mckinley

twtxt.net

A guy on the internet. https://mckinley.cc/

Recent twts from mckinley
In-reply-to » @bender Standard twtxt is a microblog in its purest form. A blog, but smaller. It's just a list of posts to read, and that's an echochamber in the same way my regular blog is an echochamber. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

@bender@twtxt.net Makes sense. We definitely need the ability to mute feeds from the Discover feed.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » QOTD: How do you back up your files?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I remember your solution. It’s very simple, I like it.

Yes, my backup target is my home server. I have a hard drive dedicated to Restic repositories. It’s still not a real backup as I don’t have anything offsite but it’s better than my previous solution. I had two very old hard drives I kept plugged in to my desktop PC and I would (on very rare occasion) plug in another hard drive and copy all the files over to it. Luckily, I’ve never suffered any significant data loss and I would rather not start now. Once I have automated backups on each of my machines, the next project is getting those backups offsite.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » @bendwr and I discussing something along the lines of: Media I.e: How to deal with or reduce noise from legacy feeds.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think one-way feeds are okay and we shouldn’t discourage them so strongly. On the other hand, I think it’s the duty of a poderator to filter out feeds that are just noise from the Discover feed. I definitely consider a truckload of one-way posts mostly in another language to be noise. Did you get rid of Gopher Chat too? I’d call that noise, for sure.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » @prologic Your position doesn't make any sense: it's closing down and arbitrarily limiting the use of the Twtxt protocol. One more reason not to use https://twtxt.net/

@bender@twtxt.net Standard twtxt is a microblog in its purest form. A blog, but smaller. It’s just a list of posts to read, and that’s an echochamber in the same way my regular blog is an echochamber. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

@prologic@twtxt.net I support the delisting of ciberlandia.pt in the Discover feed due to the sheer volume of posts from there and the fact that most of them are in Portuguese with this being a predominantly English-language pod.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » @bendwr and I discussing something along the lines of: Media I.e: How to deal with or reduce noise from legacy feeds.

@prologic@twtxt.net Why do we need to avoid posting to the void? That’s pretty much what twtxt was made for. I don’t like the “Legacy feed” terminology, either. I support the delisting of ciberlandia.pt but I think this change is heading in a bad direction.

I like @sorenpeter@darch.dk ’s suggestion. It gives the users the information and lets them make their own decision instead of putting a big scary warning in their face. That’s what Microsoft does, and we shouldn’t be Microsoft.

⤋ Read More

QOTD: How do you back up your files?

I asked this one almost a year ago and I started using Restic shortly after that. When I started, I was only backing up my home folder to the repository over NFS. Now, I’m backing up the entire root filesystem to a repository using the REST backend so I can run Restic as root without breaking the permissions.

I’m working on automating it now and I’m trying to come up with something using pinentry but my proof-of-concept is getting pretty obtuse. It will be spread out in a shell script, of course, but still.

systemd-inhibit --what=handle-lid-switch restic --password-command='su -c "printf '"'"'GETPIN\n\'"'"' | WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 pinentry-qt5 | grep ^D | sed '"'"'s/^D //'"'"'" mckinley' --repository-file /root/restic-repo backup --exclude-file /root/restic-excludes --exclude-caches --one-file-system /

I’m curious to see how everyone’s backup solutions have changed since last year.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » Bitwarden is truly excellent. Highly recommend

I use KeePassXC because I really only use one device. I imagine it would be challenging to rsync the database around if I needed my passwords on more machines. It’s probably fine if you’re deliberate enough, but I don’t think it would take long before I’d lose a password by editing an outdated version of the repository and overwriting the main copy.

I like the simple architecture of Pass, and it would indeed lend itself well to a Git repository, but I don’t like that service names are visible on the filesystem. pass-tomb might mitigate this somewhat but it seems messy and I don’t know if it would work with Git without compromising the security of the tomb.

What’s so good about Bitwarden? Everyone seems to love it. I like that it can be self-hosted. I certainly wouldn’t want a third party in control of my password database.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » @mckinley That may be true. I tried some "decentralized exchanges" but I have issue with "trust" so this is proving to be quite hard to figure out how to support accepting XMR as a "payment method" 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net I use LocalMonero (onion) to buy Monero with cash sent by mail. You can sell on there if you want to convert back to fiat. People also like Bisq, which is peer-to-peer software for buying and selling cryptocurrency.

To accept Monero, all you need is a wallet program. I recommend Feather Wallet. Create your wallet in there, then you’ll copy the wallet files into monero-wallet-rpc for use with MoneroPay, see docker-compose.yaml.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » QOTD: Hello Linux users, what do you use to monitor your network traffic?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s very useful. I always start my music player in a tmux session so I can SSH in, attach it, and control the music from another computer. It’s also handy for letting long-running tasks on a remote machine continue in the background even if the SSH connection is broken.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » @prologic I might have mentioned this already but you might want to look into MoneroPay for payment processing when you get to that point with cas.run. It's a completely self-hosted backend service for receiving and tracking Monero payments and it's written in Go.

@prologic@twtxt.net Monero has stayed a little more stable than Bitcoin but it’s still a cryptocurrency and it’s still going to fluctuate quite a bit. It also uses proof-of-work algorithm so it still consumes quite a bit of electricity. I think the value of being able to send any amount of money, any time of the day, to anyone on the planet in 20 minutes (appears in 2 minutes, spendable in 20) completely privately with near-zero transaction fees exceeds the drawbacks.

Unfortunately, the characteristics that make it useful as a global currency for day-to-day transactions also make it useful for people doing illicit things. Many exchanges, fearing regulatory action, won’t accept Monero for the same reason they won’t accept Bitcoin from a mixer.

Monero shouldn’t be banned just because people use it for bad things. It’s just a tool and it can be used for good or evil. It’s the same reason countries use when they ban or restrict Tor usage.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » Does this sound reasonable for running small workloads? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net That sounds great. The only other container-level hosting service I’ve heard of is PikaPods which seems much more managed than cas.run would be. It has customizable tier-based pricing and the minimum specs are ¼ of a CPU core, 256 MB of memory, and “about 100 MB” of storage for $1/mo which seems awfully steep compared to a low-cost VPS. I don’t know if PikaPods offers an IPv4 reverse proxy or not.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » @prologic I might have mentioned this already but you might want to look into MoneroPay for payment processing when you get to that point with cas.run. It's a completely self-hosted backend service for receiving and tracking Monero payments and it's written in Go.

Monero uses cryptography to make transactions anonymous and the coins completely fungible. With most cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, the transactions associated with an address are public and you can trace those coins all the way back to their origin. This means that not all coins are the same. For example, some exchanges won’t accept Bitcoin that comes from a mixer because they assume you’re doing something untoward.

With Monero, it’s not possible to trace any transactions with just an address. People can’t see what you’re spending your money on or where your coins came from. Transaction fees using Monero are also very small. It’s less than the equivalent of 1 cent in USD.

Minuscule transaction fees and anonymity make it the best choice in my opinion for buying goods and services online. Monero is much more like “digital cash” than Bitcoin, which I think is better described as “digital gold”.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » QOTD: Hello Linux users, what do you use to monitor your network traffic?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You could always keep it running in a detached tmux session and attach it when you see the spike. Processes that were recently using the netwotk stay in the list for 10 or 15 seconds after they’re finished so you don’t have to catch it in the act.

⤋ Read More
In-reply-to » Does this sound reasonable for running small workloads? 🤔

You could get better value for money with a super cheap VPS without IPv4 connectivity but it wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t need the extra resources as a VPS wouldn’t be practical with such low specs. It would also require significantly more effort on the part of the operator.

I would understand paying a small premium for using the lowest-cost tier, convenience, and especially if you operated a reverse proxy with IPv4 connectivity.

⤋ Read More