I've really had enough internet for today. Maybe even for the whole week.

I played around with game scripts (in C-like syntax) and even wrote my own (well, halfway) before learning some Java at school. Had a bad internship and decided to waste a few years by studying engineering, where I failed everything but programming. Before getting kicked out I exmatriculated myself then I kinda came to the conclusion of "How about doing something that seems quite natural to me?".

no VPN
ping 1.1.1.1 => 22ms

with VPN
....
....
timeout

!dev (kinda)

Warning: Might contain (be) stupid rambling.

So I got my new toy and want to play around with it. Just in case I have to return it I first want to make a full disk backup, so I try to boot clonezilla. I press the power button and mash F2, F8, F9 - and it boots straight into the windows setup. Nope, not what I wanted. Try again. And again. Eventually I look it up and apparently I have to hammer the ESC key to get where I want to. Alright, now it works. Boot from USB. Failed. Try again. Failed. Check the BIOS, disable secure boot, reboot. I need to type 4 digits to confirm disabling secure boot. Alright. Reboot, try again, failed. Secure boot is on again. Wtf? After some more infuriating tries I see that NumLock is disabled. AAAARGH. BIOS: Enable NumLock on boot, disable secure boot, enable legacy boot. Input the 4 digits - works! Try to boot from USB: Failed! Grab another USB stick, did the clonezilla image, try again: Finally! It! Works!

Format disk, install Qubes OS. Success!

I will soon move to Belgium for a few months due to my wife's job and I will go back to Germany once in a while for a few weeks. Of course I'll need a computer and I can't take my tower back and forth all the time, thus I'll need something more mobile. Since most notebooks <1000€ are shit and I'll also need at least two external monitors, I went for a small (USFF) PC instead; for about 350€ I got a HP ProDesk 400 G5 with a i5-9500T, 8 GB RAM (to be upgraded), 256 GB NVME (also to be upgraded), B360 chipset. I would have liked a Ryzen, but then I could only get the predecessor with a 2400GE...

Hopefully Linux (Qubes OS in particular) will work fine.

Which privacy-respecting email provider can you recommend? It seems that the following three are the best options:

- tutanota (0€ / 12€)
- posteo (12€)
- mailbox.org (12€)

Do you have any experience with them?
What do you think about a hosted email service with your own domain?

Have you considered that we might just have to stay at home because the batteries of the surveillance pigeons have to be changed? 🧐

I just got sent an email after registering an account at a webshop which contained my username and password.. *sigh*

»The European Commission has revealed it is considering a ban on the use of facial recognition in public areas for up to five years.

Regulators want time to work out how to prevent the technology being abused.«

https://bbc.com/news/...

RAM buying advice needed!

I wanna upgrade from my measly 8GB to 32GB and I'm a bit lost at which RAM to buy. Just the cheapest or is there more to consider? Some cheap options are (due to an offer):
(per 16GB module)
57,99€ DDR4-3200 CL16 Ballistix Sport LT
56,99€ DDR4-3000 CL15 Corsair Vengeance LPX
52,99€ DDR4-3000 CL15 Ballistix Sport LT
46,99€ DDR4-3000 CL16 G.SKILL Aegis
45,99€ DDR4-2400 CL16 Ballistix Sport LT
43,99€ DDR4-2400 CL15 G.SKILL Aegis
(for the latter three I'd need to buy something else to get over 50€)

My hardware can only run at 2400 MHz (MS-7A74 + i5-7500), but the price difference is quite low and I'd be prepared for a (not yet planned) upgrade.

While planning my (personal) server I just seem to pile up more and more things to do/consider. Basically, for now I just want to have rclone, nextcloud and jellyfin, plus some usenet stuff later on. But I want to have the whole installation and configuration automated as far as possible, since I'll at first it will run in a test environment and needs to be migrated to another server at a point, possibly even another OS. So I suppose that means docker, docker-compose and Chef (any better options?). I want SSL: Traefik. User management / auth? RADIUS, LDAP. SSO? keycloak. I also need to deal with virtual hosts. And probably much more..

Since I just have basic Linux knowledge and have no real experience with any of the other technologies, I feel a bit lost. I just got to the abovementioned software due to some ddg research. I don't mind digging deep, I want to learn (which is half the reason for this project), but it's not easy to the the best way to set this up.

I finally managed to get my Wireguard setup to work in both ways! Beforehand I could ping from A to B, but not the other way around.

A network 10.1.0.0/16
B network 10.2.0.0/16
(both actually use multiple /24 subnets, but I reserve a /16 for each site for the sake of simplicity)

Lots of fiddling later this is my configuration:
A interface 10.1.199.1/32
A allowedIPs 10.2.0.0/16
B interface 10.2.199.1/32
B allowed IPs 10.1.0.0/16

ping from 10.1.1.1 to 10.2.1.1 => 172ms
ping from 10.2.1.1 to 10.1.1.1 => 172ms

it works, yay! now to add more sites...

I only have least favorite APIs

Does anyone have experience with Google Drive (GSuite) and rclone? I want to use it as a storage for jellyfin (emby fork) and Nextcloud, with the first being only saved there and the latter either as or with a backup.

I'm considering to build a powerful, small/semi-portable mini-ITX PC. Just small box you can easily travel with, kinda like a laptop but a lot cheaper and without a screen, keyboard and battery - I can't really work on laptops anyway (ergonomics!). Stuffed with something like a 4400G when Renoir (mainstream Zen2) comes out, so lots of processing power. Add 32GB+ RAM and one or two SSDs.

I'd say the reason is that I might work from abroad (remotely) next year, but honestly, it just gives me an excuse to break my piggy bank!

What do you think?

I have set up a VM on Azure as a small build server - nothing fancy yet, just being able to manually build LineageOS. I only spin it up when I need it, so when I do, I can assign quite a beefy machine and that's all fine. But: It needs a lot of hard drive space and the additional data disk needs to be paid 24/7, whether the VM is up or not. As such, it is eating up my (free MSDN) credits. I am not too well versed with Azure yet, so maybe there is a better way.

Does anybody know a cheap way to get a large-ish SSD on Azure? Maybe with ephemeral OS disks, potentially running on another (small) VM in the same network and sharing it?

Motherfuckin fuckidy duck fuck!

I am so done with Azure for today!

After I ran out of space on a secondary drive I shut the VM down and increased said drive and now after starting it (which takes way too long already) I can't ssh into it: "Connection refused". Diagnostics say "everything is fine bruh" and now I'm stuck with an inaccessible VM which I already spent half the night on configuring and downloading 60gb of sources.. aaargh!

I am working on partitioning my life and getting my tech stuff and online life organized. Partially fun, partially dread. Still one of the better things I'm dealing with right now.

Tech stuff mainly includes desktop PC (Qubes OS), network (to be driven by openwrt) and smartphone (already running Lineage OS, but I want to build my own LOS). This is the fun part. I want to add a NAS, but I'm too cheap for a proper one (at least for my >20TB media).

Furthermore offline stuff: Remove clutter, get analog documents properly organized (with a sustainable system) and possibly digitalized. I already have maybe half of the things I own in boxes each with a specific purpose (e.g. audio cables, network cables and game controllers each have their own box). Can be tiresome, but it's easy to see a progress and that makes it quite okay.

Online life: That's a big one. A large chunk is email and the hundreds of website accounts. I have them in a keepass file, but all running under the same address. Unfortunately I need to have a Facebook account for some purposes, but I'd like to start over with a new one. Not so easy when you have to transfer group admin privileges though, when I tried the last time I tripped some system and the new account was banned. Annoying.

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)

After lots of fuckery with UEFI, I finally managed to install (and boot into!) Qubes OS - in legacy (MBR), but whatever. I am so excited!

wk177 (least successful project)

A maps behemoth created by a single dev (↑). It took "only" 2 years to get a halfway proper version out. Said dev could have saved half of the time if he (well, his employer) bought the control from a company that has all their devs working on just that (.NET controls) and thus the dev wouldn't have had to reinvent the wheel with the very basic control of the map service provider.

wk172 (worst disturbance while working)

Pain. I haven't really gotten anything done this year, at least not how I would want it. The future is not looking very bright either as far as I can see.

A pm asked about a feature I was developing and I went on to show them what I got so far. Feature-wise almost finished, but it still needed to be polished and thoroughly tested, as such it wasn't merged yet. Weeks later - I couldn't finish it yet for unrelated reasons - there was great confusion about why the feature is not there as it had been billed to the customer already. So I gotta pull some sunshine out of my ass and bring it to the last release branch..

I have not been able to work for quite some time already due to a chronic condition getting worse. Even when I have been at work I wouldn't get anything done due to chronic pain (a literal pain in the ass), so this year hasn't been very fun so far. I cannot sit nor stand for extended periods of time. I just want to be able to work again! :C

rant !dev

The other day I signed up for a 12 months gym membership. Things have gone wrong.

First, they managed to trick me into signing up at all because in the shitty handwriting I have mistaken a 9 for a 1, so the actual price was a bit higher than I thought it was (+15%).
Second, a day after signing up I get a medical diagnosis with unclear prognosis. I write them a nice letter with an added note from the Dr, explaining that I will not be able to go to the gym for an unforeseen time and asking to nullify the contract. Of course they respond me with an email saying "we need details about the illness, the one you sent us is not enough" or in short "fuck you, you're trapped".

I hate gyms (the business side). They have no ethics whatsoever.

Now I feel just as angry at myself for not double checking the price on the contract and for signing up at all.

Long time stalker, but I finally signed up! Maybe I have dragged it out to not get too addicted, but it seems like that plan has failed.. ;)

Now for the question:
Can anyone recommend a VPN provider (well, functionally proxy) that works in (South) China these days? Because of the holidays the CCP is blocking everything they can to ensure that.. well let's not get political.

Priorities: Reliability > Privacy > Cost (trial or guarantee would be great though)

Thanks :)