How you imagine things send messages to reset your passwords, sending notifications and whatever is currently managed via email than some piece of code creating and sending messages, managing possible errors with them and potentially also monitoring/logging the message traffic for statistics or debugging?

User adoption matters if you want your thing to be actually useful for the actual users. And supporting any messaging system requires effort, so it makes sense to spend limited resources on a thing which has the biggest userspace. If you want to run matrix server which has you and your dog using it, go ahead, but don’t be surprised if you want to contact your neighbor and he’ll look like you have two heads when you start to explain how to reach you.

It’s a crapload more work to support XMPP/Matrix/whatever messaging on any platform than…SMTP

It’s absolutely not.

And you know this since you’ve written code to manage both on different environments, right?

Also, whatsapp supports all kinds of “bots” and it has absolutely massive userspace compared to pretty much any other instant message application. It doesn’t matter if you create the perfect protocol and platform for this kind of thing if there’s 7 people globally using it.

It’s a whole lot less work than configuring email.

It’s a crapload more work to support XMPP/Matrix/whatever messaging on any platform than just using a robust, reliable, resilient, widely supported good old SMTP. For you it might be easier to input your account (which at least on XMPP resemble quite a bit of email address) but for the developer it’s totally different thing. Also practically everyone accessing a website has an email address and if they’d decide to support some mesaging platform it’d make more sense to use whatsapp than XMPP since it’s vastly more popular.

Self hosting is not just one thing. You are system adminstrator, network engineer, security specialist, service architect and many other things, specially if you expose anything to anyone outside your very private network. And to get anything even running on that complex mess requires some knowledge on a lot of things. Making them run securely with proper backups requires even more knowledge on things.

Sure, you can just throw some docker images on your old desktop and be happy, even forward ports from the public internet to your things if you like. But that exposes your stuff to quite a lot of dangers and if you just click buttons without any understanding you’ll soon be a part of a botnet or lose your data or lose money if someone decides to mess around with your home automation or something else.

I get what you’re saying, not all of us are very polite and answers can be pretty harsh, but more often than not the generic idea behind those answers is not trying to be an asshole or gatekeep anything. It’s just that there’s a skillset you need to build things safely and if it’s clear from the start that someone looking for answers is way over their head it’s better for everyone to get them take a step back and learn instead of trying to create a meaningful answer since there’s too many variables or it’d just take immense effort to write down comprehensive guide on what to do, why and how for everything from the ground up.

I know for a fact that in my area there’s a bunch of surveillance cameras, home automation stuff and even some farm equipment directly open to the public network just because someone just plugged things in without any idea on the whole picture. Sometimes the correct answer is ‘stop shooting yourself on the foot and learn the basics first, then come back’.

Just for the sake of conversation, I recently did some crude math on this. I have few friends around who are well capable of running a backup server for me (hardware maintenance and stuff is always needed anyways) and at first it seemed like a good plan. Just get a 4TB SSD/NVME and throw that on a Raspberry Pi (or something small to keep electricity consumption low and setup silent), set up encryption, connect that to my network with wireguard or some other VPN and let it do it’s thing.

But I’d need to purchase everything as setting up a remote location with old hardware is just asking for trouble. The drive alone is 300€ (give or take) and the rest is easily another 100€. Currently my storagebox costs ~10€/month for 5TB. Even if I scored a fantastic black week offer and got everything for -50% discount that hardware with multiple single point of failures would cost nearly 2 years worth of cloud backups. And I’d still owe at least few beers to the friend for the trouble.

Your mileage may obviously vary, there’s a million different scenarios, but for me with my current setup it just makes sense to pick couple cloud providers and let them store my bits instead of getting more hardware to maintain and upgrade.

With backups two is one and one is none, so you are very much in a right track. Personally I have my stuff running on proxmox VMs with a proxmox backup server (VM as well) storing backups to Hetzner Storagebox. I’m planning to set up a another host in garage to have “local” backups too, as mine is detached as well the risk of both going up in flames in event of fire is pretty low. However, a voltage spike due to lightning on the grid or something else might blow up both hosts so that’s a threat model to be aware of. Also if your connection to garage is over copper it can cause other problems, fibre or wireless is highly recommended.

With backups it’s largely about the bandwidth available. I personally have enough so uploading to cloud is not an issue, but backing up a terabyte of data over 10Mbps connection might not work out at all.

For more info search for 3-2-1 strategy, that should give you plenty of ideas what you need to think about and what are industry best practises about making sure backups are in order.

I’ve done quite a bit of freelance work and visited various office spaces with multiple companies in a single building. It was pretty common just to call to the building reception and tell them that I’m working for this-and-that-company upcoming weekend for their network stuff and I’d need access to network cabinets and whatnot and they’d have keys ready for me with very little (if any) verification if I’m actually doing what I’m supposed to or if I am who I claim to be. Some of the locations just handed me keys with access to practically everything, including shared server rooms hosting their CCTV setup, key managing servers and all.

So, just get a name tag with a local operator logo and clothes to match and ask nicely. You’ll get access to a lot more than you think.

English is not my native language and for whatever reason that makes text almost unreadable. But no worries, I can feed that to copilot to clean up:

Can you replace those strange characters to normal from this text: Beautiful! I had þis vinyl, once. Lost wiþ so many þings over þe course of a life.

Absolutely! Here’s your cleaned-up version with the unusual characters replaced by their standard English equivalents:

“Beautiful! I had this vinyl, once. Lost with so many things over the course of a life.”

Let me know if you’d like it stylized or rewritten in a different tone—poetic, nostalgic, modern, anything you like.

I would choose this too. Probability that I’ll win lottery next week would be nice to adjust. Also probability of getting sick/staying alive. And as I’m (allegedly) slowly getting older: Probability that I’ll wake up tomorrow well rested in a good shape and nothing hurts.

I’m also looking to learn about esp32 and I’m just sanity checking that this is a reasonable thing to do with one.

It sure can do what you’re after. Most likely not on it’s own, you’ll need a mosfet or a transistor as esp32 likely can’t handle the current your light uses. There’s plenty of tutorials on how to do the electronics, but cat least you need a mosfet with gate voltage below 5V and a resistor, both are very cheap. Just be careful with the esp32, it’s pretty easy to accidentally kill it with a short circuit or miswire.

And while you’re at it, esp32 can manage a ton of stuff beyond just blinking an led. You can add light/temperature/movement/whatever sensors, a button to manually toggle the light and whatever else you might think is useful and/or fun to have. It’s pretty much a generic purpose computer after all.

If I browse a piece of software from play store and click ‘install’ it’s “installing” and if I do the very same with F-droid it’s suddenly “sideloading”. Fundamentally every language is just made up, but on this occasion the newly coined term is used to obfuscate things and attempting to paint things something they are not.

I can claim all day that grass is blue and sky is green, but no one will take me seriously. Same thing should happen with ‘sideloading’ vs 'installing. Or if you really insist, sideloading might be something like injecting code to a system in a way which is not normally possible, like how some rootkits for devices work. But ‘sideloading’ is very different from ‘installing’ and installing anything on a general purpose computer doesn’t include any particular tool (like play store). I can install things on my workstation with ‘apt-get install’ or from source via ‘make install’, but the end result is still that a piece of software was installed.

Last time they tried our grandparents took 105 days to beat Russia with very little formal military and even less hardware. Sure, we had some help back then too, but today it’s on a whole different level. And we’re just a single small country up north, NATO as a whole is quite a bit bigger.

Russia currently has lost million soldiers and stockpiles of soviet relics are pretty much empty with a strong breeze away from total economy collapse. They don’t have power to conquer a potato field from a modern western country right now, much less against the whole global west.

Since the question is ‘vehicle’: Massey-Ferguson 165. Or if you insist a car: Opel Kadett C.

Give users that choice

That’s the one thing they want to get rid of. Security and other bullshit is just a theater around it to get validation for even bigger walls for their garden.

Whole thing is well worth a read, but just from the title alone I was ready to write a long rant about the term ‘sideloading’. Gladly that’s covered on the text too:

It bears reminding that “sideload” is a made-up term. Putting software on your computer is simply called “installing”, regardless of whether that computer is in your pocket or on your desk.

Where in the FUCK in Outlook currently is an option to use preformatted text? It’s not a style I could pick nor I could find an option to make my own. I send copy-paste from terminal every now and then and if it’s formatted like normal text it’s nearly useless. It used to be a text style I could pick, but this new-new-new-classic-new outlook doesn’t have it anymore.

Well, I guess it is safe to assume you are an enthusiastic murderer.

As it happens, I am. I wander around doing all the murdering I want to. It just happens to be none at all.

Why not try someone a bit more relevant than Hans Reiser, there’s plenty to choose from. Like Eric Raymond whose work, at least indirectly, influences more or less everyone using a computer on a daily basis.

I absolutely agree with your statement. Hell, even the GNU project (RMS mostly) had their own scandal a while ago, so if you really insist on being pedantic about this matter feel free on removing practically every piece of open source software from your systems.

So it is always DNS