Voters in Missouri, Arizona, New York, Colorado, Nevada, Nebraska and Montana voted to enshrine protections in their states for women to decide their own healthcare

Sarah McBride, D-Delaware, is the first openly transgender person elected to Congress.

Colorado repealed its 2006 same-sex marriage ban. California repealed its 2008 law that banned same-sex marriage.

In (at least) Kansas, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, Washington, Illinois, Montana and Texas (!), the people voted to send out LGBT people to Congress.

Dozens of LGBT folks won their races in state-level contests across the country

In every state in the union, millions of people voted for hope and progress and forward momentum. They might not have been the majority of those voting in every case, but they came out to say it.

We are here. We are queer. We are stronger together.

Oh, sure, when you do it you win the Pulitzer Prize, but when I say the grapes are angry, they call me “the crazy farmer running around screaming about the emotional lives of plants.”

The inverse of “this meeting could have been an email” isn’t exactly “people keep sending emails about the meeting replying to the email that contains all the information they’re seeking” but it feels related, nonetheless

Hot take: Your build folder should not be completely excluded from your source control. There are very few good reasons why npm run build should run on production.

iOS updates’ 5+-year streak of the keyboard getting even worse at guessing what I’m trying to say (and completely divorcing suggestions from context) continues unbroken 💩 👑

The singularity is the victim of bad press. Instead of an omniscient superintelligence, it’s more of a “human centipede” of AI-generated content.

I remain not completely anti-AI, just against its predominant usage of “producing content that otherwise no one would bother to pay for or take the time to create on their own.”

If a person looks at all the art and tries to make their own copies and pass them off as art, we call them a forger. If a computer looks at all the art and tries to make its own copies and pass them off as art, we call that “AI” and clock its worth at north of $150 billion.

I understand golf lingo. I understand businesses often give money to charities with golf events because businesscritters like the work-sponsored opportunity to play golf.

But I still don’t know that I would have touted on social media that I “sponsored a hole”

I never thought about it as a kid, but the stores featured in movies date them just as much (if not more) than fashion, haircuts, cars, etc. Meatballs starts with the kids in a Kmart parking lot, which, outside of Australia? Might as well stop by a Woolworth’s or a Ben Franklin.

In my experience, when a doddering, elderly, clearly overwhelmed candidate flounders at a debate, he stops running for president.

If AI-written stories were any good, they’d put them on beats they perceive people care about. Instead, they dump it on topics the suits perceive as lower interest and low-impact, like women’s sports.

I don’t know that we as a society are prepared for celebrity deaths at the rate they’ll soon come. The explosion of pop culture in the 80s/90s (literally cable TV at least doubled the number of people we consider “famous”) + the boomer cohort aging could mean multiple “names” a week.

Why don’t we have a JS frontend framework that focuses on what devs want, not what Google or Facebook think are important, funded indefinitely with $30 million of a random unicorn’s windfall?

Tech has created more billionaires and centi-millionaires than ever existed. They all spend their money on sports teams, yachts … but never drop a couple million on open source, even the projects they relied on! At best, it’s corporate money.

Like many, I get annoyed by subscription pricing that doesn’t accurately reflect my needs. I don’t want to spend $5 a month for a color picker app. I don’t really want to spend $4/month on ControlD for ad-blocking and custom internal DNS hosting, and NextDNS is worth $20/year until I hit the five or six times a month it’s completely unresponsive and kills all my internet connectivity.

(I recognize I departed from the mainstream on the specifics there, but my point is still valid.)

I’ve self-hosted this blog and several other websites for more than a decade now; not only is it a way to keep up my Linux/sysadmin chops, it’s also freeing on a personal level to know I have control and important to me on a philosophical level to not be dependent on corporations where possible, as I’ve grown increasingly wary of any company’s motivations the older I get.

So I started looking at options that might take care of it, and over the last few months I’ve really started to replace things that would have previously been a couple bucks a month with a VPS running four such services for $40 a year.

Quick aside: I use RackNerd for all my hosting now, and they have been rock-solid and steady in the time I’ve been with them (coming up on a year now). Their New Year’s Deals are still valid, so you can pay $37.88 for a VPS with 4GB of RAM for a year. Neither of those links are affiliate links, by the way - they’re just a good company with good deals, and I have no problem promoting them.

AdGuard Home - Ad-blocking, custom DNS. I run a bunch of stuff on my homelab that I don’t want exposed to the internet, but I still want HTTPS certificates for. I have a script that grabs a wildcard SSL certificate for the domain that I automatically push to my non-public servers. I use Tailscale to keep all my devices (servers, phones, tablets, computers) on the same VPN. Tailscale’s DNS is set to my AdGuard IP, and AdGuard manages my custom DNS with DNS rewrites.

This has the advantages of a) not requiring to me to set the DNS manually for every wireless network on iOS (which is absolutely a bonkers way to set DNS, Apple), b) keeping all my machines accessible as long as I have internet, and c) allowing me to use the internal Tailscale IP addresses as the AdGuard DNS whitelist so I can keep out all the random inquiries from Chinese and Russian IPs.

The one downside is it requires Tailscale for infrastructure, but Tailscale has been consistently good and generous with its free tier, and if it ever changes, there are free (open-source, self-hosted) alternatives.

MachForm - Not free, not open-source, but the most reliable form self-hosting I’ve found that doesn’t require an absurd number of hoops. I tried both HeyForm and FormBricks before going back to the classic goodness. If I ever care enough, I’ll write a modern-looking frontend theme for it, but as of now it does everything I ask of it. (If I ever get FU money, I’ll rewrite it completely, but I don’t see that happening.)

Soketi - A drop-in Pusher replacement. Holy hell was it annoying to get set up with multiple apps in the same instance, but now I have a much more scalable WebSockets server without arbitrary message/concurrent user limits.

Nitter - I don’t like Twitter, I don’t use Twitter, but some people do and I get links that I probably need to see (usually related to work/dev, but sometimes politics and news). Instead of giving a dime to Elon, Nitter acts as a proxy to display it (especially useful with threads, of which you only see one tweet at a time on Twitter without logging in). You do need to create a Twitter account to use it, but I’m not giving him any pageviews/advertising and I’m only using it when I have to. When Nitter stops working, I’ll probably just block Twitter altogether.

Freescout - My wife and I used Helpscout to run our consulting business for years until they decided to up their subscription pricing by nearly double what we used to pay. Helpscout was useful, but not that useful. We tried to going to regular Gmail and some third-party plugins, but eventually just went with a shared email account until we found Freescout. It works wonderfully, and we paid for some of the extensions mostly just to support them. My only annoyance is the mobile app is just this side of unusable, but hard to complain about free (and we do most of our support work on desktop, anyway).

Sendy - Also not free, but does exactly what’s described on the box and was a breeze to set up. Its UI is a little dated, and you’re best served by creating your templates somewhere else and pasting the HTML in to the editor, but it’s a nice little workhorse for a perfectly reasonable price.

Calibre-web - I used to use the desktop version of Calibre, but it was a huge pain to keep running all the time on my main computer and too much of a hassle to manage when it was running on desktop on one of the homelab machines. Calibre web puts all of the stuff I care about from Calibre available in the browser. I actually run 3-4 instances, sorted by genre.

Tube Archivist - I pay for YouTube premium, but I don’t trust that everything will always be available. I selectively add videos to a certain playlist, then have Tube Archivist download them if I ever want to check them out later.

Plex - I have an extensive downloaded music archive that I listen to using PlexAmp, both on mobile devices and various computers. I don’t love Plex’s overall model, but I’ve yet to find an alternative that allows for good management of mobile downloads (I don’t want to stream everything all the time, Roon).

Ernest Goes to Camp is the only movie I can recall that ends with a dramaric (frantic?) waving of a temporary injunction. After the Home Alone-esque fight betwist kids and construction workers, of course.

I have been playing around with Soketi as a self-hosted Pusher alternative and, while the software is great, boy is its documentation and error messaging lacking. If you’re trying to run it and get the error

There was an error while parsing the JSON in your config file. It has not been loaded.

This is, as near as I can tell, the minimum required set of keys to get an app working:

{ "debug": true, "port": 6001, "appManager.array.apps": [ { "id": "id", "key": "key", "secret": "secret", "webhooks" : [] } ] }

Without the empty webhooks array, it kept failing on me.

I still have not gotten a pm2 instance to accept a config file 😭️. I gave up on the Docker instance because it doesn’t allow more than one app per instance and I want something more flexible.

I’m sure it’s great and super easy if you’re just spinning up a single app, though!