Posts
Self-hosting a CalDAV service
One of the common uses of Google’s “free” services is the appointment calendar. Similar services are provided by other vendors, but as part of my effort to free myself from Big Tech, I decided to host a CalDAV service on my own Ubuntu 22.04 server. There are two parts to hosting CalDAV: a server and a web client.
December 30, 2023
Running a Linux Server for Fun and Non-Profit
#Linux#Software#Ubuntu#Git#Xbrowsersync#Vaultwarden#Fossil
For the last couple of months, I’ve gradually been weaning myself from some Big Tech services, and reimplementing these services on my own Linux VPS (virtual private server) on Linode, running Ubuntu Server 22.04.
November 10, 2023
Publishing source code with Cgit
#Linux#Software#Git#Ubuntu#Apache
As part of my continuing work to free myself from Big Tech, I recently moved most of my source code repositories from Gitlab to Cgit on my own server. There’s nothing particularly wrong with services like Gitlab or Github, but they are far more powerful than I need. My source code projects are a one-man show; virtually nobody else is interested in them. So I don’t need all of the fancy collaboration tools offered by the big Git sites.
November 9, 2023
Clonezilla and Windows 7
I manage the computers at our local library, and unfortunately, most of these run Windows – Windows 7, to be specific. This operating system can be terribly slow at times, on our slightly old desktop computers that use hard disks instead of SSDs. When booting, it often takes Windows a minute or two have a fully working desktop, and you have to watch a spinning hourglass during that time. Also, when Windows puts itself to sleep after some idle time, the wake-up process is so slow and disk-intensive that you might as well go to lunch while waiting for it.
November 5, 2023
Implementing the xBrowserSync API
#Linux#Software#Xbrowsersync#Android#Crystal#Apache
For about a year, I’ve used the Brave browser, mostly due to its built-in ad blocking and its bookmark sync feature. I have been using Brave on four different devices (three Linux laptops and one Android phone running GrapheneOS), so the bookmark sync feature is very useful. But this article on the privacy features of numerous browsers is rather scathing about Brave. So I decided to try Ungoogled-Chromium, along with the uBlock Origin and uMatrix extensions.
November 4, 2023
Put Brave Browser Cache in RAM
The Brave browser is constantly writing large amounts of data to its cache, which is a concern when your storage device is an SSD. The solution is to put Brave’s cache on a RAM disk, i.e., a tmpfs device on Linux. Some Linux distros, like Arch, mount /tmp as tmpfs, but Linux Mint 21 does not.
October 10, 2023
Force a Wi-Fi Login Page to Appear
Some public wi-fi networks require you to log in to their network using a browser. This is an annoying feature of hotel wi-fi, in particular. Some browsers, like the Brave browser on Android, detect this situation and redirect you to the login page the first time you try to use the network. But the Brave browser on Linux doesn’t seeem to be able to do this, and won’t bring up the login page. The solution is to to visit the web interface of the network’s gateway router, which will then redirect to the login page.
October 9, 2023
Using Pobox.com with Postfix
As part of my plan to reduce my dependence on Big Tech, I recently made an effort to self-host an email server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This is normally a really terrible idea, for a number of reasons. Receiving email is hard, but can be done with spam filters and other security tools. The much worse problem is related to sending email. As the linked article above says, it’s just too easy for your server to get on blacklists and then be blocked forever.
October 7, 2023
Installing Vaultwarden Without Docker
#Linux#Software#Bitwarden#Vaultwarden#Apache
Update: This post describes how to install Vaultwarden on Ubuntu (or Debian) without using Docker. I now longer use this procedure, which is somewhat complicated and error-prone. Instead, I recommend installing the unofficial vaultwarden and vaultwarden-webvault packages. (I used the xUbuntu 22.04 packages.)
October 6, 2023
Postfix + Maildrop = Failure
I’ve spent most of the last two days struggling to get first chasquid (a minimalist SMTP server) and then postfix (the ubiquitious SMTP server preinstalled on my Ubuntu VPS) to work with maildrop (a mail delivery agent). The reason I was attempting to do this was so that I could have maildrop pass emails to notmuch-insert. I use notmuch as my mail store, and I thought that it would be more efficient to have notmuch-insert process emails as they come in, instead of having notmuch-new process them in a big batch.
October 3, 2023