I found out about the Nostr social network a couple months ago. The network is based on public key cryptography. While browsing the feeds, I noticed some people had really nice public keys which contained their username in some form, like Snowden’s npub1sn0wdenkukak0d9dfczzeacvhkrgz92ak56egt7vdgzn8pv2wfqqhrjdv9. My key is still being generated, since my username is quite a mouthful. So I wondered if GPG keys can be generated like this too. And of course, they can.

I like the Gmail app. I like its design, simplicity, its features (or lack thereof). I am a fan of KISS philosophy, so it’s all in line with my thinking. I like the iOS Mail app even more for this. But the EAS implementation in Gmail app on Android is full of bad surprises.

This is a story about how I moved my server between locations 250 kilometers apart. The primary reason for making this move was to perform the initial backup to a new off-site storage location on a faster connection than what I have available at home. The second and better reason was, of course, curiosity. The server in this case is my Thinkpad T430. The setup This is what my setup looks like:

I was hesitant to even set up an XMPP account since even Matrix is barely getting any traction. And I really don’t like unnecessary fragmentation. However, the software from XMPP ecosystem is way more lightweight than Matrix so my first steps were to set up Ejabberd and check out what it’s all about. I know it’s not the most lightweight of XMPP servers, but it seemed to have the most features and docker images available by upstream.

Another in the series of ramblings about self-hosted mail system. About client software.

I love RSS. I used it way before Fediverse even existed. I mention Fediverse because a lot of people call them out on trying to reinvent the wheel in this sense. Following an independent website is nothing new. Of course, like everyone, I try to make RSS even better and more comfortable to use and the core of my aproach is sending full articles to e-mail I know about the existence of self-hosted RSS readers like FreshRSS.

I recently had to travel and use the internet in random locations without the availability of my carrier’s mobile signal. On some public Wi-Fi hotspots, I was unable to send an email.

Sending email is hard. Yes, that’s right. If you don’t own or control your whole IP subnet and have built-up reputation on it, you aren’t reaching anything other than the recipient’s spam folder.

About a year ago I decided to revamp my personal cloud. Main objectives were to make it more manageable and use as much pre-made software suites as possible instead of maintaining my own. This article is about what software I chose, which software it replaced as well as reasons why this was done. Oh and of course, I’ll start with hardware. Hardware and Performance Considerations old solution: Thinkpad X200 + ultrabase

As I was migrating my whole system over to btrfs the other day, I came across my docker volume which was already btrfs and using subvolumes. This was of course intentional, however, I had no idea how to properly move those subvolumes to the new disk. Surprisingly, it was somewhat easy. Btrfs has send-receive functionality which you can use to move data between disks (even do stuff like incremental backups, replication and so on.