A First Post

I’ve had blogs multiple times in my life, some public, some private. Some dedicated to a subject, some pretty general. Some for multiple years, some for a week and then forgotten about. I currently have one still running about a little travelling I did, I’m kinda moving it from where it runs now into a whole new system.

I am still thinking about what I want to do with the galleries because that requires more thought when trying to use a static site generator that pulls data from a headless CMS. Maybe I’ll just keep thinking about that for a couple more years while it just stays a text and inline-image only blog until I figure it out. Or maybe someone’s talking about some great gallery somewhere and I think “yo that’ll work” and it’s done in no time. Who knows.

I’m on a trip to a more privacy-concious or privacy-centered life. Not related to this is that I’ve been looking through old pictures while moving it from one self hosted cloud storage to another, and I think I’ve been trying to get away from Google since the start of 2017. When racing through images and old screenshots I started noticing less and less Google-related screenshots, I stopped using Google Drive for every bit of storage I needed. I’ve got a 7zip file that’s named “Drive-2017-02-16-final.7z” so I think that’s when I settled on using Nextcloud.

About a year ago I started using LineageOS on a new phone but kept using my old phone for a couple of services, mostly WhatsApp. This meant that I was carrying two seperate mobile devices in my pocket at all times at one point because there was the chance of receiving messages I couldn’t miss on both devices. This in turn led me to be lazy, installed Signal on my old phone again and neglected privacy for a bit, especially since my new workplaces kind of demanded I use some software. Later I would mess up an update of Lineage on the new phone and left it in a drawer for a couple of months.

But now it’s back, it’s updated, it’s running Shelter with two or three apps that I don’t want to have access to all my data and it’s working. I got endlessly frustrated with my Nextcloud setup, it just wasn’t working for big files because of timeouts, so I started using Syncthing. I’ve got a server at home that runs Syncthing and all other devices synchronise to that, my phone doesn’t know my computer exists, they all go through the server. This enabled me to, when I feel like I need it, set up an offsite syncthing server, synchronise all data from the homelab to that one and I can use it as a drop-in replacement or just as an offsite backup. It suits me fine for now, and the data is non-automatically backed up but I’m working on that. Slowly.

Now about the whole blogging thing: this will be a place where I’ll talk about what I’ve just talked about. Being an amateur sysadmin, GNU/Linux enthousiast, homelabber, privacy advocate and other amateur things.

On a weird note: I just ran the header image through an EXIF cleaner and it got rid of almost 1 MB of data. What.

Correction: latest version of the website does not have a header image.