Freedom. 24 years ago, I figured that there had to be something different that I could customize. I had experimented with BeOS but then I came across Gentoo, and Linux in general. I crushed and burned many times experimenting with Slackware, SuSE (and later OpenSuSE), as well as Mandrake, but Debian became my thing. I did some time with Solus, but I’m a Debian guy. Netboot, put it together as I want, and what not.

Interest groups. Hobbies. Travel. Volunteers. Book clubs. That sort of thing. Cast your net wide enough and you are sure to get someone.

It took me 6 deploys to finally understand all the mechanisms. What I like about self-hosting and the open source mantra in general is that every failure is a lesson with field experience. So skills development and acquisition is fairly easy if you push for it and once you get it, its wash, rinse, repeat.

Self hosting is not always about hosting at home. A private VPS/VDS, co-located server that you own/lease and operate is essentially that. I take self hosting as not turning to big tech for the very same solutions I can spin up myself on a private server.

That being said, self hosting also involves servers at home that run personal services.

My line of work is mostly in business. Getting people to operate their businesses with open source tools on private servers, local, in the country and abroad, as they wish.

So there is a bit of work you need to do, but if you manage your server well, do DMARC, DKIM, SPF etc and then nip it in the bud when you get warnings, its very easy to manage. Its about responsibility. Bad actors exist, but careful operators prevail.

There are very easy steps you can take here. It seems complicated, but there are tools for this and with a VPS/VDS, you can be up and running in under an hour if you are technically inclined. Moving to my own email, is by far, one of the best things I have done in my life.

I just launched a business to help non technical people identify and selfhost their business tools. I faced such problems when I lived in a fascist country and now that I live in a fascist country again, I figured its a good way to go.

Lol. Yeah. Been through that. I find myself wanting to start new subs, then I am reminded of the horror show, and I move on.

Looks like you found a niche and are about to start a new sub.

I believe short term there is an increase, give that a lot of people are braving stuff they can’t afford to fix. But it stabilizes and reduces in the long term cause as society becomes healthy, and with other health initiatives like healthy eating, exercise and preemptive healthcare, it normalizes with a general reduction in staff numbers.

I’m surprises at how SailfishOS has a limited presence. This could be that moment. HarmonyOS is sick. I’ve seen it in action and it is on another league.

This will face legal hurdles, especially in the EU and China. It reminds me of the time Microsoft played shell games with Chrome and Firefox and then lost eventually. That being said, it will kickstart a new mobile OS arms race, not necessarily to beat Android but for choices.

An analytics tool?

Same here. Makes me consider just doing my own thing instead and rolling my own extra backup system. Something to consider.

That aside, I’m surprised at how there is a VPS limitation at both Netcup and OVH. Netcup is selling ARM as the closest alternative. OVH is selling Canada as the closest option. I found it weird.

Had considered Hetzner, not going down that route. If only Scaleway had services in the US. Well, their snapshots are marked as copy on write, so my assumption is that for every write, there is replication somewhere.

Check their website.

https://www.netcup.com/en/server/root-server/rs-1000-g11-iv-12m#rs-1000-g11-iv-12m-nue

I was working on cal.com two days ago. I saw this.

If they lied, they will get what’s coming to them ;)

From Google

A punishment or fate that someone deserves.

I just get the ick is all.

I’ve been planning for two years now on how to successfully put this together.

First thing I realised I would have to learn is tools like Blender, Gimp (which I will likely replace with Krita), etc. cause regardless of how well AI produces, you need to tidy things up.

Then there is story boarding. No amount of AI can replace professionalism. So this is an important skill to have.

Then there are the layouts. All that. I learnt how to use Scribus for layouts and Inkscape is always handy.

My main struggle will be maintaining consistency which has improved consistently over the last two years, and I’ve been reading a ton of comics to learn the sort of views and angles they use.

I can’t allow AI to generate text for me, cause that loses the plot. I might as well just prompt a story up and put it on Amazon and move on. I don’t want to do that. Instead I let it suggest better phrasing, words, basically a better editor.

I also created my own theme and it, very nicely, points out when I lose the plot. I then ask it to point out where my story sucks and it will also point that out. If I run my text through an AI text detector, I get like 1-2% written by AI which I believe any AI language tool would do. It points out where it detects the AI written text and I work on it and remove the text. GPT has a habit of adding its own text and does not stick to the boundaries set.