I have self hosted my email since 2006. I gave up on self hosting outgoing mail in 2021, but I still keep the server up for incoming mail, and still set up throwaway accounts on there.

The hard part of hosting email is getting Google and Microsoft to accept outgoing mail. Tons of businesses that do not have visibly outlook .com or gmail .com addresses are still hosted by those servers.

I had SPF, DKIM, and a static datacenter IP address with no reputation problems. I still couldn’t get through to Microsoft, not even in people’s junk mail directory, until they manually whitelisted my address. Microsoft didn’t allow them to whitelist a whole domain. Google was a little easier, but they added new demands monthly.

In 2025, I can’t get reliable delivery to gmail .com addresses even sending from a hotmail .com address in the outlook .com web interface.

Not sure how much you’re paying for your VPN, but a virtual private server can be had for about $5 per month. You’ll get a real IPv4 address just for you, so you won’t have to use non-standard port numbers. (You can also use the VPS as a self-hosted VPN or proxy.)

$5 per month doesn’t get you much processing power, but it gets you plenty of bandwidth. You could self-host your server on your home computer, and reverse-proxy through your NAT using the VPS.

Cloudflare has IP banned me before for no reason (no proxy, no VPN, residential ISP with no bot traffic). They’ve switched their captcha system a few times, and some years it’s easy, some years it’s impossible.

X11 has effectively already been deprecated for years, seeing little to no development on it. No one should be surprised.

X11 is complete.

Wayland is incomplete, and is missing essential features like accessibility and automation (ydotool will never have half the features xdotool has).

Mozilla, for example, would sign Firefox’s flatpak with a PGP key that they would disclose on their website. You verify the signature using the RSA algorithm (or any other algorithm for digital signatures. There are a bunch.) Or, you could just trust that your connection wasn’t tampered the first time, then you would have the public key, and it would verify each time that the package came from that same person. Currently, you have to trust every time that your connection isn’t tampered.

Major flatpak providers (Flathub at the very least) would include their PGP public key in the flatpak software repo, and operating system vendors would distribute that key in the flatpak infrastructure for their operating system, which itself is signed by the operating system’s key.

Article doesn’t mention my biggest problem with flatpaks, that the packages are not digitally signed. All major Linux distros sign their packages, and flathub should too. I would prefer to see digital signatures from both flathub and the package’s maintainer. I don’t believe flathub has either one currently.

This survey doesn’t distinguish between levels of cloud service provider, so I was a little confused.

Virtual private servers, cloud virtual servers (like AWS), cloud-based software where you provide code or a program and the cloud system runs it on a server of its choosing, and cloud-based systems where someone else provides the software (like Google Docs).

I like git add because then you can do git diff --staged

When I worked on OpenStack for a few years, 80% of the bugs I fixed were type errors that could have been prevented by Python being staticly typed.

Jellyfin depends on proprietary Microsoft .NET, even on Linux.

It’s still better than Plex and Emby, which are fully proprietary, and have no source code. But I will stick with sshfs with kodi, and nginx plus mpv for now.

One time I was getting estimates for server software for an embedded device I had made. In a teleconference, I told one company that our prototype server ran on nginx. They emailed us an estimate saying we had to switch our embedded system to Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, and put the server on Microsoft’s cloud, because “Engine X is not an enterprise web server.”

I took one look at a trans woman, and I was immediately infected by the woke mind virus.

The DNC is holding a meeting at the ritzy $400-a-night resort over the weekend to choose a new party chair, a move that took on urgency after the Democrats took a beating at the ballot box in November. State party chairs Ben Wikler of Wisconsin, Ken Martin of Minnesota, and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley have the most votes so far

Hey, I recognize that name. I sent a letter to Ben Wikler a couple months ago, demanding that the next DNC chair NOT be a neoliberal, and saying that I wouldn’t offer any more support to any neolib candidates. This was based on the assumption that he would be the one representing me for the purpose of choosing the next DNC chair. I never really expected he could be the one selected for it. I hope he’s as progressive as I’ve heard.

Looks like polar coordinates, with theta being the maleness (at 180 degrees) or femaleness (at 0 degrees), and radius being the magnitude.

(edit: That’s actually what it says above the chart, I just missed it.)

C when I cast a char * * to a char * * const: ok

C when I cast a char * * to a char * const *: ok

C when I cast a char * * to a char const * *: WTF

C when I cast a char * * to a char const * const *: ok

You may not like it, but the rules say “any operating system is fine”. I don’t like Windows either, but this post is technically correct.

In the US, healthcare is too expensive to afford out of pocket, so most people get health insurance from their employer, as an additional benefit. This covers the employee, their spouse, and their children up to a certain age.

In this case, it looks like people employed by the military will be prevented from getting full healthcare for their children, if those children are transgender.

Using a VPN (like Tailscale or Netbird) will make setup very easy, but probably a bit slower, because they probably connect through the VPN service’s infrastructure.

My recommended approach would be to use a directly connected VPN, like OpenVPN, that just has two nodes on it – your VPS, and your home server. This will bypass the potentially slow infrastructure of a commercial VPN service. Then, use iptables rules to have the VPS forward the relevant connections (TCP port 80/443 for the web apps, TCP/UDP port 25565 for Minecraft, etc.) to the home server’s OpenVPN IP address.

My second recommended approach would be to use a program like openbsd-inetd on your VPS to forward all relevant connections to your real IP address. Then, open those ports on your home connection, but only for the VPS’s IP address. If some random person tries to portscan you, they will see closed ports.