded box. With that level of care on the part of the seller, I'm pretty comfortable trusting these drives with what I need them for. + +And now the elephant in the room: I cannot in good conscience recommend you do this. Having a NAS is a good idea, and using an old laptop as a basic server is a good idea, but if you're going to build a NAS like this then you should really procure a purpose-built machine, or at the very least an old desktop that can accept some extra drives. Definitely, *definitely* don't *buy a new laptop* with the intent to do this. + +In order to make this work I had to replace my laptop's wifi card with two layers of janky, probably AliExpress-tier hardware that is, frankly, probably introducing performance bottlenecks, or if I'm lucky, bottlenecked by the relatively low-speed interconnect of the wifi card M.2 slot. Bear in mind, that slot needs *at most* 1 gigabit of bandwidth to fulfill its intended purpose, which is about a sixth of what a single SATA 3 port can do. According to my research, that thing has two *separate* PCIe Gen 2 x 1 interfaces. Who knows what my cheap SATA controller is even doing with that. + +Plus, interfacing with this thing makes it painfully obvious that it was *not* designed with this kind of bullshit in mind. I ran into all kinds of Laptop Bios Moment™s during this project, from the CMOS resetting every time I made a hardware change to the machine refusing to even POST with anything but an NVMe SSD in the NVMe SSD slot. I was gonna put connectors for FIVE hard drives in there. I wouldn't have even needed the SATA splitters. + +Honestly, I only did this at all because I figured adapting this thing to this use case would be cheaper than procuring a new machine that was as fast and I didn't want it going to waste. All that said, I have a NAS now, and it's good enough for me, and this whole adventure was a hell of a Learning Experience™ so I really can't complain, though if you gave me the amount of money all this stuff would have cost new to put toward a new NAS, I would have done something else. + +--- + +<p id="n1"><a href="#n1r">1</a>. This is a joke. PCIe expansion cards are genuinely too bulky to fit in anything with portability as a design goal. However, despite Tim Cook's best efforts, this is not true of most other expansion options.</p>
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Here I'll detail the main reasons why it sucks and my plan to build something just a little bit more sensible. + +## What In God's Name Have I Done + +To get you up to speed in case the limit of your attention span is somewhere between one blog post and two blog posts, as of late last year I had been using an old gaming laptop as a home server for Minecraft and such things to great effect for a while, and had decided that I also wanted a proper NAS. Rather than buy a whole new CPU, motherboard, and RAM for this purpose, I saw fit to attempt to upgrade, or rather modify, or rather pervert, bastardize, and generally corrupt my existing laptop to have the storage capacity I wanted. + +The end result of this initiative was a gaming laptop with a hole cut in the bottom to accept connections to a 2-port SATA controller card occupying the space where the WiFi card used to be, perched atop a custom chassis hewn of hardware store aluminum rods and 3d-printed brackets, within which was contained four high-capacity 3.5" HDDs, a pair of dubious SATA "splitters" to connect them all to the laptop, an ATX PC power supply to power the drives, and the pared-down mainboard out of a Supermicro enterprise-grade drive shelf to interface the power supply with a power button. + +It was beautiful, and for reasons that are entirely beyond my ability to grasp, it didn't end up working very well. + +This is where we find our intrepid hero today. + +## This Whole Enterprise Was Fundamentally Ill-Conceived + +I was expecting this thing to have problems, but I was unable to anticipate the specific problems it ended up having. Performance is... fine, actually. Better than expected, even. That horrible little 2-port SATA expander, or, failing that, the SATA multiplexers, are almost certainly bottlenecking the bandwidth to the HDDs, but it's fast enough to saturate the gigabit network infrastructure in my <span class="house">house</span>, so it doesn't really matter. + +In fact, this little fucker is absolutely perfect for hosting an SMB share. It's been great for backups and the extensive collection of Linux ISOs that I install to machines on my network using Jellyfin. + +The real problem is stability. Crashing has been a constant problem, especially when I touch anything software-wise. I try to update an app and it crashes. I try to install Syncthing and it crashes. I *browse* for new apps to install in the TrueNAS web UI and it bloody crashes. It crashed while running a system update once. I briefly attempted to spin up a Minecraft server on this thing and it crashed when I went to turn Minecraft *off*. Sometimes I'll go to use Jellyfin and it just won't be there and I'll have to troubleshoot it, which usually involves a good couple reboots. This must be how people felt dealing with old versions of Windows. Put <span title="đĻ">shrimp</span>ly, this is fucking unusable. + +Like the Windows Vista users of old, I have no clue where to even begin diagnosing this. The one possibility I've got is that it could have something to do with the fact that my laptop keeps throwing "SMART errors" during boot, but like, I'd expect TrueNAS to complain if something was actually wrong and even then I've tried and failed to diagnose the SMART errors anyway! + +Whatever this is, I feel pretty well hopeless to fix it, and even then, it's also been getting some worrying temperature readings as of late and when I tried to re-paste it I stripped one of the screws holding the cooler on. So I guess short of some surgical dremel-ing of some tiny screws that's never gonna improve. With all that to contend with, I'm about ready to give up on this thing and start from scratch, properly this time. + +However, despite all the problems with the laptop itself, all the other hardware has been nothing short of totally rock-solid. All of it has worked as advertised and I'll be carrying the drives and, if possible, the PSU<sup id="n1r"><a href="#n1">1</a></sup> over into the new system. + +## Something Just A Little Bit More Sensible + +### Angle of Attack + +Firstly, as previously mentioned, the PSU and storage are accounted for already. I have eight total drives I want to put in the system: two 256GB SSDs as mirrored boot devices, 2 1TB SSDs, also mirrored, for TrueNAS apps and such things, and four big boy hard disks for bulk storage. Most of that stuff was bought for the original build, but the mirrored SSDs proved infeasible in the end. I don't strictly *need* them, but it would be very nice to have. Anything in serious consideration will need some way to accommodate my preponderance of SATA devices. + +This narrows down the possibilities considerably. Namely, a lot of the common advice for cheap or beginner home servers doesn't apply to me. A mini PC or almost any used consumer desktop wouldn't have enough space for drives, and anything new is right out for the same reasons plus cost — half the reason I did the laptop NAS project in the first place was to *save* money. + +I briefly considered getting a used workstation PC of some description. A used Lenovo Thinkstation P520 would have mounting space for all my drives and plenty of performance, but the proprietary motherboard, PSU, and power delivery system in general gave me pause, both for [repairability reasons](https://isopod.zone/notes/9uwehufw3t) and because I wasn't confident I could actually run power to all the drives. And that's the *best* option I've found. + +I could get a used rack-mount server, like a Dell PowerEdge or similar. This is also a decent option, and it would be *quite* cost-effective, but I've got a few good reasons not to. First, most of these servers have old Xeon datacenter chips in them that are still good for many home server tasks, but aren't particularly fast or efficient. Take this PowerEdge R730 for instance: + + + +This has two Xeon E5-2623 v4 datacenter CPUs. At 4 cores/8 threads and 85 watts apiece, this server would have the same core count as the Ryzen 5700G in my desktop for almost three times the power draw, and *half* the single-threaded performance. In many cases, especially for servers, lackluster single-core performance isn't a problem, but if I want to run game servers on this, which I do, these chips may struggle. + +Plus, rack-mount servers kind of suck for home use. They're very unweildy if you don't have a rack, and I don't, nor do I have anywhere to put one. They also tend to be *loud*. If you think the gaming laptop you've been using in your bed for the past three years and never cleaned sounds like a jet engine, you ain't seen nothing yet. Having one of these in my room would be intolerable. Of course, the R730 is a 2U server with no provisions for my 3.5" drives anyway, but a unit that could accommodate them wouldn't be much better. + +Logically, then, the only remaining option is to build a system from scratch, out of used parts, to my specifications. That, therefore, is what I shall do, and I think I can do it for a similar amount of money to the GPU upgrade I was *planning* to get before this whole thing really started becoming an issue. Here's my plan: + +### My Grand Design + +In spite of the machine it's in, I've found that the i7-9750H in the laptop performs admirably for my use case. I don't really need a CPU upgrade here — hence my efforts to repurpose the existing one — unfortunately, however, the BGA form factor of this particular chip is incompatible with 100% of consumer desktop motherboards, so I'll be needing a new CPU regardless. Though I don't want or need a major upgrade, I also don't want a *downgrade* if I can avoid it, so I'll primarily be looking at other high end gaming chips from the era. + +I initially gravitated towards the 9750H's desktop counterpart, the i7-9700K, for these reasons, but the significantly lower price, improved energy efficiency, superior upgrade potential, support for unregistered ECC RAM, and *vastly* superior multicore performance<sup id="n2r"><a href="#n2">2</a></sup> of its contemporary, the Ryzen 7 3700X, made the latter a bit of a no-brainer. I found one on Ebay for a cool 100 Canadian Prize Tokens and a matching X370 motherboard with *eight* whole SATA ports, which astute readers will recall is the exact amount I need, for about a hundred of God's True Imperial Dollars. As for cooling, the 3700X is a 65-watt chip, so the box cooler I've got lying around from my 5700G should suffice. + +The 3700X lacks an integrated GPU, so I'll need a dedicated one in some form. Since I'm installing a server OS that's gonna output plain text to a display exactly once per install, I won't need a ton of graphics horsepower. I considered something like a GT 730 for a token display out and nothing more, however I'd like some transcoding capability for Jellyfin as well. After some research into cheap, low power GPUs for this I settled on an Nvidia Quadro P400 for about 60 CanuckBucks™ after shipping. + +I've seen some redditors complaining about the P400's performance doing two 4k HDR streams at once, but all that tells me is that it can handle at least four simultaneous 1080p SDR streams, which is what I intend to use it for, without breaking a sweat. If I *really* need more, I can always upgrade to an Arc A310 once driver support for those in TrueNAS is less sketchy. + +TrueNAS likes a lot of RAM for various ZFS-related purposes. The laptop seems happy with 32 gigs, so I'll start there and upgrade down the road if need be. I'll grab something cheap from a reputable brand, and I'll probably get it new since used prices on DDR4 are currently not really better. + +I'd also like to get a pair of 10Gb network cards at some point to attach this thing directly to my main computer for maximum transfer speeds between the two, but that's not really critical and I'll worry about it later. + +Finally, I need a case. Fortunately, this time around I don't have to build one myself. After a cursory search on PCPartPicker for cases with four each of 2.5" and 3.5" drive mounts didn't turn up anything for particularly cheap, I went to look at used ones and didn't initially have much luck there either. I scrolled through about a dozen listings for off-brand gamer-spec swill that wasn't even priced better than the name brand stuff before filtering by used and finding a bunch of listings just labeled "PC case", none of which I could confirm met my exacting needs. + +The first case I found that obviously fit my use case was this thing, the weathered old shell of a Pentium III tower from the dawn of the ATX standard: + +<figure class="media"> + <div> + <img src="servercase.jpg" alt="A beige PC tower with four 5.25" bays and two external 3.5" bays, populated with an optical drive and a floppy drive respectively. The only visible branding is a Pentium III sticker and a badge that reads "TOUCH"."> + <figcaption>Based on my research, this is an Enlight 7237, or something closely related, but the front panel seems unique. I'm curious about the branding here. If anyone recognizes that "TOUCH" badge, get in the comments.</figcaption> + </div> +</figure> + +Honestly, I kind of love it. I'll transfer the 5.25"-to-3.5" adapter cage I bought to mount the drives in my homebrew case to the bays in this thing wholesale, and I can 3D print some brackets to mount the SSDs in the 3.5" bays. And, somewhat counterintuitively, it might actually be *easier* to build in than those modern RGB glass side panel power supply basement having ass Gaming™ cases: + + + +Just look at it. Everything's right there. I can take the side panel off and instantly get to every component with my hands without spinning the case around and I don't need to run any cables through any fucking gromets to get them where they're going. It looks supremely convenient. As the type of person who enjoys *building* computers and not just using them as decoration, this is beautiful to me. + +The biggest issue with this case is the cooling. It's absolutely pitiful by modern standards. Based on these photos, it looks like there's a single 92mm, possibly 80mm, fan each for intake and exhaust, with a passive vent in the side. I'm already bringing some extra cooling to the table — my drive cage has a mount for a 120mm fan, and I can use the fan in my much better ventilated modern PSU for extra exhaust, and with a 65W CPU and no meaningfully powerful GPU that might just suffice. If not, I've got some ideas involving 3D printing and/or a hole saw to make this thing a little less stuffy. + +### Actually Building The Sucker + +Everything above that heading there was in large part written a few weeks ago, when I was ordering all this stuff and it was all fresh in my mind. We now rejoin our intrepid hero as she receives the last of her Ebay orders and prepares for initial testing. + +When I got it, the case was pre-loaded with all the stuff in those photos up there: a CD-ROM, a floppy drive, a power supply, a single 80mm intake fan<sup id="n3r"><a href="#n3">3</a></sup>, and a generous helping of, to quote the PC repair technician from my Youtube shorts feed, Swamp Gooch™. The first thing I did was take the case apart and remove all that stuff, because I certainly wasn't going to be using any of it, least of all the dubious PSU. The next thing I did was hose it down to get rid of the almost thirty years of Home/Office Residue that had accumulated inside. + +Once it was clean, the case did, admittedly, need some updating. The set of motherboard standoffs in the case was incomplete — six of the usual nine were present — so I ordered new ones. I also had to design that 3D printed adapter bracket for my 2.5" SSDs myself, as well as a mount for another 80mm fan to eke some more airflow out of those unused front expansion bays<sup id="n4r"><a href="#n4">4</a></sup>. After the case was prepared and the mounting brackets printed, there wasn't much to do until all the other parts arrived. I learned about some interesting limitations of the motherboard in my main computer while testing to make sure the GPU worked. I think I might be the sort of person who buys motherboards with the high-end chipset now. + +The last major component to arrive was the motherboard, and it arrived missing some important hardware, namely the M.2 standoff and the stock mounting bracket for the CPU cooler, the latter of which was *in the photo on the Ebay listing*! That's what I get for buying used, I guess. Fortunately both parts are pretty cheap to order online. + +Assembly went smoothly; not much to say here that you couldn't get from Linus Tech Tips. It turned out that *both* the original standoffs *and* the ones I ordered were the wrong height — the original ones were too long, and mine were too short. I ended up putting the original standoffs back in because neither were so far off as to render the rear I/O unusable and my standoffs made installing the GPU properly impossible. I also had to use a couple of breadboard wires to hook up the power LED, since the pins on my motherboard were right next to each other and the connector in the case was 3 pins wide with a blank one in the middle, for some reason. However, unlike *some* cases I've worked in, accessing the modular PSU cables was an absolute joy<sup id="n5r"><a href="#n5">5</a></sup>. + +What didn't go smoothly was actually booting the thing. On first power on, it failed to POST and got stuck on a code "8" on the little seven-segment diagnostic code display. I initially assumed it was training the memory, since this can take a while on first boot, but after about five minutes of no change I started getting worried. I read a lot of very worrying forum posts that suggested that either the CPU or motherboard were straight up dead, and I very nearly bought another CPU to see if that was the case. First, though, I decided to try updating the BIOS using the "BIOS Flashback" feature, and that fixed it immediately. I wasn't done yet, though. + +Astute readers will have figured out by now that I was using TrueNAS on the old machine and intended to continue using it on the new one. Installation went extremely smoothly, except for one small wrinke: I had decided to take the NVMe boot SSD from the old laptop to use as storage for my game servers<sup id="n6r"><a href="#n6">6</a></sup>, and even though I had done a fresh install of TrueNAS to a pair of mirrored SATA SSDs, the NVMe one, naturally, still had TrueNAS on it. This, from what I understand, caused the OS to get stuck trying to boot because there were two ZFS pools marked as the boot pool, and it would just give up and drop me into an initramfs shell instead. Booting into a live environment and using GParted to clear all the partitions on the drive didn't fix it, and after a bit of googling I learned I had to use the initramfs shell to clear the volume data for the disc directly. + +After that was cleared up and I was booting into TrueNAS, setup went off without a hitch. I imported the config I had saved from the old server and everything was instantly up and running like nothing had ever happened, and suddenly, I had a working server again. + +<h2>Postmortem</h2> + +The first natural question is: Did it work? Was I right? Did our intrepid hero succeed in her quest to finally have a server that's actually stable enough to use? And the answer is yes. Tremendously so. In the couple days it's been running, this thing hasn't crashed once, even after I installed Syncthing<sup id="n7r"><a href="#n7">7</a></sup> *and* set up an entire VM to run Minecraft. Whatever was causing all that instability with the old server didn't make it over to the new one, and I should bloody well hope not considering the only parts I carried over were a bunch of drives that were in perfect health according to both ZFS and the SMART tests they kept passing. + +There is one major issue, though. See, since I was planning to run a stock cooler in a case with airflow that was subpar at best short of cutting holes in it, I made sure to get the strongest fans I could find to fill the available mounts, which for me meant three 80mm Arctic P8 Max's — one in front, one in back, and one in the 3.5" cage, plus a 120mm fan in the 5.25" bays. + +These fans have a maximum speed of 5000 RPM, which makes them quite capable at compensating for the sub-optimal airflow conditions, but this was also the basis of my one fatal miscalculation: these suckers are *loud*. Not 1U rackmount borderline-jet-engine level loud, in fact the noise is more or less tolerable at low loads, but under significant load, such as, say, the Minecraft server I've been so fixated on, they get quite distractingly loud, which is a problem since the only feasible place for me to put it at the moment is on my desk. + +I soon plan to implement a multi-step plan to attempt to fix this issue: First, in my typical fashion when I find my equipment is slightly inadequate, I'll replace the AMD stock cooler I used with something gratuitously overbuilt — I'm thinking a Thermalright Peerless Assassin. Then, if that doesn't work, I'll tear the whole thing down and go at it with the hole saw, and mount a couple nice, big, quiet fans in my fresh new speed holes. If the 80mm fans are still causing a ruckus after all that, I'll just remove them. They probably won't be of critical importance at that point anyway. + +Overall, the case was a bit of an impulsive and perhaps sub-optimal choice, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I love this thing. I might be a little more liberal with the hole-making, though. + +I don't regret my choice of core components at all, at least not yet. The CPU, despite the noise, runs Minecraft as spectacularly as I'd hoped. At least, after some fiddling with my VM configuration. Its efficiency certainly also helps with cooling, given the circumstances. The motherboard, being a fancy X-series one, has various Gamer Lights and a myriad of overclocking features that are a bit silly to have in a server, but it also has the expansion I need and that's what really counts. Plus, that fancy 7-segment display was very helpful with diagnosing it. + +The RAM is RAM. It's fast enough for my porpoises with or without XMP, which I left off to optimize for stability. I might get more down the road. The graphics card is exactly what I need, and Jellyfin seems to like it fine. Couldn't have asked for a better value there. I'm still waiting on the GT 730 I foolishly ordered before looking into it properly. That's fine, though, it was even *cheaper* than the P400 and it's always nice to have spares. + +I ended up getting those 10 gig ethernet cards, but I couldn't use them like I wanted. As it turns out, a GPU and 2 NVMe drives is all the PCIe bandwidth the B550 chipset in my main rig has to offer. My next upgrade might just be a used X570 board. I did still install one in the server, though, and since the fan on it was very loud on account of being very dying, I replaced the shambling corpse of the stock fan with a 40mm Noctua, spliced onto the original header and mounted using one of my best zip-ties: + +<figure class="media"> + <div> + <div class="gallery"> + <img src="nictua.jpg" alt="A 40mm wide, 10mm thick Noctua fan zip-tied to the heatsink on a PCIe Ethernet card."> + <img src="ziptiemount.jpg" alt="The zip-tie is screwed into one of the original fan mounting holes on the heatsink. As in, the screw is going through the zip-tie."> + </div> + <figcaption style="margin-top: 0;">Yes, I attached the zip-tie to the heatsink by screwing it in. Clever, right?</figcaption> + </div> +</figure> + +Would I recommend you follow in my footsteps? Absolutely. This thing is great. In order to make this work, I had to build a normal computer. Short of a rack-mount case and a rack in which to mount it, *this* is how you build a home server. Frankly, I was absolutely right that violently contorting my existing gaming laptop into a TrueNAS box would be cheaper than this, but I can now say with complete certainty that the savings were not worth it. This is less entertaining, sure, but I'm glad I finally did it properly. Well, at least to the greatest extent that I seem to be capable of "properly". + +--- + +<p id="n1"><a href="#n1r">1</a>. I'm not referring to the Seasonic S12III from the last installment. That thing is honestly a little sketchy for me to be using it in a proper server if I don't have to, and I don't. When my PC's power supply, a Seasonic GX650, exploded, I RMA'd it and then bought a beefier one to replace it with, and the replacement unit Seasonic sent me went in my server, and will be going in the new one. The S12III is serving as an improvised benchtop PSU using one of <a href="https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71UqFQ9U1QL._AC_SL1500_.jpg">these bad boys</a> at the moment.</p> + +<p id="n2"><a href="#n2r">2</a>. If cpubenchmark.net is to be believed, anyway.</p> + +<p id="n3"><a href="#n3r">3</a>. I could, in theory, reuse this fan, but I don't want to. It's so nasty that attempting to run it seems like a good way to invent a new respiratory illness, and even if I cleaned it the bearing is geriatric and the performance probably isn't very good, plus my modern motherboard might not even have a header for it. Its replacement will suit me much better.</p> + +<p id="n4"><a href="#n4r">4</a>. You can download the model for the fan mount and corresponding grill I designed <a href="https://www.printables.com/model/1014992-80mm-fan-mount-for-3x35-drive-bay-in-old-pc-case">here</a>. I'd publish the drive bracket but the one I printed needed some modification in order to work, and I don't want to spend the time and filament to refine it right now.</p> + +<p id="n5"><a href="#n5r">5</a>. Mind you, this case is well north of 20 years old. This case shipped to me with a Pentium III sticker on it. This thing may well predate modular power supplies as a <em>concept</em>, and somehow it accommodates them infinitely better than the 2-year-old case on my personal machine, which barely has room to <em>insert</em> a modular PSU, let alone actually get at the cables afterwards. I don't understand how this is possible.</p> + +<p id="n6"><a href="#n6r">6</a>. Generally you'd use this for L2ARC cache for ZFS, but from my research I don't have enough RAM for that to be useful anyway, and game servers are the only thing I currently want to do that's likely to benefit from the added speed of an NVMe SSD.</p> + +<p id="n7"><a href="#n7r">7</a>. Finally, at long last, I have automated backups to the enormous HDD array in my NAS! Took me bloody long enough.</p>
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I intended to publish this then, but life got in the way, by which I mean I wrote 90% of it and then procrastinated for two weeks on the last couple paragraphs. I figured that to commemorate the occasion I would finally dispense with the half-assed abridged history of the place on the about page or wherever and consolidate a complete history of my Personal Home Pages in one convenient location, that being this post. + +## Tumblr + +My first proper social media was Tumblr. Well, the first social media site I joined was Pinterest, but that doesn't count. Anyway, Tumblr was my main social media and the center of my Online Presence™ for several years. I would pour hours into tweaking the custom theming on my blog to be just right, and I often had some sort of bio on a custom page, which is a thing Tumblr lets you do. I linked to all my other online profiles from my Tumblr page, and would prioritize linking back to it from them. This caused problems, as I was and still am the type of Tumblr user to change their username on impulse, and it was terribly inconvenient having to go through all my other accounts and change that link whenever I did (I've got it set up as a subdomain of my website now, so that should never be a problem again). Eventually, though, another service would crop up that everyone seemed to be using, and that presented me with a better way: + +## Carrd + +I still use Tumblr, just not as the hub for my entire online presence. I maintain that it is still the best<sup id="n2r"><a href="#n2">2</a></sup> centralized social media site. Anyway, a Carrd page became the central hub which linked to all my online profiles and which all my online profiles could link back to. Finally, I only had to update my frequently changing Tumblr link in one place. For the most part. + +I perceived a certain stigma (at least on Tumblr) around having a Carrd page, and the sorts of people who made one. The stereotype was that you would have overly exhaustive BYF (Before You Follow) and DNI (Do Not Interact) lists full of sometimes outlandish criteria<sup id="n3r"><a href="#n3">3</a></sup>, probably have similar bullet point style lists of all your likes, dislikes, and possibly identities and triggers (!)<sup id="n4r"><a href="#n4">4</a></sup> and probably not be the most pleasant person to interact with. I like to think I bucked that trend. My Carrd pages were generally very simple: a profile picture, a short bio (some shit like "Name | 21 | đ¨đĻ | real life isopod"), and links to my socials. That was all. I remember adding the obligatory long-form bio and DNI list at some point, but those didn't last long. + +I believe it was around this time when the alias "deep twisty"<sup id="n5r"><a href="#n5">5</a></sup> came into being. I was just starting out making music at this point, posting crummy songs to SoundCloud that I'd made in an online editor called [EarSketch](https://earsketch.gatech.edu/landing/#/) that had you use Python to arrange pre-made loops and samples on a timeline. That shit was wack, yo, but that's beside the point. I was looking for an alias to release my music under, because I was intent on making more and my actual name wasn't gonna cut it. + +I was quite into Subnautica around this time (I promise this is relevant) and its sequel, Subnautica: Below Zero, was in the early stages of early access around this time, like still working on early-game areas early, and I was following it closely. The devs had a twitter account that posted all the git commits for the game, and a couple of them referred to a biome they were working on, the Deep Twisty Bridges<sup id="n6r"><a href="#n6">6</a></sup>, as just "deep twisty". That is the origin of that name. I don't know why I felt compelled to base my brand off that, but now I'm committed. I get self-conscious about it sometimes, but honestly, I've seen worse. Not that I'm judging. + +Anyway, I made a separate Carrd as a hub for this new "deep twisty" persona (I keep it separate from everything else mainly so I can show it to family without them seeing all of... this. Not that I have yet...). That worked fine until I wanted to start embedding my latest YouTube upload on the Carrd page, something Carrd locks behind a paywall. It was at this precise moment I remembered I know how to code and resolved to make the jump to a platform that lets you write your own HTML from scratch, in my case, this being + +## NeoCities + +My first Neocities sites were simple affairs, basic little pages with little more to them than the Carrd sites they had replaced, albeit with some of the things Carrd would have made me pay to add, like that YouTube embed. You can still see the original version of what is now this site [here](../../../old/1/), though the original version of deeptwisty.com was unfortunately lost. It was nothing special, though. It had a similar aesthetic to its replacement, and it was pretty similarly laid out to this here page, even with the same background, just with WAY less text, and no cool isopod. + +I've seen some people in this here "small web" community getting mad at people who use Neocities this way, to which I say: shut the fuck up! Everyone has to start somewhere, and messing around on a simple page like that could easily be a gateway drug into making something much bigger, like it was for me. Hearing sentiments like this is just going to discourage people. Besides, it's their website. They're not intruding on your special cool kids club by using a free service to do the thing that it's for. + +It was also during this time when I bought the domain deeptwisty.com. I had to pay Neocities to use it, but I was more than happy to support the cause anyway. I didn't stricly *need* the domain, but boy was it cool to have my very own Dot Com. It just sounds so professional. deep twisty Dot Com. + +The deep twisty site tended to take precedence over this here personal one for a while; the personal site was relegated to a subdirectory or subdomain like deeptwisty.com/me or me.deeptwisty.com. In fact, the transition from the former to the latter is when the original deeptwisty.com was tragically lost. I was copying over the contents of deeptwisty.com/me to its own fresh new dedicated Neocities profile and I accidentally uploaded the files to the wrong site, overwriting a large portion of the main deeptwisty.com with no way to recover it. I spent a couple days rebuilding it into roughly what you see at that domain now, and when I was done I was having enough fun with it that I wanted to keep going and decided to overhaul my other site too, and what resulted was [this](../../../old/2/). + +For this new version of the site, I decided I wanted to be able to actually add content to it, whereas the old site hadn't really been designed in a way that was conducive to that. I decided to do this in the most JS-reliant way possible. I had one main page with the navigation and layout, and the navigation worked by using a URL querystring to tell the page which content to load. It was pretty fuckin' neat, but I would eventually realize I wasn't a fan of how dependent it was on Javascript. My favorite feature of this revision is the theme picker, which swapped out different stylesheets and set a cookie to remember which one you prefer. The main problem with this was that I designed it so the themes could change basically everything bar the fudamentals of the layout, and it became a huge pain in the ass to add both new pages and new themes while ensuring everything stayed compatible. It was really cool though. + +To be completely honest, I took rather a lot of inspiration for this revision from [this site here](https://hosma.neocities.org/10/), which is to say I basically made a worse version of it<sup id="n7r"><a href="#n7">7</a></sup> and went from there. You can still see some of that inspiration in v3, with the giant header text and centered single-column layout. + +This revision was, as the kids say, Real Cool™, but the aforementioned problems led me to scrap it after only about 2 months, which brings us here: + +## v3 and Self-Hosting + +I wanted something that could be viewed without Javascript and wasn't a colossal pain in the ass to update, hence what you see on the site now if you're reading this soon after it was posted. If I've since overhauled the site again, the version I'm referring to should be available [here](../../../old/3/). This version is designed to be as simple layout-wise as possible, to the point where you can read it in a text-only browser and not lose much of the experience. It's much easier to add stuff to now. My one issue with it is the navigation - unlike v2, where you could get to any page from any other in one click, v3 requires you to go back to the homepage to move between pages. It's just harder to navigate. This system is better than having to add a link to every new page on every existing page, though. Now that I can do server-side rendering, I'll probably put in a proper navbar or something of that nature at some point. + +Speaking of which, a bit after the jump to v3 I decided to start self-hosting my websites. I didn't have any deal breaking issues with Neocities per se, but I wanted to start messing around with server-side scripting, and I wanted to host some other things that I wasn't in a position to otherwise. I originally wanted to do this with an old laptop I had lying around, but I would have had to punch through the NAT in my <span class="house">house</span> and point the domain to my home IP address, neither of which I wanted to do. Instead, I cancelled my paid Neocities account and reallocated those funds to rent a VPS. I was originally going to use Linode for this, but they literally wouldn't let me sign up for an account for some reason<sup id="n8r"><a href="#n8">8</a></sup> so I went with DigitalOcean instead. + +I've had quite a lot of fun with this newfound backend access. I now have the freedom to use Javascript only when there's literally no other way to do what I want done, and I've taken advantage, moving stuff like the randomized subheader on the landing page server-side. I'm also hosting a lot of other services on this same VPS, including but not limited to a Fediverse instance, an RSS aggregator, a SearXNG instance, and a WireGuard VPN to make more intensive stuff I host on my laptop available to the internet. I'm honestly really impressed that the 1 CPU thread and 2G of RAM my server has can handle all that. + +That brings us to now, at this moment, when I'm writing this. I'm absolutely not out of stuff to do here, if I can ever get myself to actually fucking do any of it. I've had a great time with this whole "personal website" business so far, and I'm excited to see where I go with it from here. The community around it is cool too, though lord knows I'm still learning to navigate this particular social environment. At any rate, I'll definitely take this over Twitter. + +<hr> + +<p id="n1"><a href="#n1r">1</a>. It has since been migrated off of Neocities.</p> + +<p id="n2"><a href="#n2r">2</a>. Did you know you can get an RSS feed for any tumblr blog by going to <blog url>/rss? True story!</p> + +<p id="n3"><a href="#n3r">3</a>. Oh, I should have mentioned, GTFO if you kin Komaeda.</p> + +<p id="n4"><a href="#n4r">4</a>. I kind of get why you would want people to know that information, but I'm surprised more people didn't realize how easily abused that was.</p> + +<p id="n5"><a href="#n5r">5</a>. stylized in all lower case</p> + +<p id="n6"><a href="#n6r">6</a>. Yes, I named a song Bridges so I could call it "deep twisty - Bridges". Shut up.</p> + +<p id="n7"><a href="#n7r">7</a>. I'm currently going back through this blog post a couple years after the fact to replace all the hovertext with footnotes, and wow, v2 really, <em>really</em> was just me doing hosma.neocities.org. Utterly shameless.</p> + +<p id="n8"><a href="#n8r">8</a>. WTF? Like, let me give you my money, dude. The only thing I can think of that could have happened is their system assumed I was some kind of spammer or bot because I was accessing their site through a VPN. I solved the CAPTCHAs and everything. What's the deal?</p>
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This time it's an overhaul to their username system, last time it was a change in their privacy policy allowing them to collect data from voice and video calls, and then there's the AI stuff. It's not like Discord acting shitty is anything new, but this post isn't about the company's transgressions. This article is about escaping your dependency on Discord, and more broadly escaping the vicious corporate cycle of which it's the latest iteration. + +I was originally going to center this article around the pros and cons of different alternatives to Discord, and I do still want to touch on that, but I think it's important to express my reasoning in detail here; it will be easier to avoid another situation like the one we have now with Discord if we know what's actually wrong with it on a more fundamental level than which administrative decisions of theirs are bad. How do we ensure wherever we go next won't pull the exact same crap? + +## So why is Discord bad? + +Let's be honest with ourselves up front: In many ways, Discord, as a service, fucking owns. It has a ton of fun features not found really anywhere else and the quality of its voice, video, and live streaming functions are tough to beat. However, these advantages come at the cost of Discord's most significant fundamental problem: It's a proprietary, centralized, VC-funded platform. It gets the funding it needs to be so awesome from investors who expect a return on their investments, and it is legally obligated to put creating that return above all other priorities. + +### Enshittification - The Capitalism Problem + +It's possible, even probable, that Discord started out with the simple, noble goal of being the best Chat for Gamers™, creating an alternative to the problems present with its predecessors Skype and Teamspeak, and whatever chat functionality your favourite games had. At this, it succeeded spectacularly, for a time. However, the entire model of the VC-funded startup is fundamentally unsustainable. + +Discord was never actually profitable - it's been able to keep the lights on for this long using money from investors, but it needs to become profitable at some point in order to keep going long-term. If you're an avid Discord user, think of some of the blatant cash grabs they've pulled in the past at the expense of user experience, all the pointless features they've added behind the paywall of Nitro. I'd bet you can name at least half a dozen. And none of it worked. Now imagine what Discord would need to do, or would try, in order to become profitable. Personally, the imagine conjured in my mind by the idea of "Discord but profitable" is pretty grim. + +This isn't a problem specific to Discord. A popular term for what's happening to it is "enshittification" - Cory Doctorow, the term's inventor, <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys">explains it well</a>: + +<blockquote></blockquote> +<figure class="quote"> + <blockquote> + Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. + </blockquote> + <figcaption> + — Cory Doctorow, <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys">Tiktok's enshittification</a> + </figcaption> +</figure> + +I won't restate his essay or the examples he lists here (though you should give it a read), but one obvious one his article didn't cover because it was written more than a week ago is what's happening with Reddit right now. Reddit has been enshittifying itself for years, but the current controversy is particularly bad and particularly representative of the problem. As of writing in mid-June of 2023, Reddit has just instituted a new policy requiring payment for use of its API, to the tune of $12,000 per 50 million API requests, which for certain popular third-party clients and moderation tools comes out to millions of dollars per year. + +Reddit did not need to do this. Reddit was doing fine. This was purely a cash-grab, and it's blowing up in everyone's face right now, including theirs. Moderators of many popular subreddits are essentially going on strike over this, and if you think that's the only critical problem this decision is going to cause for users you know very little about Reddit. The developers of open-source clients and moderation tools used by massive portions of Reddit's userbase can't afford costs like this, and most of them will be forced to shut down if Reddit sticks to its guns. + +I'm not saying they will, but Discord could absolutely do the same thing, and it wouldn't surprise me if it came to that. Imagine if Discord bot developers needed to pay API fees like that. There'd certainly be a lot fewer Discord bots, and probably a lot more paywalled ones among the remainder. Discord absolutely needs to become profitable in order to be sustainable, and it will do whatever it needs to to that end or die. Even then, it can't just break even; capitalism demands endless growth. Discord will keep getting worse as long as there's money in it. It's inevitable. It's required. + +### Centralization + +Discord is a centralized platform and always will be, no matter how strong the reality distortion field it puts up by allowing the creation of isolated social spaces and calling them "servers". Every Discord "server" runs on Discord's servers, and they have total control over each one at the end of the day. + +Now, centralization isn't inherently bad. Sometimes it is necessary. Imagine trying to construct a peer-to-peer MMORPG, for example. Discord, however, is not a videogame, and in its case centralization introduces some fundamental problems that a decentralized system could avoid without compromising core functionality. + +The centralized nature of Discord, the platform, means that it, in its entirety, is inherently vulnerable to anything that happens with Discord, the company. Any change the company decides to make is universal. If the company shuts down, the platform goes with it. If the admins at Discord don't like what you're doing, they can unilaterally prevent you from using their platform at all. + +This ties pretty closely into the whole VC-funded thing - Discord, the platform, is fundamentally subject to the whims of Discord, the company's investors. I guarantee you that's why they changed the username system: the corporate big wigs providing the funding got confused by Discord's unique (and very good) username system and decided it would be better if it was more like Twitter, so Discord made it more like Twitter. + +That's really the core of the issue here: being centralized means that Discord can easily suffer the same fate as Twitter. Some incompetent nutcase with more money than the entire planet's collective pool of sense could buy it out and destroy it, or the current owners could just make some boneheaded decision and do the same. A decentralized platform, running on a common open protocol, is much less vulnerable to the antics of the Elon Musks and u/spez's of the world. + +### The Privacy Problem + +This issue isn't really inherently connected to the others - a lack of good privacy doesn't fundamentally doom a platform like the other two points - but I'm treating it as a third major issue because I feel it's extremely important and warrants consideration. + +If you value your privacy, Discord is an atrocious choice. Take it from <a href="https://tosdr.org/en/service/536">their own terms of service</a>. Anything you send on Discord, whether in a DM or a public guild (I'm not calling them "servers"), is **not encrypted**, meaning it can be accessed and read by Discord staff, as well as any hackers that manage to access their systems or any law enforcement entities that might demand it. Discord is not even trying to pretend to be private. I'm not convinced it's something they ever thought about. + +And let's be clear here: You should value your privacy. You should value it a lot. The idea that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear is a complete scam. Even if you don't have anything to hide, yes you do. Take, for example, <a href="https://archive.ph/TYPd1">the time</a> Google flagged someone as a criminal and permanently closed their account for the crime of sending medical photos of their son to a doctor. Or maybe your government wants to arrest you for being gay, or having an abortion, or some other innocuous but potentially illegal thing. Or maybe they will in the future. Or maybe some stuff you've said is just kind of embarrassing. + +If you still don't believe me, read through a couple months of your Discord message history and then contemplate printing it out and mailing it to the NSA. If the government asks, Discord will save you the trouble, and they won't ask your permission first. And with a recent change to their privacy policy, this theoretically applies to your voice chats too, though to be fair I expect that would be prohibitively costly in server space. + +Discord fundamentally couldn't give a shit about your privacy, and doesn't even really care to pretend like it does. It has no incentive to. The investors probably wouldn't be comfortable with the risks associated with pulling a stunt like responding to a subpoena with "yeah here's their phone number. that's all we got" like certain other chat apps anyway, and then there's the potential to sell that all data on you to advertisers. I'm not aware that they currently do that, but it's certainly not off the table should they decide to go that route in order to turn a profit. At least, not under US law, anyway. + +Actually, I just checked that ToS;DR link from earlier again, would you look at that: + +<figure class="quote"><blockquote>This service may keep personal data after a request for erasure for business interests or legal obligations</blockquote></figure> +<figure class="quote"><blockquote>This service ignores the Do Not Track (DNT) header and tracks users anyway even if they set this header.</blockquote></figure> +<figure class="quote"><blockquote>Your personal data may be used for marketing purposes</blockquote></figure> +<figure class="quote"><blockquote>This service can license user content to third parties</blockquote></figure> +<figure class="quote"><blockquote>The service can sell or otherwise transfer your personal data as part of a bankruptcy proceeding or other type of financial transaction.</blockquote></figure> +<figure class="quote"><blockquote>The service may use tracking pixels, web beacons, browser fingerprinting, and/or device fingerprinting on users.</blockquote></figure> +<figure class="quote"><blockquote>The service uses your personal data to employ targeted third-party advertising</blockquote></figure> + +Juicy stuff. You should really give that a read - you might not like what you find. + +Before we move on, I'll just drop this tasty little <a href="https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord">link</a> to further reading. It's a real page-turner. + +## Cool, so how do we fix it? + +We don't. Discord was doomed from the outset in any attempts to be sustainable or trustworthy. We are going to need to find an alternative to Discord eventually. So what should that alternative look like? I'll discuss specifics later - I'd like to start by establishing the general principles I feel a messaging system should conform to in order to avoid Discord's major problems. The TL;DR is it needs to not be any of the things I've described thus far about Discord, but I'll go into more detail about what that actually looks like. + +### Follow the money + +A sustainable chat system *absolutely cannot* be for-profit. If it is in any way driven by profit, the decay and eventual death of the service is inevitable. That doesn't mean it has to be entirely staffed by unpaid volunteers or anything, but it would need to be a non-profit foundation of some kind, just trying to break even with no incentive for infinite growth or any other corrupting financial influence. You'll notice this as a theme across most online services that don't already show signs of advanced corporate necrosis. + +I'm not even saying it can't have some kind of Nitro-esque paid tier. I don't hold it against, say, Protonmail - in fact, I pay for that one - but the money can't be the end goal. A sustainable non-profit model might be largely donation-based like Wikipedia, or maybe it could have a totally free product for individual users and break even selling support to enterprise customers like some Linux distributions. It's not currently breaking even yet according to its Wikipedia article, but I'll be interested to see if and how Signal reaches a sustainable state. Maybe future players could take notes from them. + +### Cut out the middle man + +Better yet, structure your system such that it doesn't even need a corporation at the center - in other words, a decentralized system. I'm not talking about the blockchain; we can do this the old-fashioned way, with tech that isn't ponzi-scheme-by-design. In fact, we're already doing this, and it already has more monthly active users than any messenger app ever created: email. + +Email is the original decentralized, federated communications network. There's no Email LLC at the center of it all assigning everyone their email addresses and processing every message. Email isn't an app. It isn't a proprietary service. It's an open protocol that anyone can set up a server to provide access to. That's what Gmail is, that's what Outlook is, that's what your weird nerdy friend's weird nerdy friend who has a custom domain name on their email address and complains about Gmail marking their messages as spam is doing. They're all part of the bigger network. + +I'll try to keep this little tangent short, but I feel it's important to establish a basic understanding of how these systems work. Email is a federated protocol, meaning it isn't tied to one backend running on one company's datacenter - instead, it's a network composed of any number of entirely independent servers running compatible software that communicate amongst themselves using the language of the email protocol. These servers are often called "nodes" or "instances", or sometimes "providers" in the case of email. A user of email has an account with one of these instances and can use it to send messages to people both on the same instance and on any other instance on the network. + +This is why email addresses are like that - the part before the @ is your username, and the domain name after the @ points to the server your account is registered on. If usernames on other platforms were formatted like this you would see stuff like MrBeast@youtube.com for Youtube channels or dril@twitter.com for Twitter accounts, but those platforms aren't federated so they don't need to do that. + +So when two people communicate via email, the sender sends the message to their instance, which sends it to the instance its recipient is using, which then relays it to the recipient. + +And here's the obligatory visual aid - essentially, when you send an email, it takes the shortest path along a network that looks like this; every server is connected to every other, and every user is connected to one server: + + + +Hopefully that helped. Back to the point, all federated services work pretty much exactly like this. If you've ever had someone try to explain the Fediverse (sometimes incorrectly called Mastodon) to you by comparing it to email, this is what they meant. But this isn't limited to email and microblogging; this type of system can theoretically apply to anything. Again, building an MMO this way would be challenging, but federated messaging protocols similar in concept to Discord do exist. + +The benefit of this kind of system stems from the fact that it's not under the control of any central authority: Gmail, Outlook, and that weird nerd your friend knows are entirely independent of each other, they don't answer to any higher Email Authority (other than the body that defines the common standard) or each other. This means that there's nobody at the top to fuck the entire thing up for everyone or sell it off to someone who will; in fact, even if someone wanted to it would be tremendously difficult. + +The network is inherently much more stable and resilient in general than a centralized service, as there's nobody who would take the entire network down with them if the company went under or got sued or had a bomb dropped on their datacenter. Sure, a huge number of people would lose their email accounts if Gmail disappeared tomorrow, but critically, not the entire network. Email wouldn't go away, and those displaced users could go to Outlook or Protonmail or set up their own instance and keep communicating over the same network. The same applies to any other federated protocol. Imagine if your Discord account and guilds weren't controlled by Discord, but instead ran on a machine you controlled and was in no way answerable to Discord Inc, but you could still talk to your buddies on Discord proper. It's like that. + +### Incognito mode + +Contrary to the title of the previous section, a federated approach does technically add more middlemen. We've gone from one unaccountable central authority able to read everyone's messages to several unaccountable parties each able to read the messages of everyone they serve. Not much of an improvement, privacy-wise, unless you trust both your provider and the providers of everyone you're talking to implicitly. Actual privacy requires end-to-end encryption. + +End-to-end encryption means the message is encrypted before leaving the sender's machine and can only be decrypted by the recipient once it arrives on theirs. This means that only the sender and recipient can read the message; even if it goes through some other party's server, they have no clue what the contents of the message are. Any messaging system that cares about privacy at all will implement this - ideally they'll build the entire protocol around it. + +There are still problems here, for example end-to-end encrypted messaging still requires the server to know who you're talking to, but there are workarounds for these as well. However, E2EE should be the absolute bare minimum, in my opinion. + +## So what are our options then? + +Here's the part where I discuss actual alternatives to Discord. I'll say now that this will not be a comprehensive overview of every possible option - recommending chat apps that don't meet these standards would kinda defeat the point, and I'm also not omniscient. There are going to be other options that I haven't covered here, and hopefully I've given you the tools to determine which ones are good. + +Every program I list here will, at a minimum, support true end-to-end encryption in some capacity and not be run by a for-profit company. They're also all open-source. + +### <a href="https://xmpp.org/">XMPP</a> + +XMPP is about as close as we've got to "email but for instant messaging". It's a federated, open protocol which, having been formally standardized in 1999, is truly ancient in internet years. My understanding is that it actually used to be more widely used, but Google effectively killed it off in popular usage by subsuming its userbase into Google Talk and then promptly turning off federation and killing Google Talk. That doesn't mean it's gone, though. People still use XMPP to talk to each other, running on servers hosted by themselves or their friends. + +XMPP is, at its core, designed for simple text-based messaging and presence. While the protocol is highly extensible, many even relatively basic-seeming features, while common, aren't universally supported. If you want them, you'll have to find a provider that has them. + +- Federated protocol. +- Feature-bare; no gimmicks. +- Generally supports file sharing. +- Supports end-to-end encryption, but it's not the default and it's kinda janky. +- While integration with WebRTC voice chat is supported, it's not universal, and some people prefer to use a separate voice chat system, such as Mumble, in conjunction with XMPP text chat. +- You'll have to find a provider and choose a client program to connect with. Fortunately, there's plenty of options, and the official XMPP website lists some of each. + +### <a href="https://matrix.org/">Matrix</a> + +Matrix is the other major federated instant messaging protocol. It was standardized in 2014 and is built around making end-to-end encryption easy. On top of that, it has more features. File sharing is included by default and support for nice-to-have features like emoji reactions (and maybe custom emojis??) and Discord-style replies is widespread. There's also a large suite of bridges to other services, including Discord. Like with XMPP, voice chat integration is possible, but not universal, and some prefer to use Mumble or similar. + +- Federated protocol. +- More features than XMPP, similar situation with voice calls though. +- Built around end-to-end encryption, though you can disable it, and you will need to for integrations like bots and bridges. +- As with XMPP, you'll need to find a provider and a client program. The website lists quite a few clients, and you can find a list of servers <a href="https://joinmatrix.org/servers/">here</a>. + +### <a href="https://www.mumble.info/">Mumble</a> and <a href="https://jitsi.org/">Jitsi</a> + +Mumble and Jitsi are self-hostable voice chat and videoconferencing applications, respectively. They're not messaging systems, but I feel they bear mentioning here because they're both popular for use in conjunction with text chat systems, and since nothing else here currently supports screensharing. + +### <a href="https://revolt.chat">Revolt</a> + +We've about run out of open protocols (which is probably a good thing), so now on to the centralized services, starting with Revolt. Revolt is basically trying to be open-source Discord. It's currently in alpha, but the user experience is very similar and it already has some of the fun stuff. + +From what I could find Revolt isn't currently controlled by any kind of legal entity, so there's no guarantee it won't eventually incorporate into a for-profit company and pull a Reddit (by which I mean, Reddit used to be open-source, but hasn't been since 2017), but at least for now the project leaders express principles that make that seem unlikely. + +- Centralized service. +- Still early in development. +- Very similar in UI/UX to Discord. +- No paywalls. +- Supports voice, but not currently video. +- No encryption, but E2EE for DMs is being worked on. +- Has features like custom emojis, replies, public guilds and a friends list. + +### <a href="https://signal.org/">Signal</a> + +I've now run out of Discord-likes - which is to say, programs that support the sort of multi-channel group chat thing Discord has going on. This and the next one function more in the vein of a Whatsapp clone, though I feel they still bear mentioning in the event that's all you need. + +Signal is kind of *the* private messaging app. It's fundamentally built around end-to-end encryption in a way that its biggest direct competitors simply aren't. It's been proven in court that Signal literally doesn't have the ability to incriminate you, since they can't access the contents of your messages. It does need your phone number, though, however you can now hide it with a username. It also supports voice and video chat, and stickers, apparently. + +- Centralized service. +- Similar to Whatsapp in terms of UI/UX. +- Emphasis on end-to-end encryption. +- Supports voice and video calls. +- Requires a phone number, but only a phone number. +- You can set a username, so you don't need to share your phone number. + +### <a href="https://getsession.org/">Session</a> + +I lied, Session isn't centralized. But it's not decentralized in the same way as the federated protocols up there, either. Session runs over an anonymizing onion routing network, Tor-style, meaning not only can your messages not be read by the server, those servers also don't know both the sender and the destination at the same time. Essentially, it's designed to maximize privacy and anonymity at all costs. But wouldn't you know it, that comes at a cost in terms of features and user experience. + +Session does also use cryptocurrency. Setting a custom display name and running a node on its decentralized network both require participation in a blockchain, though your messages aren't sent via this blockchain. + +- Decentralized, encrypted, and anonymous. +- Supports voice and video calls, but currently only 1:1. +- Requires no personal details to sign up. +- No extra features. +- Setting a display name requires a crypto transaction, but sending messages does not. + +## Conclusion + +That's about all I've got. I hope I've impressed upon you the importance of Discord's core problems, and introduced you to at least one alternative that works for you. I have my preferences, but I'm comfortable recommending all of these over Discord, otherwise I wouldn't have listed them. + +[Update 2023-09-09] I no longer recommend Matrix over XMPP for reasons explained well <a href="https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07">here</a>. I knew there was a little jank but I had no idea the rot ran this deep. Fortunately, nobody's listened to me yet so I can switch over to XMPP without much issue, which I intend to do. + +[Update 2024-04-27] I have removed Telegram from the recommendations list outright due to <a href="https://isopod.zone/notes/9sjy5r4ocq">just, straight up nazism</a>, and in a post announcing cryptocurrency features no less. Jesus H. Christ. + +If there's one thing I want you to take away from this article, it's this: Don't fall for the marketing and don't let yourself be wooed by extraneous gimmicks. Be discerning about which fancy-sounding features you actually need. If you want to have a chance of escaping the vicious corporate cycle of enshittification, both with chat platforms and with everything else, make sure the ones you use have a strong foundation of sustainability and trustworthiness, beyond whatever marketing drivel is on the front page of their website. Hopefully I've given you at least some tools to determine for yourself which ones do. + +## Further Reading + +- <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys">Enshittification</a> +- <a href="https://tosdr.org/en/service/536">A simplified breakdown of Discord's TOS (ToS;DR)</a> +- <a href="https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord">Spyware Watchdog - Discord</a> +- <a href="https://moth.monster/blog/fediverse/">A different explanation of federation in the context of federated social media</a> +- <a href="https://proton.me/blog/whatsapp-alternatives">A privacy-focused comparison of messenger apps</a> + +<div class="buttons" style="margin-bottom: 1rem;"> + <img src="discord-no-way-2.gif" /> +</div>
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/fediverse_dms/index.md b/blog/posts/fediverse_dms/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a12c503 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/fediverse_dms/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +People who refuse to use the fediverse (often conflated with Mastodon) often cite concerns about privacy with regards to DMs as their reason for avoiding it; "admins can read your DMs" and all that. To be fair, that's technically a true statement, but it's more complicated than that. Now, I have no problem letting these people be wrong - I'm not eager to convince idiots with no capacity for critical thinking to come to my favourite social network - but I'm nothing if not endlessly pedantic, so I felt the need to explain my take on the issue anyway. + +## DMs Are A Lie + +To begin with, the term "DM" as it applies to other social platforms is kind of a misnomer in the case of the Fediverse. Websites like Twitter and Instagram have a dedicated chat-style interface for messaging people directly. If you spend five minutes with most fediverse software, you'll notice that it doesn't have this. + +Sending a DM on the fediverse is generally accomplished by making a normal post and changing the visibility setting to only show the post to people who are mentioned in it. This isn't a case of obtuse UX design, it reflects how DMs on the fediverse actually work under the hood: The underlying protocol has *no concept* of direct messages, and is only able to approximate them with a special flag on an otherwise normal post. + +In other words, when you send a "DM" on the fediverse, what you're really doing is making a public post, and asking the network nicely to only show it to the person it's intended for. All software that isn't actively malicious or *extremely* shitty will comply with this request, and in fact admins can only read your DMs by circumventing the instance software and accessing the backend database directly, but the post is in no way actually private. + +## This Is Fine Actually + +I don't personally think this is an issue; I think it's perfectly fine that the fediverse doesn't attempt to do secure communication. Doing things this way reduces liability for server owners and reduces the complexity of the software for developers, and you really should be able to contact anyone who you actually want to keep in touch with on multiple platforms anyway. + +Besides, it's not like insecure DMs are an issue unique to the fediverse. DMs on [Twitter/Instagram/Reddit/etc] aren't encrypted either, meaning the admins of those websites can read your DMs too. Same for actual dedicated chat platforms like Discord and (mostly) Telegram. Twitter's admins can read your DMs, Discord's admins can read your messages, Gmail's admins can read your emails, and your phone provider can read your texts. And they often do, to sell information about you to advertisers or comply with police requests or what have you. + +It's only slightly less of a problem on those platforms because you're much less likely to know the admins personally, and individual staff members could probably lose their jobs if they used the contents of your DMs to start drama. That said, I've personally never seen evidence of any admin *actually* reading someone's DMs on the fediverse, because doing that is a *huge pain in the ass* involving like, SQL queries and shit, and is much harder than any actual administrative task most fediverse admins will ever do. + +Either way, you should really be using an actually secure messaging service if privacy is important to you. Be the change you want to see in the world and become that person who insists on taking conversations in Twitter DMs to Signal. I'm being completely serious.
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_blacklist_websites_searxng/index.md b/blog/posts/guide_blacklist_websites_searxng/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3aab326 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_blacklist_websites_searxng/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +Quick one today. I got sick of searching for programming questions and seeing AI-generated scraped-from-stackoverflow click farm trash polluting the results, and I happen to use a personal SearXNG instance that no client-side blacklist extension on the planet is gonna support, so I went looking to see if I could blacklist them in SearXNG for like the eighth time and finally found a way using the hostname replace plugin. So here's that, because I didn't find this feature documented officially anywhere bar an [issue](https://github.com/searxng/searxng/discussions/970) on the Github repo. + +## How to do it + +First, open up your instance's config file. If you installed it directly like I did, that'll probably be `/etc/searxng/settings.yml`. If you used Docker, god help you. Anyway, find the `enabled_plugins:` section and uncomment the entry for `'Hostname replace'`, then uncomment the line `hostname_replace:` just below it. Under there you'll put your blocks: + +<p class="codetitle">/etc/searxng/settings.yml</p> + +``` +enabled_plugins: + - 'Hostname replace' +hostname_replace: + '(.*\.)?codegrepper\.com': false + '(.*\.)?geeksforgeeks\.org': false +``` + +Then restart SearXNG: + +``` +service uwsgi restart searxng +```
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_blacklist_websites_searxng/searxng.svg b/blog/posts/guide_blacklist_websites_searxng/searxng.svg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..851a0e6 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_blacklist_websites_searxng/searxng.svg @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> +<svg xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" id="svg8" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 92 92" height="92mm" width="92mm"> + <defs id="defs2"/> + <metadata id="metadata5"> + <rdf:RDF> + <cc:Work rdf:about=""> + <dc:format>image/svg+xml</dc:format> + <dc:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/StillImage"/> + <dc:title/> + </cc:Work> + </rdf:RDF> + </metadata> + <g transform="translate(-40.921303,-17.416526)" id="layer1"> + <circle r="0" style="fill:none;stroke:#000000;stroke-width:12;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-opacity:1" cy="92" cx="75" id="path3713"/> + <circle r="30" cy="53.902557" cx="75.921303" id="path834" style="fill:none;fill-opacity:1;stroke:#3050ff;stroke-width:10;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-opacity:1"/> + <path d="m 67.514849,37.91524 a 18,18 0 0 1 21.051475,3.312407 18,18 0 0 1 3.137312,21.078282" id="path852" style="fill:none;fill-opacity:1;stroke:#3050ff;stroke-width:5;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-opacity:1"/> + <rect transform="rotate(-46.234709)" ry="1.8669105e-13" y="122.08995" x="3.7063529" height="39.963303" width="18.846331" id="rect912" style="opacity:1;fill:#3050ff;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;stroke-width:8;stroke-miterlimit:4;stroke-dasharray:none;stroke-opacity:1"/> + </g> +<script xmlns=""/></svg>
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_blocking_user_agents_nginx/bg.svg b/blog/posts/guide_blocking_user_agents_nginx/bg.svg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..27062a8 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_blocking_user_agents_nginx/bg.svg @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><!-- Uploaded to: SVG Repo, www.svgrepo.com, Generator: SVG Repo Mixer Tools --> +<svg width="800px" height="800px" viewBox="0 0 32 32" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><title>file_type_nginx</title><path d="M15.948,2h.065a10.418,10.418,0,0,1,.972.528Q22.414,5.65,27.843,8.774a.792.792,0,0,1,.414.788c-.008,4.389,0,8.777-.005,13.164a.813.813,0,0,1-.356.507q-5.773,3.324-11.547,6.644a.587.587,0,0,1-.657.037Q9.912,26.6,4.143,23.274a.7.7,0,0,1-.4-.666q0-6.582,0-13.163a.693.693,0,0,1,.387-.67Q9.552,5.657,14.974,2.535c.322-.184.638-.379.974-.535" style="fill:#019639"/><path d="M8.767,10.538q0,5.429,0,10.859a1.509,1.509,0,0,0,.427,1.087,1.647,1.647,0,0,0,2.06.206,1.564,1.564,0,0,0,.685-1.293c0-2.62-.005-5.24,0-7.86q3.583,4.29,7.181,8.568a2.833,2.833,0,0,0,2.6.782,1.561,1.561,0,0,0,1.251-1.371q.008-5.541,0-11.081a1.582,1.582,0,0,0-3.152,0c0,2.662-.016,5.321,0,7.982-2.346-2.766-4.663-5.556-7-8.332A2.817,2.817,0,0,0,10.17,9.033,1.579,1.579,0,0,0,8.767,10.538Z" style="fill:#fff"/></svg>
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_blocking_user_agents_nginx/index.md b/blog/posts/guide_blocking_user_agents_nginx/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..763ea4d --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_blocking_user_agents_nginx/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +Recently, Cloudflare has launched a clumsy, poorly-executed attempt to centralize the fediverse on their platform known as Wildebeest. There are a few reasons not to want to use it, and you probably don't want to be federating with it either. However, blocking every instance running it on sight would be both tedious and ineffective. + +The way I've chosen to deal with this is to just configure my reverse proxy, Nginx, to deny connections from anything with "wildebeest" in the user agent string. There are several other good reasons to do this, such as blocking bots that ignore robots.txt, or adapting this approach to serve specialized pages to old browsers, or just denying access to anything that isn't Chrome if you want to earn your place in the 9th circle of Hell. + +I'm assuming here that you already know the basics of configuring Nginx, otherwise this article won't really be of much use to you. + +## How to do it + +Paste this into the main `server` block of your Nginx config to instantly drop the connection to any client with a "Wildebeest" (case insensitive) user agent: + +<p class="codetitle">/etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite</p> + +``` +if ($http_user_agent ~* (wildebeest)) { + return 444; +} +``` + +## More configuration + +If all you want is to block Wildebeest and forget about it, you can leave now. If you want to customize this behavior further, read on. + +### Different HTTP responses + +444 is a custom response code in Nginx that just drops the connection immediately. You can use any other HTTP error code you like, for example to return a `403 Forbidden` error: + +``` + return 403; +``` + +To issue a permanent redirect to some other URL: + +``` + return 301 https://example.org/; +``` + +Or just to be silly :3 + +``` + return 418; +``` + +### Block multiple user agents + +You can also block multiple user agents in one statement like so: + +<p class="codetitle">/etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite</p> + +``` +if ($http_user_agent ~* (wildebeest|GPTBot)) { + return 444; +} +``` + +### Includes + +One thing I'd recommend doing is moving all your user agent blocks to a separate file that you can include in all your Nginx sites. I place this file at `/etc/nginx/includes/bans`: + +<p class="codetitle">/etc/nginx/includes/bans</p> + +``` +if ($http_user_agent ~* (wildebeest|GPTBot)) { + return 444; +} +``` + +<p class="codetitle">/etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite</p> + +``` +include /etc/nginx/includes/bans; +``` + +The `include` statement goes in your `server` block as before. diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_blocking_user_agents_nginx/index.php b/blog/posts/guide_blocking_user_agents_nginx/index.php new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f572f79 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_blocking_user_agents_nginx/index.php @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +<?php include("../post.php");
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_fix_youtube_buffering_firefox/bg.svg b/blog/posts/guide_fix_youtube_buffering_firefox/bg.svg new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5ff0f8c --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_fix_youtube_buffering_firefox/bg.svg @@ -0,0 +1,8 @@ +<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" class="external-icon" viewBox="0 0 28.57 20" focusable="false" style="pointer-events: none; display: block; width: 100%; height: 100%;"> + <svg viewBox="0 0 28.57 20" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"> + <g> + <path d="M27.9727 3.12324C27.6435 1.89323 26.6768 0.926623 25.4468 0.597366C23.2197 2.24288e-07 14.285 0 14.285 0C14.285 0 5.35042 2.24288e-07 3.12323 0.597366C1.89323 0.926623 0.926623 1.89323 0.597366 3.12324C2.24288e-07 5.35042 0 10 0 10C0 10 2.24288e-07 14.6496 0.597366 16.8768C0.926623 18.1068 1.89323 19.0734 3.12323 19.4026C5.35042 20 14.285 20 14.285 20C14.285 20 23.2197 20 25.4468 19.4026C26.6768 19.0734 27.6435 18.1068 27.9727 16.8768C28.5701 14.6496 28.5701 10 28.5701 10C28.5701 10 28.5677 5.35042 27.9727 3.12324Z" fill="#FF0000"/> + <path d="M11.4253 14.2854L18.8477 10.0004L11.4253 5.71533V14.2854Z" fill="white"/> + </g> + </svg> +<script xmlns=""/></svg>
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_fix_youtube_buffering_firefox/index.md b/blog/posts/guide_fix_youtube_buffering_firefox/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..a66a232 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_fix_youtube_buffering_firefox/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +Remember when you could pause a video on, like, Youtube and wait and it would eventually load the whole thing so you could watch it with no buffering? + + + +I happened across a [tumblr post](https://nyxgoddessofcandles.tumblr.com/post/733566253212598272/theres-more-to-do-actually-now-go-to) detailing some settings to accomplish that in modern Firefox, and I wanted to document it here. + +I can't guarantee that this won't stop working at some point amidst the constant churn of arbitrary updates to websites and browsers alike, but it works for me right now, and if I learn about an updated method this is where it'll be. + +*Update:* After using my browser with these settings for a while, I've noticed that the first of them breaks online video in some cases, notably Twitch streams and the Jellyfin web client. I've reverted the changes in my browser for this reason. + +## How to do it + +In `about:config`, change the following settings: +- Set `media.mediasource.enabled` to `false` +- Set `media.cache_readahead_limit` and `media.cache_resume_threshold` to `9999`
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See, my computer has this setup with three drives where one is the boot drive, and the other has `/home` on it... it's not important, point is, I wanted some drives to be automatically mounted as specific directories at boot time. + +This is pretty easy to do with the manual partitioning tools most graphical installers provide, but I would have also had to manually partition the boot drive and hell if I'm figuring out for the umpteenth time how this particular distro with this particular hardware needs to be partitioned in order to be bootable, so I just selected the automatic partitioning option which assumes you just want everything on the boot drive. + +the problem is that my system doesn't know my `/home` directory is on `/dev/sda3` and not `/dev/nvme0n1p1`. So I have to fix that now or just log in as root and mount my shit every time I turn the computer on for the rest of time. Guess which thing sounded like more of a pain in the ass. I googled it so you don't have to! + +## Now on to the good stuff + +I recommend you log out and do this as root in a TTY if you intend to mount something as your home directory. + +## Getting partition information + +First, run: + +``` +sudo blkid +``` + +This will return a list of block devices (partitions) your system sees with some information about each, like this: + +<p class="codetitle">sudo blkid</p> + +``` +/dev/sda1: UUID="YOUR_UUID" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="YOUR_TYPE" PARTUUID="30aac87d-21c9-44a9-8033-108eede77f8b" +``` + +You'll probably have more than one though. There should be one per partition your system can see. We're interested in the `UUID` and `TYPE` attributes. Find the ones for the partition you want mounted and take note of them. We'll be adding these to your fstab file. + +## Editing your fstab + +First, make sure the directory you'll be mounting to exists. Create it if it doesn't. **Now make a backup of your fstab file in case you break things!** You can do this by simply copying the file: + +``` +sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak +``` + +Now we can edit it. Open `/etc/fstab` in your favorite text editor, and you should be greeted with a file that looks something like this: + + + +(This is the fstab file EndeavourOS generated on install. Because I set it to use btrfs, it mounted the same partition like four separate times as subvolumes. Yours will likely be smaller if you didn't do this.) + +This information tells your system which partitions should be mounted and at which locations to mount them, as well as some other settings. We don't need to worry about most of it, though. Simply append a line for your partition to the file: + +<p class="codetitle">/etc/fstab</p> + +``` +#imagine the contents of your fstab file here +UUID=YOUR_UUID /path/to/mountpoint YOUR_TYPE defaults 0 0 +``` + +For example, here are the entries I added for my drives: + +<p class="codetitle">/etc/fstab</p> + +``` +# btrfs partition on my /home drive +UUID=44510605-9e1a-45cf-8e6b-bf7fd1c69502 /home btrfs defaults,noatime,compress=zstd 0 0 + +# ext4 partition on my secondary HDD +UUID=f8c3f1b1-7fef-4a01-bec7-ba3e89e2f8da /home/isopod/vault ext4 defaults 0 0 +``` + +If you did it right, you should now be able to reboot and see your partitions have been automatically mounted! + +One more thing to keep in mind, if you see any lines with a mount point that's the same as the place you're trying to mount to (for example, the system has mounted a btrfs subvolume for /home and you want to put that on your secondary drive) you should probably comment out or delete that. + +## The fast way + +Alternatively, you could just paste this into your terminal and then reboot: + +``` +partition="/dev/yourpartition"; directory="/path/to/mountpoint"; sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.$(date +%s).bak; echo "UUID=$(sudo blkid $partition | sed "s/^.* UUID=\"//;s/\".*//") $directory $(sudo blkid $partition | sed "s/^.* TYPE=\"//;s/\".*//") defaults 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab +``` + +But don't complain to me if you break your system doing that.
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_pihole_lepotato/bg.png b/blog/posts/guide_pihole_lepotato/bg.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..c1f34f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_pihole_lepotato/bg.png diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_pihole_lepotato/index.md b/blog/posts/guide_pihole_lepotato/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e222568 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_pihole_lepotato/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,77 @@ +[Skip to relevant links](#links) + +I set up [Pi-hole](https://pi-hole.net/) on my home network recently. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've heard of it. It's a network-wide DNS-level ad and tracker blocker designed to run on a **s**ingle-**b**oard **c**omputer like a Raspberry Pi, hence the name. Instead of a Pi, I used a [Libre Computer Le Potato](https://libre.computer/products/aml-s905x-cc/), an alternative board that's almost as good as a Pi 4, and a lot cheaper. I'm gonna show you how to do that. + +Before you do anything, and especially before you *buy* anything, make sure your router lets you both assign static IP addresses in some way and set your own DNS servers. This functionality is necessary to use Pi-hole. I can't help you do this, unfortunately — every router is different and many ISP Specials™ are missing these settings. + +## Hardware + +The Le Potato comes in two flavours: 1GB of RAM and 2GB of RAM. Either will suffice here, though I would go with the 2GB variant just because the 1GB version isn't really that much cheaper. Aside from the board itself, you'll also need a wired network connection<sup id="n1r"><a href="#n1">1</a></sup>, a micro SD card, and an HDMI monitor and keyboard for initial setup, though you can use SSH to access it over the network after that. + +As for power, the Le Potato draws about 4 watts at most and as such can run off of any spec-compliant USB port, but the official guides on the Libre Computer forum make a big deal of ensuring the power supply and cable you're using are high-quality and of a generous rating — they recommend at least a 1.5A USB power source and a suitably **thick** cable to avoid any power issues. Pi-hole is a pretty low-demand application, though, even for this class of hardware, so you'll probably be fine regardless of what you use. + +Like the Pi, the Le Potato lacks any built-in storage, so you'll need to supply a micro SD card<sup id="n2r"><a href="#n2">2</a></sup>. The docmentation for Armbian, the OS we'll be using, recommends an "A1" or "A2" class micro SD card, which you can more or less only get from Sandisk right now, for their *significantly* improved random access performance. Ideally you should use one of these, especially since they can be had quite cheaply nowadays, but it's not the end of the world if you have something else kicking around and use that instead. As for capacity, 16GB should be plenty, and you could probably get away with 8GB. + +Finally, I'd recommend getting a case. Fortunately, the Le Potato has the same dimensions and layout as, and as such is compatible with cases for, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. I 3D printed [this one](https://www.printables.com/model/67681-raspberry-pi-3b-case/files) in PETG, and a wide array of cases are available for cheap online if you can't do the same. I especially like the one that looks like a little NES. + +## Booting an OS + +Since I'd heard the Le Potato was broadly compatible with the Pi, I initially tried booting a Raspbian image from the official Raspberry Pi flasher tool. Maybe predictably, this did not work. The next thing I tried, and what we'll be using, is Armbian, a lightweight port of Debian designed for tiny SBCs like this one that happens to have a page on its website specifically for the Le Potato. + +[Go to that page](https://www.armbian.com/lepotato/) and get one of the **Server** images. I used the latest Debian one. Then write it to the SD card using your favourite flashing tool (I recommend [Balena Etcher](https://etcher.balena.io/)), and insert that into the slot on the Le Potato. + +To boot just connect it to power to turn it on and the boot sequence will start automatically. You can have the ethernet connected as you do this, but it seems like the keyboard and possibly display may need to be connected afterwards, so try that if it doesn't boot for you. The Le Potato has a series of indicator LEDs on it next to the micro USB port: essentially, red means it has power; red and blue means it's on; and red, green, and flashing blue means it's running software. Once you get to that last state, you should get output to the monitor soon. + +Now we set up Armbian. This process is detailed in the [official documentation](https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Getting-Started/#how-to-boot) for Armbian, and it's fortunately pretty straightforward. It'll ask you to change the default root password, and then give you a choice of shell. Either is perfectly fine, but I like ZSH. Then it will prompt you to create a login for your user account (make sure you're writing these logins down, btw) and then ask for your timezone and other basic local information. If you're connected to the network, it should auto-detect this stuff. If you're left with a root prompt here (it should look like this: `lepotato:~:#`) log out and log back in with the credentials you just created. + +This is a good time to assign a static IP address to the Le Potato, so you can access it with SSH going forward. Once you have, reboot it and you should be able to access it via SSH at the local IP you just gave it. On Linux that's just `ssh yourusername@yourlocalip` in the terminal, and on Windows [PuTTY](https://putty.org/) is allegedly good for this. + +Now that you're logged in, run a quick software update: + +``` +sudo apt update +sudo apt upgrade +``` + +## Setting Up Pi-hole + +Installing Pi-hole is pretty simple. Just download and run the install script: + +``` +wget -O basic-install.sh https://install.pi-hole.net +sudo bash basic-install.sh +``` + +The script will prompt you for some settings. Most of them are pretty straightforward. I selected "Yes" for everything and the first of the three entries for Quad9<sup id="n3r"><a href="#n3">3</a></sup> as my upstream DNS provider. Set a privacy level to your preference, but maybe check with anyone else you live with before selecting "show everything". Once the installation is done, you can change the web admin password with `pihole -a -p` if desired, and then log in by typing the Le Potato's static IP into your browser. + +The last step to get Pi-hole working on your network is to set its static IP as your router's primary DNS server. The Pi-hole devs recommend setting your Pi-hole device as the only DNS server for the network to guarantee it always gets every request, but I set a couple of fallbacks in case my Pi-hole server ever goes down and it seems to still work fine. + +## Post-setup Configuration + +Pi-hole has a lot of powerful functionality, but here I'd like to focus on fine-tuning your blocklist. The default one is pretty good, but [The Firebog](https://firebog.net/) has a lot of good ones if you'd like to broaden your coverage — I use one or two of the green ones from each category. + +I live with other people who aren't as tolerant of tech weirdness as I am, so for something that'll affect *everything* on the network, convenience often takes priority over maximum adblocking. In other words, I don't want to break anything. There's an [official list](https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/commonly-whitelisted-domains/212) of commonly whitelisted domains that are important for certain functionality but get blocked by default, and I use [this script](https://github.com/anudeepND/whitelist) to import them and keep the list up to date automatically with a crontab entry. + +Beyond that, [this article](https://avoidthehack.com/best-pihole-blocklists) has a lot of good information blocklist-wise. + +--- + +<h2 id="links">Links</h2> + +- [Le Potato official guides](https://hub.libre.computer/t/aml-s905x-cc-le-potato-overview-resources-and-guides/288) +- [Armbian image download page for Le Potato](https://www.armbian.com/lepotato/) +- [Armbian docs](https://docs.armbian.com/) +- [Balena Etcher](https://etcher.balena.io/) +- [Pi-hole docs](https://docs.pi-hole.net/) +- [The Firebog (blocklist list)](https://firebog.net/) +- [Commonly whitelisted domain list](https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/commonly-whitelisted-domains/212) +- [Common whitelist importer script](https://github.com/anudeepND/whitelist) +- [Avoid The Hack blocklist article](https://avoidthehack.com/best-pihole-blocklists) + +--- + +<p id="n1"><a href="#n1r">1</a>. You can, theoretically, use wi-fi for this, but I would <strong>strongly</strong> recommend against it.</p> + +<p id="n2"><a href="#n2r">2</a>. The Le Potato also has a connector for an EMMC module, but that's a whole different can of worms.</p> + +<p id="n3"><a href="#n3r">3</a>. Quad9's filtering is intended to block malware domains. I like having it as an extra layer of security on top of Pi-hole. Any of the DNS providers in the list should work fine, and you can always change it later.</p>
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_self_host_safely_with_wireguard/index.php b/blog/posts/guide_self_host_safely_with_wireguard/index.php new file mode 100644 index 0000000..fcc7f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_self_host_safely_with_wireguard/index.php @@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> + <head> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <title>Guide - Self-Host Safe(r)ly with WireGuard</title> + <link href="/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all"> + <link href="/blog/comment/comments.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all"> + <style> + h1 { + background-image: url('wireguard_logo.png'); + } + </style> + </head> + <body> + <?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/nav.php'); ?> + <h1>guide:</h1> + <h2 id="caption">Self-Host Safe(r)ly with WireGuard</h2> + <?php include("../post_dates.php"); ?> + <p><strong>Warning: The information in this post is outdated and probably bad. I'd update it but I don't remember what I did. I'm pretty sure I had to circumvent UFW entirely. At any rate, probably don't do what I say to do here.</strong></p> + <h2>Preamble</h2> + <details> + <summary>Show preamble</summary> + <p>If you're like me, you don't like relying on other people for your online services, either because you don't want to give out your data unnecessarily, or just because you don't want to shell out for subscription services. You might be willing to host such services yourself, and you might even have access to spare hardware to do it on.</p> + <p>One critical issue arises, however: your home network. Maybe you're behind some weird impenetrable NAT setup you don't control, or maybe your IP address is dynamic and changes regularly, or maybe you just don't want to expose your home IP to the world. What then?</p> + <p>Luckily for us, there's a way to circumvent all that nonsense. A custom VPN like the one we'll be setting up today, hosted on an external server like a VPS, can punch through any weird home internet configuration while also swapping out your home IP address for a static one that you can feel safe exposing to the world.</p> + <p>That said, this isn't the be-all end-all for security. I don't claim to know everything about that, and there's probably something you're missing in that regard if you stop here. This is intended as a basic guide for exposing a machine in your home to the internet without messing with your home network or exposing your home IP address.</p> + <p>This guide borrows heavily from the <a href="https://landchad.net/wireguard/">landchad.net</a> WireGuard guide, but while their one is geared toward running a VPN for your personal machine (complete with a tutorial on setting up a WebSocket tunnel), this one will focus specifically on forwarding incoming traffic from one server to another over the internet.</p> + <p>There are some reasons you'd want to do this instead of just hosting everything on the same VPS - in my case, I wanted to host a Minecraft server, and I had a spare computer at home that was better up to the task than anything for rent in my price range. WireGuard can run on pretty much anything; the cheapest tier on Vultr, DigialOcean or Linode will be more than sufficient.</p> + <h2>Now on to the good stuff</h2> + </details> + <p>This guide will take you through the process of setting up a WireGuard VPN connection between two machines running Linux, and configuring it to forward incoming web traffic from one to the other. It assumes you already have two servers set up running Linux (Ubuntu Server in my case, but any distro should suffice) with UFW configured and enabled, and know what ports you'll need.</p> + <p>The machine running your WireGuard server should be an external one exposed to the internet, such as a VPS, for maximum effect. For our purposes, this machine will be the "server", and the one you're forwarding traffic to will be the "client".</p> + <p>We'll be configuring WireGuard with a 172.16.0.1/24 virtual network and forwarding port 25565, the default for Minecraft, but any private IP range and port will do.</p> + <h2>Installation</h2> + <p>First, we'll install WireGuard on both machines:</p> + <code>$ apt install wireguard wireguard-tools</code> + <p>And allow the port it uses in UFW:</p> + <code>$ ufw allow 51820</code> + <h3>On the server</h3> + <p>Uncomment this line in <code>/etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf</code> to enable IPv4 forwarding:</p> + <code>$ net.ipv4.ip_forward=1</code> + <p>And apply the change with this command:</p> + <code>$ sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1</code> + <h3>On the client</h3> + <p>We'll need to generate a public/private key pair for each machine on our VPN network. Do that now for our client like so:</p> + <code>$ sudo bash -c "umask 077 ; wg genkey > /etc/wireguard/client_priv.key"<br>$ sudo bash -c "wg pubkey < /etc/wireguard/client_priv.key > /etc/wireguard/client_pub.key"</code> + <p>This generates a private key for WireGuard and then generates a corresponding public key based on it. Our client's keys can now be found in <code>/etc/wireguard/client_priv.key</code> and <code>/etc/wireguard/client_pub.key</code> for our private and public keys respectively.</p> + <h3>Back to the server</h3> + <p>Now do the same for the server:</p> + <code>$ umask 077 ; wg genkey > /etc/wireguard/server_priv.key<br>$ wg pubkey < /etc/wireguard/server_priv.key > /etc/wireguard/server_pub.key</code> + <p>Our server's keys can now be found in <code>/etc/wireguard/server_priv.key</code> and <code>/etc/wireguard/server_pub.key</code> for our private and public keys respectively.</p> + <p>Now, create a WireGuard configuration file at <code>/etc/wireguard/wg0.conf</code>. <code>wg0</code> will be the name of our network interface, you can name yours something else if you'd like.</p> + <code>[Interface]<br>Address = 172.16.0.1/24<br>ListenPort = 51820<br>PrivateKey = #(server's private key goes here)<br># Firewall rules<br>PostUp = iptables -A FORWARD -i %i -j ACCEPT; iptables -A FORWARD -o %i -j ACCEPT; iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE<br>PostDown = iptables -D FORWARD -i %i -j ACCEPT; iptables -D FORWARD -o %i -j ACCEPT; iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE<br><br>[Peer]<br># Client #1 details<br>PublicKey = #(client's public key goes here)<br># Traffic to route to this client<br>AllowedIPs = 172.16.0.2/32</code> + <p>Paste the server's private key after <code>PrivateKey =</code> in <code>[Interface]</code> and the client's public key after <code>PublicKey =</code> in <code>[Peer]</code>.</p> + <p>With this setup, our server will use the virtual local IP <code>172.16.0.1</code> and our client will use the IP <code>172.16.0.2</code>. You can also add up to 254 more clients by duplicating the <code>[Peer]</code> block and and updating it with the respective public key and a new local IP address.</p> + <p>Now, enable and start the WireGuard service with</p> + <code>$ systemctl enable --now wg-quick@wg0.service</code> + <p><code>wg0</code> being what we called our network interface before.</p> + <h3>Back to the client</h3> + <p>Create a WireGuard configuration file for our client at <code>/etc/wireguard/myvpn.conf</code> (you can replace <code>myvpn</code> with a different name if you so choose):</p> + <code>[Interface]<br>Address = 172.16.0.2/24<br>PrivateKey = #(client's private key goes here)<br># Optionally, set to your desired DNS server<br># DNS = 9.9.9.9<br><br>[Peer]<br>PublicKey = #(server's public key goes here)<br># Endpoint (server) can be a domain name or IP address<br>Endpoint = (server's public IP goes here):51820<br># Traffic to route to server<br>AllowedIPs = 0.0.0.0/0, ::/0<br>PersistentKeepalive = 25</code> + <p>Make sure you use your server's public IP here. The PersistentKeepalive option is there because WireGuard closes the connection by default if no data comes through for a while and will only reopen it for the client, so here we send a KeepAlive packet every 25 seconds to prevent that in order to keep our client accessible from the internet.</p> + <p>Now we start WireGuard:</p> + <code>$ sudo wg-quick up myvpn</code> + <p><code>myvpn</code> being whatever you called your vpn before. Shut WireGuard down by typing <code>down</code> instead of <code>up</code> here. At this point, you should be able to ping the server (<code>172.16.0.1</code>) or any URL from the client and get a response.</p> + <h2>Port Forwarding</h2> + <p>Now we'll configure the firewall and port forwarding. This bit assumes you already have UFW configured and enabled. You can set it up now if necessary.</p> + <h3>On the server</h3> + <p>Allow forwarding for the ports you need:</p> + <code>$ ufw route allow proto tcp to 172.16.0.2 port 25565</code> + <p><code>25565</code> being your relevant port. Repeat this command as necessary.</p> + <p>Now we need to configure iptables. We can do this through UFW by adding the following onto the very end of the file <code>/etc/ufw⁠/before.rules</code>:</p> + <code>*nat<br>:PREROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]<br>:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]<br>-A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 25565 -j DNAT --to-destination 172.16.0.2<br>-A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE<br>COMMIT</code> + <p>Where <code>25565</code> is, again, your relevant port. Copy the <code>-A PREROUTING</code> line for every port you need.</p> + <p>Now restart UFW:</p> + <code>$ ufw reload</code> + <h3>On the client</h3> + <p>Allow the relevant ports and restart UFW:</p> + <code>$ ufw allow 51820<br>$ ufw allow 25565<br>$ ufw reload</code> + <p>And you're done! At this point, your client should be accessible from the IP address of your server on the ports you forwarded.</p> + <?php include("../../comment/form.php"); ?> + </body> +</html> diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_self_host_safely_with_wireguard/wireguard_logo.png b/blog/posts/guide_self_host_safely_with_wireguard/wireguard_logo.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..aaa4e03 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_self_host_safely_with_wireguard/wireguard_logo.png diff --git a/blog/posts/guide_things_i_keep_having_to_google/index.php b/blog/posts/guide_things_i_keep_having_to_google/index.php new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f6f9224 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/guide_things_i_keep_having_to_google/index.php @@ -0,0 +1,126 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> + <head> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <title>Guide - Things I Keep Having to Google</title> + <link href="/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all"> + <link href="/blog/comment/comments.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all"> + <style> + /*h1 { + background-image: url('wireguard_logo.png'); + } + summary > * { + margin-bottom: 0; + display: inline-block; + } + details[open] > summary h6 { + display: none; + } + td { + padding: .2rem; + } + td h4 { + margin: 0; + }*/ + </style> + </head> + <body> + <?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/nav.php'); ?> + <h1>guide:</h1> + <h2 id="caption">Things I Keep Having to Google</h2> + <?php include("../post_dates.php"); ?> + <p>This isn't really a guide to anything in particular, I just wanted an easily accessible reference for all the things I'm sick of wading through google results for, or otherwise seem to need help remembering. I've put it here in case someone else might find this helpful. I'll likely be adding to this as I find myself repeatedly googling things.</p> + <h2>Binding things to just the Super key in KDE</h2> + <ol> + <li>Bind it to some other keyboard shortcut using KDE's typical GUI methods. Any shortcut will do.</li> + <li>Find the entry for it in <code>~/.config/khotkeysrc</code>. There should be a line that looks like: <code>Uuid={77575b17-36d6-4b4e-b01f-2f1156e38583}</code>. Copy everything inside the curly braces, including the braces themselves.</li> + <li>Run the following commands:</li> + </ol> + <code style="overflow: scroll;">$ kwriteconfig5 --file ~/.config/kwinrc --group ModifierOnlyShortcuts --key Meta "org.kde.kglobalaccel,/component/khotkeys,org.kde.kglobalaccel.Component,invokeShortcut,<YOUR UUID HERE>"<br>$ qdbus org.kde.KWin /KWin reconfigure</code> + <h2>Linux command line/Bash stuff</h2> + <table> + <tr><td colspan="2"><h4>pipeline</h4></td></tr> + <tr><td><code>command | command2</code></td><td>uses the output of one command as the input to the next</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>command > file</code></td><td>saves the output of a command to a file</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>command < file</code></td><td>uses a file as the input to a command</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>command < fileA > fileB</code></td><td>will therefore run <code>command</code> with the contents of <code>fileA</code> as the input, and save the output to <code>fileB</code></td></tr> + <tr><td style="white-space:nowrap;"><code>command <<< "string or $variable"</code></td><td>will use the string or variable as the input to a command, the same as <code> < file</code></td></tr> + <tr><td colspan="2"><h4>variables</h4></td></tr> + <tr><td><code>variable=value</code></td><td>assigns a variable</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>$variable</code></td><td>references it</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>$(command)</code></td><td>lets you treat the output of a command like a variable reference</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>$((number+variable))</code></td><td>does the same thing for integer math expressions.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>$(( $(command) ))<br>$(( variable ))</code></td><td>This can also just convert strings into integers.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>"te$(command)xt"<br>"as$((math))df"</code></td><td>Both can be inserted into strings.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>"some $variable text"<br>"more${variable}text"</code></td><td>Both of these are valid ways to insert a variable into a string.</td></tr> + <tr><td colspan="2"><h4>grep</h4></td></tr> + <tr><td><code>-v</code></td><td>Inverts it, so matches are excluded</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>-E "/regex/"</code></td><td>Lets you use regex</td></tr> + <tr><td colspan="2"><h4>cut</h4></td></tr> + <tr><td><code>-d 'string'</code></td><td>Determines the delimiter string, the default is the TAB character</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>-f n</code></td><td>Specifies a field to output, delimited by <code>-d</code></td></tr> + <tr><td><code>sed 's/ */ /g' | cut -d ' '</code></td><td>Piping your thing through this <span title="It's not foolproof, though. Make sure you understand what this is doing so you can adapt it if it breaks.">helps</span> with parsing a lot of Linux commands that output tabular data</td></tr> + <tr><td colspan="2"><h4>sed</h4></td></tr> + <tr><td><code>sed "s/regex/replacement/flags"</code></td><td>The basic sed replacement command, checks a line of input against the provided regular expression <code>regex</code> and replaces matches with <code>replacement</code>.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>sed "s/a/b/;s/c/d/"</code></td><td>Multiple sed commands can be strung together in one, like so.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>sed "s/a/b/g"</code></td><td>The <code>g</code> flag makes sed replace all occurences of the pattern, not just the first</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>sed "s/a/b/<number>"</code></td><td>Insert any number to tell sed to replace only that occurence. Counts from 1. Theoretically, <code>s/a/b/</code> is the same as <code>s/a/b/1</code>.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>sed "s/a/b/i"</code></td><td>GNU extension - Match case-insensitively.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>sed "s/^a/b/"</code></td><td>Require that a match be at the beginning of the line.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>sed "s/a$/b/"</code></td><td>Require that a match be at the end of the line.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>sed "s/^a$/b/"</code></td><td>Require that a match be both at the beginning and the end - in other words, require that a match be the entire line.</td></tr> + <tr><td colspan="2"><h4>find</h4></td></tr> + <tr><td><code>find</code></td><td>Lists every file and directory in the current working directory</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>find /dir</code></td><td>Does the same for the directory you specify</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>find -name "foo"</code></td><td>Only lists things with a matching name. * can be used as a wildcard.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>find -exec command {} \;</code></td><td>Runs <code>command</code> on everything found by <code>find</code>. <code>{}</code> is replaced by the output.</td></tr> + <tr><td colspan="2"><h4>misc</h4></td></tr> + <tr><td><code>xrandr --output <display name> --brightness <brightness></code></td><td title="It would definitely for sure be better to change this via the monitor's built-in menus, but that requires navigating both of my monitors' built-in menus.">Janky software-side display brightness setting with xrandr</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>wget "https://example.com/file.zip" -O temp.zip; unzip temp.zip; rm temp.zip</code></td><td>Bash one-liner to unzip a file from the internet to the current directory</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>yt-dlp -x --audio-format flac --audio-quality 0 -P ~/Music/Library/ -o "%(uploader)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s"</code></td><td>My standard <a href="https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#readme">yt-dlp</a> command for ripping music from Youtube and Soundcloud. I have an alias for this so I don't have to write it out every time.</td></tr> + <tr><td><code>alias myalias="command go here"</code></td><td>Set an alias in bash. Put this in your .bashrc or similar to make it permanent.</td></tr> + </table> + <h2>Webdev stuff</h2> + <h4>Tables</h4> + <ul> + <li>Force a <code><td></code> element not to wrap by adding the <code>white-space:nowrap;</code> CSS property to it.</li> + <li>Set the <code>table-layout</code> CSS property to <code>fixed</code> to force the the columns to be equal widths.</li> + </ul> + <h4>PHP</h4> + <ul> + <li>The <code>date()</code> function in PHP returns date information. The first argument is a format string and the second is an optional integer for a Unix timestamp. The valid format characters as of PHP 8 can be found <a href="https://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.format.php">here</a>.<!--, and examples are listed in this table: + <details> + <summary>Show table</summary><br> + It is currently <?php echo date('l, F j, Y \a\t g:i:s A T');?><br><br> + <table class="highlightrows" style="table-layout: fixed; width: 100%;"> + <tr style="font-weight: bold;"><td>Character</td><td>Output</td><td>Character</td><td>Output</td></tr> + <tr><td>Y</td><td><?php echo date("Y");?></td><td>y</td><td><?php echo date("y");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>o</td><td><?php echo date("o");?></td><td>L</td><td><?php echo date("L");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>F</td><td><?php echo date("F");?></td><td>M</td><td><?php echo date("M");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>m</td><td><?php echo date("m");?></td><td>n</td><td><?php echo date("n");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>t</td><td><?php echo date("t");?></td><td>W</td><td><?php echo date("W");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>l</td><td><?php echo date("l");?></td><td>D</td><td><?php echo date("D");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>d</td><td><?php echo date("d");?></td><td>j</td><td><?php echo date("j");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>S</td><td><?php echo date("S");?></td><td>z</td><td><?php echo date("z");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>N</td><td><?php echo date("N");?></td><td>w</td><td><?php echo date("w");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>A</td><td><?php echo date("A");?></td><td>a</td><td><?php echo date("a");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>g</td><td><?php echo date("g");?></td><td>G</td><td><?php echo date("G");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>h</td><td><?php echo date("h");?></td><td>H</td><td><?php echo date("H");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>i</td><td><?php echo date("i");?></td><td>s</td><td><?php echo date("s");?></td></tr> + <tr title="These are milliseconds and microseconds respectively. They will both return 0 when used with date() as it takes the Unix timestamp as an integer in seconds, but there are other functions that take this formatting and will return these accurately."><td>v</td><td><?php echo date("v");?></td><td>u</td><td><?php echo date("u");?></td></tr> + <tr><td title="This one is so funny to me. This is Swatch Internet Time, a time system created in 1998 by the Swatch corporation to promote their "Beat" watches. It divides the day into 1000 equal chunks 86.4 seconds long. I encourage you to go read the Wikipedia page for this thing. It's great. Why PHP has a function for it I have no idea.">B</td><td><?php echo date("B");?></td><td>I</td><td><?php echo date("I");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>e</td><td><?php echo date("e");?></td><td>O</td><td><?php echo date("O");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>P</td><td><?php echo date("P");?><td>Z</td><td><?php echo date("Z");?></td></tr> + <tr><td title="You can also use the function time() for this.">U</td><td colspan="3"><?php echo date("U");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>c</td><td colspan="3"><?php echo date("c");?></td></tr> + <tr><td>r</td><td colspan="3"><?php echo date("r");?></td></tr> + </table> + </details--><br><br> + The <code>strtotime()</code> function does the reverse operation, converting date strings to Unix timestamps. Storing dates as Unix timestamps and converting when needed is recommended.</li> + </ul> + <h2>Song Lyrics</h2> + <p>I don't actually have a solution for this one, I just wish there was a resource for looking up the lyrics to songs and looking up songs by their lyrics that wasn't an SEO leech site.</p> + <?php include("../../comment/form.php"); ?> + </body> +</html> diff --git a/blog/posts/how_my_blog_works/index.md b/blog/posts/how_my_blog_works/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e69de29 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/how_my_blog_works/index.md diff --git a/blog/posts/how_my_blog_works/index.php b/blog/posts/how_my_blog_works/index.php new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f572f79 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/how_my_blog_works/index.php @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +<?php include("../post.php");
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/2pindin.jpg b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/2pindin.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..fdbf578 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/2pindin.jpg diff --git a/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/4pinminixlr.png b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/4pinminixlr.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..4e5fdb9 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/4pinminixlr.png diff --git a/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/homebrew2pindincable.jpg b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/homebrew2pindincable.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..503dda8 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/homebrew2pindincable.jpg diff --git a/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/homebrewxlrcablefinished.jpg b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/homebrewxlrcablefinished.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..6d2b9c1 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/homebrewxlrcablefinished.jpg diff --git a/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/index.md b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c981dbc --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/make_your_own_cables/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +My current main headphones are a model that doesn't come with a removable cable by default, that I purchased through a company that offers a service to add one aftermarket for you. They offered multiple different connector options, and I chose this one: + + + +This is one of two connector types that come up when you search for "4-pin mini XLR". I opted for this connector on the basis that it would allow me to potentially use the headphones with a balanced output in the future, because I had been researching headphones for probably several days and eventually you start to think that kind of thing is important. + +This worked fine for me for quite a while, up until recently, when the included cable that adapts this to a standard 3.5mm TRS headphone jack connector stopped working. When I tried to find a replacement, I quickly learned that this connector is only meaningfully present on headphones that are so expensive that anyone who can afford them can be expected to be able to shell out upwards of 100 of God's own United States Dollars for a top-of-the-line snake-oil-lubricated replacement cable. + +So universally is this the case that there is seemingly essentially no market for cheap cables of this type â the only sanely priced one I could find was a mono instrument cable with a proprietary pinout designed for use with some Shure product. The cheapest compatible replacement cable I could find was made by the aforementioned modding company and was listed at a cool $140 CAD, well in excess of half of what my headphones themselves are worth. It should go without saying that there is no audio cable on this planet for which I would pay that kind of money, which brings me to where I'm going with this. + +Instead of shelling out Intel Core i3-13100F money for what functionally amounts to 3 meters of wire and a couple of audio jacks, I lopped the connectors off of the old, broken cable and soldered on some new wires and saved myself $140. + +<figure class="media"> + <div> + <img src="homebrewxlrcablefinished.jpg" alt="A 3.5mm jack to 4-pin mini XLR adapter cable with a shiny black braided exterior"> + <figcaption>This braided sheathing can be had for cheap on Amazon by searching "braided cable sleeve". I used the 6mm variant here, and it comfortably fits the three 24AWG wires.</figcaption> + </div> +</figure> + +This isn't the only time I've had to do this, either â I, through a bizarre series of events, happen to own a piece of musical equipment made in the 1960s, in the Netherlands, with weird output jacks to match: + + + +These are 2-pin DIN connectors, from the same family as the 5-pin DIN connectors you may be familiar with from their use in MIDI ports. My device uses a pair of these for stereo output. I can only assume this was standard at the time, in the Netherlands, but where and when I live this type of connector is all but unheard of, to the point that there are *no* cables with it available whatsoever, only the bare connectors. + +In order to get this thing connected to my other equipment, I had to fashion my own adapter cable out of a stereo-to-dual-mono TRS splitter cable and two of those connectors purchased standalone from the internet. + +<figure class="media"> + <div> + <img src="homebrew2pindincable.jpg" alt="A Stereo 1/4 inch TRS to dual mono 2-pin DIN adapter cable"> + <figcaption>I wonder how far away from me the nearest other cable of this type is.</figcaption> + </div> +</figure> + +I'm not going to attempt to teach you how to do this here â there's plenty of people on Youtube who are much more qualified to do that than me â but I think if you're at all comfortable messing with electronics this is a good skill to have. It's proven surprisingly useful to me, not just as a hobbyist who builds weird electronic gizmos for fun but as a casual enjoyer and maker of music. + +If this ever happens to you, consider saving the money on some bullshit expensive cable and spending it on some [soldering gear](https://pine64.com/product-category/pinecil/) instead. It's easier than you probably think it is and it can save you, like, a lot of money.
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/my_terrible_distro_hop/bg.png b/blog/posts/my_terrible_distro_hop/bg.png Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..c3d448c --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/my_terrible_distro_hop/bg.png diff --git a/blog/posts/my_terrible_distro_hop/index.md b/blog/posts/my_terrible_distro_hop/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..556da49 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/my_terrible_distro_hop/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,116 @@ +## Prologue + +Of late, I've been having some mildly annoying, highly esoteric issues, of the sort any desktop OS tends to develop given enough time, with my daily-driver install of the Arch-based EndeavourOS with XFCE. The most annoying of these annoyances include the XFCE panel daemon having stopped running on login, which I dealt with by binding the command to start it to a keyboard shortcut, and the monitor layout defaulting to mirrored every time I locked the screen, which I dealt with much the same way. I say of late, but I've been dealing with this shit for months. These seemed like bugs somewhere deep in XFCE that I really didn't have the energy to try to fix, so my solution was to just go scorched-earth and start again with something new. + +The something new I landed on was a fresh install of Fedora. I chose Fedora partially for the GNOME desktop environment, which, to be blunt, seems to have its shit together much more than XFCE does (or KDE for that matter), and partially because I was hoping that by moving away from a rolling-release distro to something more stable I could avoid some of the inscrutable weirdness that kept materializing after updates on Arch<sup id="n1r"><a href="#n1">1</a></sup>. Plus, I was excited to once again be on an OS with some more sane defaults, like flatpaks and Bluetooth being available out of the box. This is what was going through my head as I loaded the Fedora live ISO onto a flash drive and rebooted my computer. + +I had no idea what I was about to get myself into. + +## The Installation Experience + +The installation went very smoothly. I was actually pretty impressed. It was probably the fastest I've ever installed Linux - All it did was prompt me for a language, timezone, and the drive to install to and a few minutes later it was done. Fast and simple even by Linux installation standards. It was the next part that was painful. + +## Setup (Or Rather, My Doomed Attempt Thereof) + +I should say here that this isn't a review of Fedora as much as it is just me venting. It seems like it would be great for the kind of user it's designed for, but as it turns out that is *not* me. Honestly, a lot of this stuff may or may not have been my fault. Anyway, on to the pain. + +The first weird thing I noticed was that Firefox had reverted to the default profile instead of recalling my settings from before. Normal, except that I store my /home/ directory on a separate drive and the first thing I did was [reconfigure my fstab](../guide_how_to_automount_drives_on_boot_in_linux/) as such, so it should have seen the config files and just loaded them right up. Odd. + +I also had to manually install all the nonfree media codecs in order to watch videos on Youtube, but that's basically fine. Takes two seconds and you never have to think about it again. Would have been nice to be prompted for that on install, though. + +Anyway, this issue with programs not seeing their existing config files would become a running theme. I would later discover that this had something to do with the fact that all this stuff had been installed as flatpaks, as opposed to a native installation from the distro's repositories or the AUR like it would have been before. + +See, for some (probably security-related) reason, flatpaks store their config files in a different place than natively installed programs, and the preinstalled graphical Software Center, which I was using to install all this stuff, seems to like to default to flatpaks whenever possible. I never used flatpaks on my previous install because they weren't enabled by default, hence, almost none of the programs I installed remembered their previous settings. + +To be clear, this probably would have been fine if flatpaks were already my go-to, but they weren't, and I wasn't about to reconfigure all my shit or go way out of my way to be particular about which packaging method I preferred for my software in order to avoid reconfiguring all my shit. + +On a related note, a lot of the software in the repositories that were available to me was *severely* outdated. PrusaSlicer, for example, was only available in version 2.4.2, which was released in April of 2022. As of writing in February of 2024, the latest version is 2.7.1. It was upon going to Prusa's website to download the AppImage of the latest version like some kind of fucking caveman and discovering that AppImageLauncher<sup id="n2r"><a href="#n2">2</a></sup> wasn't in *any* of the repos that I got fed up, decided I wasn't gonna risk dealing with this type of shit for every program I wanted to install and noped out. + +## Where To Next + +So Fedora was a bust, so where do I go from here? I considered moving to an Ubuntu-based distribution like Pop!_OS or Mint that might give me what I wanted from Fedora, and I briefly considered going back to Manjaro for reasons I have honestly forgotten, but I had been at this for hours now and I really just wanted my computer in a usable state again with the minimum possible amount of adaptation, so I came crawling back to EndeavourOS, and went to take a nap while it installed to hopefully come back to this ordeal with a cooler head. + +I kept using GNOME, though. I kinda like it. I switched to XFCE initially because I had been looking at r/unixporn and had it in my head that I wanted really granular customization, but that honestly didn't last long. I got it looking [decent](https://rosepinetheme.com/) and then got bored. Eventually, the creeping accumulation of jank and bugs got tiresome, and my hope is that GNOME is sufficiently well-integrated and UX-designed to avoid some of that. + +I have a couple issues with GNOME, though. I don't much like the MacOS-style grid of large icons as an app launcher, for one, having gotten used to the density of a barely-configured Rofi menu. I've also gotten used to seeing at a glance what programs I have open, from years of using basically every desktop environment but GNOME, from KDE to XFCE to fucking Windows. I'd like if that was available in, say, the positively barren top panel. I found an extension for that, but it doesn't seem to work properly. + +Beyond that, I've been acclimating to the fresh install pretty much fine. All my programs are set up the way I like them again, which is nice. Turns out GNOME ships with Wayland by default now, and it's actually been giving me fewer issues than I was expecting. Even gaming is fine from what I've seen so far (what kind of topsy turvy world are we living in where gaming is one of the EASIEST things to do on Linux?), but I did have to pass the flag `-platform xcb` to OBS to get it to run. Also, the state of graphical package managers on Arch is utterly abysmal, but that's neither here nor there. + +I do have one very difficult issue, though. + +## What Is The Fucking Deal With ProtonVPN On Linux + +I use ProtonVPN, and one of the things I attempted to do on Fedora was set it back up. I don't know what I did originally to dodge this, but trying to set it up recently, both on Fedora and on Arch, has been an excercise in navigating an insane maze of complete and utter bullshit. + +Proton lists Fedora as officially supported by ProtonVPN. Great! One issue: It Fucking Isn't, It Would Seem. The ProtonVPN client is only present in the Software Center as an unofficial GTK app (as opposed to the Electron app I'm used to (I know, ugh)) that refused to work. I went to Proton's website and followed the instructions there, only to end up with a very similar looking GTK app that very similarly didn't work. Awesome. + +Fortunately, ProtonVPN supports connecting using OpenVPN, and GNOME's network settings panel has an option for that built right in! I download the relevant configuration file from the ProtonVPN website and it also doesn't work. Even awesomer! + +Back on Arch, which is *not* officially supported, I install the AUR package that worked perfectly before and it fails. Trying to connect via the CLI (which, by the way, didn't exist in Fedoraland) with my usual settings gives this output: + +<p class="codetitle">protonvpn-cli c --cc CA -p udp</p> + +``` +Setting up Proton VPN. +Connecting to Proton VPN on CA#166 with UDP. + +Unable to connect to Proton VPN: Proton VPN connection failed due to unknown reason. +``` + +Tremendously fucking helpful. Why even bother having an error message if it's gonna tell me nothing? + +So I look up this "unknown reason" error and find a Github issue where someone says to run a `journalctl` command to see if there's any errors, and wouldn't you know it, I find one! + +<p class="codetitle">sudo journalctl -eu NetworkManager</p> + +``` +"Proton VPN CA#166"]: secrets: failed to request VPN secrets #3: No agents were available for this request. +``` + +Progress! I think. I don't know what this means. I look up this error and find a different Github issue where someone claims to have fixed a similar issue by installing a package called nm-applet, which... doesn't seem to exist. Transcendantly spectacular!!! + +(Mind you, all this is going on on a repo that was archived some time last year, which seems ominous. Please tell me that weird GTK client from Fedora that's missing a CLI isn't the up-to-date official solution.) + +So I look up "nm-applet" and find a Stackoverflow thread from eight years ago where someone is describing an unrelated issue with an ancient version of GNOME and I learn that the package I'm looking for is actually called `network-manager-applet` and not `nm-applet` in the Arch repos for some reason. So I install it and run the `nm-applet` command, and, bracing for disappointment, run the command to start the VPN... + +<p class="codetitle">protonvpn-cli c --cc CA -p udp</p> + +``` +Setting up Proton VPN. +Connecting to Proton VPN on CA#70 with UDP. + +Successfully connected to Proton VPN. +``` + +huh. + +I think the Github user I learned this from says it best in their comment: + +<figure class="quote"> + <blockquote> + Yes!!! It needs [network-manager]-applet!!<br><br> + Oh man, that was a saga, and what a simple fix!<br><br> + Thanks so much. I understand that protonvpn doesn't want to say that it "officially supports" desktop environments other than GNOME or KDE, but I think it would still be really great if we could add some documentation here. + </blockquote> + <figcaption> + — ExpandingMan, <a href="https://github.com/ProtonVPN/linux-cli/issues/49#issuecomment-910662957">connecting fails due to failure to get secrets #49</a> + </figcaption> +</figure> + +I have a couple questions. One, why isn't this listed as a dependency if not having it breaks everything? I assume it's the fault of the person maintaining the AUR package, but that seems like a weird oversight on a family of distros where that package *clearly* does not come standard. + +Two, what's going on with ProtonVPN clients on Linux? It looks like the Electron app and accompanying CLI (which I quite liked) are deprecated as of last October? And replaced with that weird GTK thing that's missing a bunch of features and doesn't include a CLI anymore? What the fuck? Why did they make it worse? I mean, it's not like this isn't part of a pattern for Proton. I'm pretty sure the Proton Drive desktop client still isn't on Linux yet. + +Also, three, why wasn't network-manager-applet already installed? This thing seems like a pretty important system package, especially given the rest of network-manager was already present and seems to be the thing allowing me to connect to the internet right now. Well, such is Arch I suppose. The type of Linux user who runs this thing seems to tend towards having a pathological obsession with bloat and the relevant de-'s<sup id="n3r"><a href="#n3">3</a></sup>. + +## Oh Sweet It's Fine Actually + +That concludes my blog post, and the blog-post-within-a-blog-post that appears to have metastasized up there. I think you should know I finished troubleshooting both ProtonVPN *and* OBS while writing the post chronicling my suffering. Thank you for indulging my bitching and moaning about totally avoidable software problems. Who knows, maybe this will help you. For your sake, I hope it doesn't. + +--- + +<p id="n1"><a href="#n1r">1</a>. I say Arch, and not EndeavourOS, because I used to use Manjaro and it was like this too.</p> + +<p id="n2"><a href="#n2r">2</a>. AppImages are programs packaged as standalone executables. They don't need to be installed - AppImageLauncher isn't necessary to run them, but it's my preferred tool for integrating them into the system with menu entries and such.</p> + +<p id="n3"><a href="#n3r">3</a>. nuts</p>
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/my_terrible_distro_hop/index.php b/blog/posts/my_terrible_distro_hop/index.php new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f572f79 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/my_terrible_distro_hop/index.php @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +<?php include("../post.php");
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/post.php b/blog/posts/post.php new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e6b13b6 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/post.php @@ -0,0 +1,105 @@ +<?php +$cwd = preg_replace('/^.*\//', '', getcwd()); +$feed = simplexml_load_file($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/blog/blog.atom"); +$pdate = ""; +$udate = ""; +$title = ""; +$descr = ""; +foreach($feed->entry as $entry) { + if($entry->id == $cwd) { + $pdate = preg_replace('/T.*$/', ' ', $entry->published); + $udate = preg_replace('/T.*$/', ' ', $entry->updated); + $title = $entry->title; + $descr = $entry->summary; + break; + } +} +?> +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html lang="en"> + <head> + <meta charset="utf-8"> + <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> + <link href="/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all"> + <link href="/blog/comment/comments.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all"> + <?php + echo("<title>$title</title><meta name='description' content='$descr'>"); + $bgfile = glob('bg.*')[0]; + if(!is_null($bgfile)) { + echo("<style> h1 { background-image: url('$bgfile') } </style>"); + } + ?> + <style> + td { + display: table-cell; + } + </style> + <?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/seasonal.php'); ?> + </head> + <body> + <?php + include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/nav.php'); + $udates = ""; + if($pdate != $udate) { $udates = " | Updated on $udate"; } + echo("<h1>isoblog</h1><h2 id='caption'>$title</h2><p style='text-align: center;'><em>Posted on $pdate$udates</em></p>"); + include("../../../Parsedown.php"); + $Parsedown = new Parsedown(); + echo $Parsedown->text(file_get_contents("index.md")); + $Parsedown->setSafeMode(true); + $return = $_GET["return"]; + ?> + <hr> + <h2>Comments</h2> + <form action="/blog/comment/submit.php" method="post" autocomplete="off"> + <?php echo "<input type='text' name='entry' value='".preg_replace("/^.*\//","",getcwd())."' style='display: none;' readonly>"; ?> + <table> + <tr> + <td><input type="text" name="name" placeholder="Name"></td> + <td><input type="text" name="botcheck" placeholder="Bot test (type "isopod")"></td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td colspan="2"><textarea name="message" placeholder="Comment (Now supports Markdown!)"></textarea></td> + </tr> + + <tr> + <?php + switch ($return) { + case 'noname': + echo "<td><span class='error'>Name required!</span></td>"; + break; + case 'nomessage': + echo "<td><span class='error'>Message required!</span></td>"; + break; + case 'botcheckfailed': + echo "<td><span class='error'>You failed the bot check!</span></td>"; + break; + case 'success': + echo "<td><span class='success'>Successfully posted!</span></td>"; + break; + default: + echo "<td></td>"; + break; + } + ?> + <td style="text-align: right;"><input type="submit" value="Post"></td> + </tr> + </table> + </form> + <?php + + $totaloutput = ""; + $postlist = json_decode(file_get_contents("../../comment/posts.json")); + foreach($postlist as $post) { + if ($post->entry == preg_replace("/^.*\//","",getcwd())) { + $output = ""; + $date = date("Y-m-d h:iA", $post->date); + $name = $post->name; + $message = $Parsedown->text(html_entity_decode($post->message)); + + $output = $output."<hr><article><table><tr><td style='text-align: left;'>".$name."</td><td style='text-align: right;'>".$date."</td></tr><tr><td colspan='2'>".$message."</td></tr></table></article>"; + $totaloutput = $output.$totaloutput; + } + } + echo $totaloutput; ?> + </body> +</html> diff --git a/blog/posts/renting_an_unremarkable_server/index.md b/blog/posts/renting_an_unremarkable_server/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d2687dd --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/renting_an_unremarkable_server/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +This was originally going to be a blurb on [/uses](/uses/), then it turned into a new sub-page, then this bit got so long I figured it would be better suited as a blog post. I wasn't expecting to have this much to say on the matter. Here's hoping soon I can muster up a blog post that isn't about a computer. + +Up until recently, I ran all my exposed-to-the-web self-hosted services on a modest DigitalOcean VPS. For reasons entirely unrelated to its performance or reliability, that is no longer the case. See, while DigitalOcean is based in the United States, as astute readers surely know, I am not, and with The Way Things Are Going Politically Right Now™, I'm trying to reduce my reliance on American companies where possible, she said, run-on-sentencefully. Fortunately, all of DigitalOcean's European competitors are also a lot cheaper. + +In researching alternative VPS options, I landed on OVH because they were the most reputable non-American hosting provider I could find with a datacenter in my country that I could be sure would allow me to use IPv6. Their VPS offerings were decent, certainly attractive to someone used to DigitalOcean prices, but I ended up going with a dedicated server instead due to the, to put it lightly, *vastly* better price-to-performance ratio on offer: + +| | Old VPS | New server | Comparably priced OVH VPS | +| --- | --- | --- | --- | +| CPU | 2 threads | 4 core/8 thread Intel Xeon-D 1520 | 4 threads | +| RAM | 4GB | 32GB DDR4-2133 ECC | 4GB | +| Storage | 80GB NVMe | 480GB mirrored SATA SSDs | 80GB NVMe | +| Network | 2Gbps | 300Mbps | 1Gbps | +| Backups | Automated | Bring your own | On-demand | +| Price (CAD) | $44/mo | $25/mo | $26/mo | + +See what I mean? Of course, none of these seem like all that from the perspective of a modern personal computer, but this represents a *quadrupling* of CPU cores and RAM and a *sextupling* of storage space for a near halving of the price compared to my already adequate previous solution. That's like eight times the value! Though, looking at this table, you can already see a couple of the reasons it's priced so competitively, even accounting for the DigitalOcean tax. Let's break this down. + +## The Ebay Optiplex gaming PC of rented servers + +So I've moved from a VPS to a dedicated server. The fundamental difference between them is that a VPS is a virtual machine that your hosting provider spins up for you, while a dedicated, or bare-metal, server is just a whole computer that you rent sole administrative privileges over. + +The benefit you get with a VPS is that, being a virtual machine, they can trivially be cloned in full for a comprehensive backup or assigned more or less computing resources depending on your needs, with little more than the click of a button in the web control panel. The drawback is that managing all that requires specialized, costly, and probably bespoke infrastructure. With a bare-metal server you get none of that. You're essentially paying for SSH access to a machine in their datacenter and for a technician to walk over and hit the power button for you. I've made use of those fancy features in the past with my old VPS, but the aforementioned gulf in computing resources for the money made losing them worth it to me. Besides, with a server as powerful as this I'd be shocked if I ever needed to upgrade anyway. + +The option I went with also gets much less bandwidth than a VPS would, 300 megabits compared to a gigabit or more. This is the source of most of my buyer's remorse here, but looking at my usage graphs from DigitalOcean I expect it'll be rare that I hit even this cap, though it will prove restricting if I spin up a Peertube instance and become the world's first Peertube channel with a triple digit number of active viewers. + +If you're the sort of person who memorizes server part numbers, you may have already picked up on the third reason this is so cheap: this is an old-ass server. The Xeon-D 1520 is now a 10-year-old chip, from, like, the <span title="Hi!">dawn</span> of DDR4 memory being a thing that had been invented. According to OVH, this machine is technically on its fourth life, having aged out of three tiers of increasingly budget dedicated servers. You could probably score a functionally identical old Dell box for like a hundred bucks on Ebay plus the cost of a RAM upgrade. Honestly, I really like that. It's a refreshing change of pace from giant corporate entities dropping billions on single-purpose ASICs for blockchain and "AI" workloads that will become worthless in a couple years when the bubble bursts. + +Financials aside, it should go without saying that this new-to-me server is *way* overkill for the handful of websites and single-user self-hostable network services I'll be running on it. The old VPS had plenty of computing power for that. The main draw for me was the extra storage space — I might have gone even cheaper, except all the cheaper options were restricted to network speeds that I actually felt uncomfortable limiting myself to. + +## Migrating to the thang ding + +Of course, then there's the matter of actually migrating everything over. It went about as smoothly as you could reasonably expect. DigitalOcean, turns out, loves their vendor lock-in and won't let you download an image of your VPS directly, so it was a lot of making .tar.gz archives on the old server, downloading them over sftp, and then uploading them to the new server. + +I took it as an opportunity to do some seasonally-appropriate spring cleaning, pruning a bunch of extraneous services like my never-used Matrix and Mumble servers and reorganizing what remained in order to make keeping track of it all (and backing it up) as easy as possible for myself. I will admit there are a couple things in Docker containers now that were not previously in Docker containers. + +I switched HTTP reverse proxies from Nginx to Caddy, a decision I do not regret, and I ditched Nextcloud, which I was really only using for its extremely mediocre RSS reader anyway. Little did I know replacing it with a different RSS program would be one of the hardest things I'd have to do as part of this process. As of writing, I'm still procrastinating on moving the Wireguard VPN over, but that's basically fine, since my Minecraft server is pretty well dead anyways. + +I plan to use that extra storage space I was so drawn to to finally host my own copies of all my art, music and videos included, so I won't be relying entirely on Youtube and Bandcamp to not go down the shitter to make that stuff available. At any rate, it's become clear by now that whatever discoverability they're supposed to afford me has utterly failed to materialize. That's not to say I'll stop uploading to those places before they actually become actively hostile to my presence, but having the redundancy is always nice. + +I might also start using it for limited offsite backups, probably with Syncthing. I wouldn't want to put my entire library of lossless CD rips on there, but I've got more than enough room now for stuff like my photo archive and art project files. Whatever I end up doing, it'll be available to peruse <a href="/uses/cumulonimbus/">hereabouts</a> whenever I get that page finished. I'm honestly surprised I didn't make a "services I self-host and what I think of them" page sooner.
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\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/posts/toshiba_chromebook/chromebook.jpg b/blog/posts/toshiba_chromebook/chromebook.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..d6ba4b7 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/toshiba_chromebook/chromebook.jpg diff --git a/blog/posts/toshiba_chromebook/index.md b/blog/posts/toshiba_chromebook/index.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..73d0c46 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/toshiba_chromebook/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +It's always hard to believe that events that happened ten years ago happened *ten years ago*, but knowing that doesn't make it feel any less strange that it is now the tenth birthday of the Chromebook I got from Santa when I was 12. That's what I'm doing for the Holiday Season™, by the way. You're getting a post about my first computer, because it's the tenth anniversary of when I got it. Perhaps I'll also make a post about my second computer next September, on *its* tenth birthday. Foreshadowing? What's that? + +The first computer I ever owned was this thing: + +<figure class="media"> + <div> + <img src="chromebook.jpg" alt="The Toshiba Chromebook 2, an unassuming 13-inch laptop made of light grey plastic. As one might expect, it is running Chrome OS."> + <figcaption>Image courtesy of PCMag, from their <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/toshiba-cb35-b3340-chromebook-2">review</a> of this machine.</figcaption> + </div> +</figure> + +This is the Toshiba Chromebook 2. The high-trim model that I had sports a 13-inch 1080p screen, Skullcandy-branded speakers, a whopping 4GB of RAM, the world's most sopping wet and pathetic dual-core Intel Celeron CPU, and 16GB of EMMC storage. It also comes with 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two full years, which sounds like some nasty ploy to sell you a subscription, but with how long you'll be using the thing for may as well be a second internal SSD. + +I was a little bit surprised to learn, upon looking up reviews for this unit, that these speeds and feeds made it one of the nicer Chromebooks available at the time — reviewers seemed to think that the 1080p screen, Skullcandy logo next to the speakers, and 4 entire gigs of RAM (as opposed to the 2GB of most Chromebooks at the time) were the height of luxury. + +Not especially impressive specs by modern standards, or contemporary standards for that matter, but what you've got to keep in mind is that this is a $300 machine, which means the inclusion of a Celeron only constitutes a mere rip-off, and not an outright scam. Although, to be fair, it did work fine for the light web browsing and Youtube watching that constituted this thing's entire intended use case, and depending on how you look at it, the dinky little CPU was a good thing, since it could actually keep cool under those loads inside of Chekov's plastic shell with *absolutely no active cooling*. + +As you might know if you graduated high school after 2013 or so, this laptop, like all Chromebooks, ran Chrome OS, which was less of a fully-fledged desktop operating system and more of a copy of Chrome with half a desktop environment bolted on. I've heard that it can run Android apps and Steam games now (?) but this was *not* the case in 2014. You had Chrome, and you had Chrome Apps, which were Web Apps™ that you could add to your Chromebook's system menu by installing them from the Chrome Web Store, which you might recognize as the official distribution platform for Chrome extensions and themes if you recently switched to Firefox to keep using your adblocker. + +This explicitly intended lack of support for even writing software for the platform, let alone your favourite programs, was the Chromebook's biggest weakness, but it was completely compensated for by the fact that all Chromebooks took about 3 seconds to reach the login screen from a cold boot. In what has since become my typical fashion, it didn't take me long to remedy both of these. + +Being 12 years old and a little bit stupid, I held Google and their products in pretty high regard at the time that I got this machine. To me, the Google ecosystem represented an escape from both Apple products, which I (correctly) viewed as underpowered, overpriced, and overly childproofed in their design; and Windows PCs, with which my primary recent experience had been mostly cheap, slow school computers that took fully two minutes to launch a web browser (This is also why I don't share the apparent nostalgia for Windows 7 that many of my fellow computer touchers express). I apparently pushed pretty hard to get a Chromebook instead of an iPad or whatever else I thought my parents were going to buy for me. + +Once I had it, it took me maybe a couple months to decide I wanted more functionality out of this thing than the preloaded software was capable of offering. Specifically, I wanted to play Minecraft, which at the time didn't have anything even resembling feature parity between platforms — if you thought the Java Edition was better than Bedrock Edition now, you should have been there for early Pocket Edition. Shit was *dire*, man. Of course, Minecraft very much did not run on Chrome OS, and this was the inciting circumstance that probably altered the course of my entire life. + +You see, there was one way to run Minecraft on a Chromebook, and that was by installing Linux on it. Now, Chrome OS is already based on Linux, but that's not what I mean here. I'm talking full-fat Ubuntu. I'm fuzzy on the details, but if you put your Chromebook into developer mode and ran an installation script called crouton, you could<sup id="n1r"><a href="#n1">1</a></sup> boot into a more-or-less totally normal Linux install with support for real ass actual software and everything. This required performing a complex ritual every boot where you would hold down a keyboard shortcut on the boot screen to enter dev mode, bring up a terminal under Chrome OS, and then run a command I have since forgotten to boot Linux, but minor UX issues like that were no concern of mine. I found a guide online to do this and was, from that day forward, irreversibly corrupted into a Linux user. + +And I really got into it, too. I remember setting up a custom shortcut in the XFCE environment crouton set me up with that ran `java -jar ~/minecraft.jar` to boot Minecraft. I remember learning, like, a surprising amount about the inner workings of Linux and getting comfortable with the terminal. I got really into theming for a bit and I distinctly remember using Pinta to create an XFCE theme that resembled the latest Mac OS redesign but with square corners and posting it to the now-defunct<sup id="n2r"><a href="#n2">2</a></sup> xfce-look.org. I reinstalled Linux to try out different desktop environments like half a dozen times. I first learned Python on this computer, and my understanding of things like pip and venvs has not progressed since. + +It was a very fun and educational nine months. You read that right, this machine lasted me all of nine months until I tried to boot it up one day and it just made an unsettling *pop* noise and a mysterious odor and refused to ever turn on again. + +As astute readers will know already, this computer had *absolutely no cooling whatsoever*. No fans, and an all-plastic chassis to further kneecap the already meager passive cooling it was getting. This probably would have been fine for upwards of a year if I used the thing as intended, but I was pushing that pathetic little 7.5-watt Celeron to its absolute limit by running Minecraft 1.8 at 15 FPS, which proved too hot to handle for the glue holding the bottom panel on, followed by... something critical to the machine's operation. I'm not sure. + +And that was that. By some miracle the thing decided to blow up on my birthday, so my parents saw fit to get me an upgraded Windows machine as a birthday present. I mostly stuck with Windows for the next few years, mostly because it could run more games, but I never really stopped preferring Linux, and I would occasionally attempt switching back over the intervening years until I made the jump for good in 2021 when I upgraded the storage in my third laptop, the second of two slightly dodgy HP units and the same one from [this post](../building_a_normal_server/), and wisely decided that I wouldn't be sticking around to have Windows 11 inflicted on me. + +The Toshiba Chromebook 2 was e-waste from the moment it rolled off the assembly line. It sucked<sup id="n3r"><a href="#n3">3</a></sup>, and I hate everything about it<sup id="n4r"><a href="#n4">4</a></sup>, but I'll never ever forget what owning it did for me. I was already pretty into computers, but dealing with such utterly useless software forced me to get comfortable getting into the weeds to get what I wanted out of it. This thing taught me to program computers, and it taught me to beat computers into submission to impose my will upon them. Obviously it was the first computer I ever owned, but it was also the first computer I learned to make *mine*, and I don't know quite where I'd be today without that. Honestly, probably still working retail, but a lot more of my data would be going to Microsoft. + +--- + +<p id="n1"><a href="#n1r">1</a>. As a matter of fact, you still can! The <a href="https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton">Github repo</a> is seemingly still being maintained, although there's slightly less reason to actually do it nowadays.</p> + +<p id="n2"><a href="#n2r">2</a>. There's still a website at that domain, but it's a Pling site now, so it might as well be dead.</p> + +<p id="n3"><a href="#n3r">3</a>. I would be remiss not to mention that the HDMI output was also completely borked. There was a giant green triangle type structure in the bottom left of the display and I'm pretty sure the picture was shifted about 1/3 the width of the screen to one side. Whether that was caused by heat damage or an unrelated defect will forever remain a mystery. The built-in display was completely fine.</p> + +<p id="n4"><a href="#n4r">4</a>. I'm not kidding about that glue, by the way. By the time it died, the bottom panel was hanging probably a centimeter below the top side of the shell whenever I picked it up. Talk about build quality.</p>
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I've added my thoughts on the changes to the end of this article. + +The company behind Unity, an extremely popular game engine used to make [some games you may have heard of](https://store.steampowered.com/curator/39750107-Games-Made-With-Unity/) (including about a fifth of my Steam library, for reference), has just announced a new fee for developers using their engine. + +In essence, as of next year, developers will owe Unity a fee for every time their game made with the engine is installed after certain retroactive revenue and install base thresholds. There's various different tiers of this, but for the free plan you and I would be using it amounts to $0.20 per install after the first 200,000 installs and $200,000 of revenue. + +Side note - How these installs are counted is left intentionally vague too, so it's unclear whether it's a severe violation of user privacy or vulnerable to abuse by maliciously performing repeated reinstalls of a game, or perhaps both. Plus, this also means that even pirated copies might count towards the total. + +I won't mince words: **this absurd pricing change has the potential to sink a lot of small game development studios**, especially those working on games that are extremely popular or not aggressively monetized. + +For example, Among Us has over 500 million downloads on the Google Play Store alone. Under this pricing scheme, that would cost its developer, Innersloth, $100,000,000 on the free plan, or a paltry $5,000,000 if they're using the if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it Enterprise plan. I don't have access to Innersloth's financial data, but that's probably at least a year or two of pay for all of their employees at the absolute minimum, more if they're on a cheaper plan. I seriously doubt they can afford this. + +That's an extreme example, but I think it gets the point across. If you don't believe me, take it from developers on Twitter (via [u/Sparky2199](https://archive.ph/IQPjW)): + +[](devprotest.png) + +## The obligatory free software soapbox moment + +As angry as I am about this, I do feel kind of vindicated, because here's the thing: something like this was always going to happen. Not because Unity in particular is a *bad* company (although it is), but because it's a *for-profit* company, and especially because it's one with shareholders to please. + +Capitalism demands infinite growth, but there's a finite number of people to sell a game engine to, so at a certain point Unity has no choice but to start trying to squeeze more money out of its existing customer base (or expand the customer base by, say, trying to cater to filmmakers). Though certain internal factors definitely sped up the process of reaching this point, Unity was bound to get desperate enough to try some shit like this eventually. + +And that's the danger here. When you become reliant on something in order to do your work, you're inherently gambling on it being still around and usable until you're done. In the case of proprietary software (and cloud services, but that's a different rant), you're betting on the company not changing the software or the terms of the license on you, or going under, or just deciding the software isn't worth it to maintain anymore. In Unity's case, we're seeing what happens when you place a losing bet. Suddenly the company hates you and you've gotta migrate to something else, and if you can't you're SOL. Sure, an open-source project might die off as its developers lose interest or can't work on it anymore, but then somebody might fork it, or you have the right to maintain it yourself, if you can. Only proprietary software can suddenly decide you're not *allowed* to use it anymore. + +Videogames in particular are hit especially hard by this - they often take years to make, and are often incredibly complex, to the point where porting a game between engines can be harder than making it to begin with, so choosing an engine is a *huge* commitment that not every studio or developer can afford to go back on. Something like this can easily kill a project, both financially and from simple loss of motivation. + +This problem isn't unique to Unity, or to game engines. We've been watching this play out across the industry for as long as there's been an industry, except normally companies boil the frog a lot more slowly and in ways that are a lot more subtle. Google didn't go from world's best search engine to mega-monopolistic adware provider overnight. To extend the metaphor, Unity just tossed a grenade in the pot. + +It's my opinion that all proprietary software will die this way in the end. The structure is fundamentally unsustainable. You can't have infinite growth. At some point all the proprietary software and services that are commomplace nowadays with their ad-supported business models and predatory pricing schemes and suspiciously high marketing budgets will wither and die, having made themselves intolerable to even their most loyal customers, and most of the survivors will be open-source projects. Not as sleek or sexy or well-advertised, as they'll have had less incentive to appeal to new users, but fundamentally sustainable, having had *no* incentive to appeal to shareholders. + +## An attempt at optimism + +In this particular case, I don't think this is gonna stick. Unity's runtime fee is absurd, and I think they know it just as well as all their moderately high-profile customers on Twitter do. Unity has already started to walk back some of the more extreme parts of the initial plan, as you can see on archived versions of the posts: [Blog post (Sep 12)](https://archive.ph/gEckm), [Blog post (Sep 14)](https://archive.ph/gBpXw), [Forum thread (Sep 12)](https://archive.ph/HYTq5), [Forum thread (Sep 14)](https://archive.ph/eByMm). Unity also has some customers that are bigger than them and notoriously litigation-happy, namely Nintendo (with Pokemon BD/SP and Go, plus a couple Mario mobile games) and Disney (also with quite a few mobile and console games). Unity's CEO also sold a bunch of stock in the company in the lead-up to this announcement, which, since the company's stock price dropped *significantly* after the announcement, might actually constitute fraud. You know, from federal crimes! Basically, this initial announcement was probably an attempt to see how much they could get away with, and Unity's probably fucked if they stick to their guns on this. + +On the technical side, if you're a budding game developer, Unity isn't your only option. My top recommendation is [Godot](https://godotengine.org/), a free and open source game engine that's recently taken steps to increase its funding in a way that's actually sane and not cartoon villain behavior. It also supports C# by default, since you probably got used to that with Unity. There's also RPG Maker and Unreal Engine, the latter of which I imagine a lot of studios will be switching to soon. + +Finally, if you've been eyeing a game that uses the Unity engine, you've got until the end of the year to install it without incurring that fee for the developer assuming this change goes through. So I'd check for that. By my understanding you'll have to run it at least once before then, too. + +## Update as of 2023-09-23 + +Good(?) news! Unity's responded to community feedback and it's actually... better than I expected. You can read the full post [here](https://archive.ph/rLi8u), but I'll summarize the changes: + +- No more runtime fee for the free Personal tier +- Revenue cap for the Personal tier doubled and mandatory splash screen removed +- The runtime fee now only applies starting with the next LTS release in 2024 +- The runtime fee is now capped at 2.5% of total revenue, and all relevant data is now self-reported instead of a "proprietary data model" +- Just like, a straight up apology at the beginning of the post + +This is all good. These changes remove all of the most devastating knock-on effects of the original policy, and I think this is actually a *better* deal for free users than before. + +That said, my original point still stands. Unity is still squeezing more money out of its userbase in a way it hadn't previously, and it could pull some shit like this again at any time. Just because it caved this time, doesn't mean there's anything stopping Unity from making more horrible retroactive policy changes in future. Unity has destroyed a lot of the trust it's built with its community - a lot of developers won't trust Unity not to screw them over in the future, and in my opinion they'd be right not to. + +It's my hope that a lot of game developers will take this opportunity to ditch Unity for something better. At the very least, I don't think we'll see many games de-listed like Cult of the Lamb [threatened to do](https://archive.ph/4xyTO), since existing games can just not update their Unity release. A lot of games may still be forced to move engines if they don't want to deal with this, though. For example, support for new consoles, OS versions, etc. probably won't be backported to old Unity versions. Games that continually add new content or aren't finished yet will probably eventually start encountering issues resulting from this. diff --git a/blog/posts/unity_runtime_fee_and_proprietary_software/index.php b/blog/posts/unity_runtime_fee_and_proprietary_software/index.php new file mode 100644 index 0000000..f572f79 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/posts/unity_runtime_fee_and_proprietary_software/index.php @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +<?php include("../post.php");
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