I am quite strict about which messages make it to a push notification on my phone. I don't like to receive notifications unless they are important or urgent. The same thing happens with emails—indeed, it's one of the few applications which have notifications enabled. However, I also don't want to regularly check different places for updates. Because of this, most of the updates I receive are…
During this past year, I have been coming up with a variety of services that I want to host from home. The problem was that I didn't have a computer to host them on, so I decided to buy one before my Christmas vacation, when I would have time to tinker with it. Because of the gifting tradition, I was asked if there was anything that I wanted, so I ended up getting it for Christmas instead. In case…
I have lately been reading many pages on Gemini . There has been a lot of interest around it on the blogs/microblogs I follow, which has lead to me check it out as well. The project is very interesting, and if you have ever been interested in how much bandwidth the current web wastes, the lack of privacy there is when we navigate it, the constant security issues that come up with browsers, etc., I…
Most people make use of free and open source software—or services based on it—that is made available to the public for free. And I mean free, not services that you pay with your data, but those that are truly free of cost. Projects that rely on donations, grants, and the resources of the maintainers (and most of the time it's only the latter). If you are a heavy user of FOSS, you are probably…
Back in March, at the start of the lockdown, I had a lot of free time. I also had a lot of ideas for personal projects and functionalities for my server, so I started coding a lot. I realized that since I was spending a lot of time on my computer, without any time constraints, I could use the opportunity to try things I was always "too busy" to try. Things that I knew would make me more efficient…
Since the start of this website (its first anniversary was a couple of weeks ago!) until recently, I have been using the static site generator Hugo . Static site generators are very useful when building relatively complex static websites, and Hugo has served me well. I have also used Lektor and Jekyll before for other projects, but for a site with a blog, I like Hugo the most. However, with time,…
Meet DAVup ! It is a simple script that will back up any contacts, calendars and to-do lists synchronized through CardDAV or CalDAV. I have always synchronized my contacts and calendars with online services to avoid losing them if something happened to my phone and to have them synchronized with my computer. For some time, I have been going a step further with my backups and have tried to keep a…
I use stagit to show the public repositories of my Git server on the web. I chose stagit because it is a very simple and lightweight tool, which makes tinkering with the source code very straightforward (which I have been doing a bit lately) and because the resulting website is static: easy to set up, faster, and there aren't any application-specific issues (there is no application). Static sites…
Oh no! Another vim post! Well... yes. I have seen a lot of people criticizing vim before even trying it, so I am going to try and explain my history with it and what I like about it. If you aren't aware, vim is a text editor that is normally used from the command line (and, normally, the mouse doesn't work in it or is deactivated). Getting into vim When I first saw people that got around a…
Running a personal Git server is something that has been on my mind for quite a long time. One of the most popular solutions I have seen around is Gitea . A couple of months ago, when trying out different things, I decided to run Gitea locally to see how easy it would be to implement on my server. It turns out pretty easy, especially if you are using Docker. However, my server doesn't run Docker…
I have been a user of NetGuard for quite some time. It is a great Android app that lets you control which apps get Internet access and which don't. The paid version will allow you to block connection on a per-domain basis (for each app), as well as let you see all the domains an app connects to (which are normally a lot!). Furthermore, you will be able to block domains for the whole phone. This is…
My first experience with GNU/Linux was with KDE. It is the desktop environment used on my college computers, and it was more or less the only experience I had with the GNU/Linux operative system, so it was the desktop environment I installed at home (at that point I don't think I knew the difference between a distribution and a desktop environment). After some time, I got comfortable with the new…
Web feeds are data formats used to provide users with updates through web syndication. Websites can use web feeds to post their content in a format that allows users to easily check for updates regularly. Examples of web feeds are Atom , RSS or JSON Feed . The most popular is RSS, you have probably heard of it. Until a year ago, RSS to me was an old technology that some people used to get their…
When talking about violations of our privacy, I've found that most people don't care because it is a thing that happens "far away" ( who in that huge enterprise cares about me, my browsing habits, etc.? ). I can see where those people are coming from, it looks as if you are anonymous because there are just so many people whose data is collected. Let's bring it closer: if you are connected to your…
Following up with the last post , I decided to make my website even faster (which probably doesn't make a difference anymore). The logo My pages (HTML only) were about 21KB (without compression), but 11KB of those consisted of an SVG that appeared in all of them: the logo. The logo wasn't requested from a different static file because I needed to modify it using CSS (so that colors would change…