I wish there was something that just did file sync.

I know there’s syncthing but that’s not ideal for large repositories with many users and many files.

PHP apps always feel old.

See, IDK anything about data and power and cables but I dislike the vibe when I dock my laptop with that itty bitty USB-C connector that does power and 2x monitors and networking and peripherals.

I did buy the bonkers expensive proper cable from lenovo, and it does generally just work, but maybe once every few weeks I have to unplug & re-plug.

More power and more data through the same cable just seems daft.

the GPMI cable comes in two flavors — a Type-B that seems to have a proprietary connector and a Type-C that is compatible with the USB-C standard

I actually copied this from the article to come here to the comments and have a whinge about all the different USB-C standards, and here you are explaining the reason why.

This is what I do. Changing the port to a higher number will prevent almost all bots.

I understand that obscurity is not security but not getting probed is nice.

Also ssh keys are a must.

I do log in as root though.

However, I block all IPs other than mine from connecting to this port in my host’s firewall. I only need to log in from home, or my office, and in a crisis I can just log in to OVH and add whitelist my IP.

Yeah but commonwealth has connotations that don’t apply.

Nah we just need a fancy team name for the not-absolute-fuck-head countries.

I mean EU is Europe and I fucking love you guys but down here in Australia we can’t just up and move the continent to Europe.

I don’t think the name should be dependent on membership like BRICS or whatever because you don’t want to have to rebrand when you kick someone out or let someone in.

I think it should include a word like collaborative because honestly, that’s what it’s about - we’re better off working together.

It’s also important to choose a name with a catchy acronym that isn’t already taken.

Maybe Collaborative Union of Nice Terran States.

Even if you’re not “out of work”, your work becomes more chaotic and less fulfilling in the name of productivity.

When I started 20 years ago, you could round out a long day with a few hours of mindless data entry or whatever. Not anymore.

A few years ago I could talk to people or maybe even write a nice email communicating a complex topic. Now chatGPT writes the email and I check it.

It’s just shit honestly. I’d rather weave baskets and die at 40 years old of a tooth infection than spend an additional 30 years wallowing in self loathing and despair.

I went looking for something official but couldn’t find it.

I feel like most commenters here haven’t understood what you’re proposing.

I’ve thought about doing this, I’ve seen other commenters say they’re doing it. It’s not a terrible idea. I haven’t done it myself because … it’s just not a priority and I’m not sure it ever will be. Anyway …

If you’re willing to set up and self host your own email stack like mail-in-a-box or whatever, then configuring a separate outbound SMTP server is fairly trivial in comparisson.

If you already had your own stack set up to be self hosted you would ordinarily be using the SMTP server there-with to send emails.

Firstly configure your client to use whatever other SMTP server you have access to. I think it’s possible to use mailgun or one of those API transactional senders. You could get a cheap plan with mxroute or any other email host and just use the SMTP server.

Suppose your client is Thunderbird and you set up your account like smtp.mxroute.com for outbound and imap.myserver.com for email storage. When you send an email tbird transmits it through mxroute and then stores it on your imap server at myserver.com in your sent folder.

The potentially complex part is configuring spf & DKIM records on your domain.

SPF

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to explain this clearly but… suppose a recipient’s spam service receives an email purportedly from marauding_giberish@myserver.com but transmitted by smtp.mxroute.com. That spam service will look up the DNS records for myserver.com and inspect the records for the spf record. This record pretty much lists which servers are authorised to transmit email from addresses ending in myserver.com. So with a more typical set up an spf record might be:

“v=spf1 include:myserver.com -all”

This would indicate that only the smtp server at myserver.com can transmit email from your domain.

You would edit that to include the mxroute smtp server like this:

“v=spf1 include:mxroute.com include:myserver.com -all”

This way, recipients can confirm that the owner of myserver.com domain has formally designated mxroute as an authorised recipient.

DKIM

Your SMTP server will have a public & private key pair which it uses to sign outbound messages. Recipients can use the public key to confirm the signature and thereby confirm that the message has not been altered in flight.

Whatever SMTP server you use will tell you the public key and instruct you to add that to the DNS records of your custom domain.

That’s the one that looks like this:

“v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIIBIj [ … it’s a long key … ] op3Nbzgv35kzrPQme+uhtVcJP”

Once this is in place recipients of your emails can query the DNS for myserver.com and find this public key, and use it to confirm that the signature on the email they received is authentic.

In countries where banning parties is a thing, such parties usually have another on the shelf ready to go.

It’s usually the party leader that gets banned and the party can’t re-register or something.

So when the leader gives their thanks goodbye speech they usually mention the new party.

I don’t use an “alias provider”.

I just don’t use aliases for companies I need to send emails to. There are very few.

Sorry to be that guy but replicating / syncing isn’t really backing up.

You need snap shots or versioning.

It looks like there’s several distinct components to gpodder which confuse things.

Firstly gpodder seems to be a desktop podcast client.

Secondly there’s the sync service / protocol. Gpodder.net provides this for free but according to antennapod doesn’t have adequate resources and causes errors in your client (which I can confirm). There are other containers available which are not from the gpodder team but emulate the protocol.

Finally there’s the recommendation / discovery service apparently provided by gpodder.net. I haven’t been able to get this to work because my client hasn’t been able to sync yet, despite 12 hours of trying.

In my own case, I already have a client (antennapod) and I’m not really interested in sync because I only use the one device. The recommendation / discovery service would’ve been cool but it seems broken for the moment.

Fuck this expansionist greed.

Hah. It was IBM that was running the shitshow in Queensland too.

Yeah, as you’ve said it’s not the complexity that’s the problem, it’s that dunning Kruger style overconfidence that you’re smarter than everyone else and can manage data better than these silly accountants.

It’s not a case of “seeing the code isn’t perfect” but rather, not understanding the myriad problems the code is solving or mitigating.

I’m reminded of this shitshow:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation

Queensland is a state of about 3m people in Australia. Their health service employs about 100k people. They ended up spending about 900m USD to develop their payroll software and fix the fuck ups it caused.

I’m an accountant by trade, there’s a classic “techbro does accounting” style of development we see a lot. Like if you hadn’t spent a career learning how complex accounting can be, it would be easy to look at a payroll system and conclude “it’s just a database with some rules”.

Oh wow. I’d seen the gpodder thing in antennapod subscriptions but never realised it was a kind of discovery / recommendation service.

I wonder if the recommendation stuff works with a self hosted instance?

According to Les Échos, the letter concluded: “If you do not agree to sign this document, we would be grateful if you could kindly provide us with detailed reasons, which we will forward to our legal department.”

God this is so childish. This just isn’t how grown ups go about disagreeing about things.