Looking for ways to simplify my setup, I recently switched the DNS zones for my domains from AWS Route53 to Gandi LiveDNS . I already have my domains registered at Gandi and use a VPS of another provider, so I can reduce my dependence on Amazon and save a small amount of money. I use two kinds of automation working on DNS records: my zones are defined and managed via OpenTofu, and my servers use…
A lot of advice that I have seen on making presentations with slides recommends not putting enough text on the slide to be useful without the presenter’s speech, ideally just a few words or a picture per slide, with at most around a dozen slides. Having listened to many presentations of various styles, I disagree with that advice. Slides are mostly used for presentations that are now shared in…
I found a tool extending Docker with IPv6 NAT and an issue about it being replaced by a builtin Docker functionality and I thought that if Docker natively (but experimentally) supports IPv6 then it will be easy to configure, so I chose to enable that for my Mastodon instance. It took slightly more work than I expected. Unlike much more complex earlier guides that I have seen, this approach uses…
I used a Cubieboard as a personal server until October, running Kanboard , tt-rss and some other Web apps there. It allowed me to keep more of my data at home and practice some more system administration. Why Cubieboard Initially I wanted a computer that would work during the night in my bedroom. This required a fanless design and therefore a low power usage. (Now I have a separate room for the…
There are licenses known for excessive attribution requirements: in a single project the old four-clause BSD license required including 75 different texts in all advertising materials . The license text itself can be long ( GNU FDL 1.3 takes more than 3 500 words, the Web browser that I use would spend nine A4 pages to print it): imagine an award pin with an FDL-licensed image or several pages…
On the download page of PlaneShift I see big letters ‘Fully Free Cross-Platform MMORPG’ and ‘Open Source Development!’. They provide the source code of their client, while writing how this helps user’s freedom and security. (I prefer using clearer terms like free software and copyleft for the exact things that they praise. While I played PlaneShift many years ago, I do not have any opinion on it…
One of the nonfree programs that make it hard for many people to use completely free software operating systems is Adobe Flash. There are several free software projects aiming to replace the Flash interpreter, one of them used to be an FSF high priority project . I don’t believe that developing such programs will significantly help people stop using nonfree software. (While hardware compatibility…
Big email providers use very complex spam filtering methods. Solutions used by Google require distributed real-time processing, access to to plain text of all messages . Their work is closely followed by spammers in an arms race, while it’s not usable for small servers and both sides benefit from reducing user’s privacy. In this article I describe how spam filtering works on my personal server: a…
Free software has less antifeatures than proprietary software and users can remove them. While a well-known distro vendor includes spyware , such bugs usually get fixed. Despite these, some well-known free programs include antifeatures restricting uses or modification of data that these programs should access or edit. These antifeatures are called DRM which is ‘digital restrictions management’. It…
Most software cannot be edited without a source, making source availability necessary for software freedom . Free GNU/Linux distributions have an explicit requirement to provide sources of included software. Despite this, they include works without source. I do believe this is practically acceptable, while it restricts potential uses of the software and limits our ability to reason about software…