How and why to host a blog at home
kubesail.com
kubesail.com
I was up late last night playing with midjourney's generative art system as well (for the first time), so to see art generated with midjourney featured in a blog post today feels like interesting timing!
what really strikes me, is that this blogger has opted to use his generative prompt as a caption. It's tempting to borrow the prompt and keep tweaking the image to my liking.
I can't quite articulate it, but given the communal environment midjourney is typically used in, with everyone shoulder to shoulder in a chat room, glancing over other's iterations. Everyone working in the open... I am left with the distinct impression I could well have bumped into the blog author at the studio last night (whether that's literally true or not).
I guess what I'm saying is it's surprising that this AI generative art tool has a sense of community. Which I find myself rather inexplicably feeling I belong to.
Seems you were touched by the Synchronicity Fairy and her sparkling coincidust.
The art was amazing at adding to the narrative. And it was exciting to discover and play with after. The Jobs quote really made it clear what the thesis of the article was (which I thought the author still danced around a bit).
The final section changed tone and where I think the author’s true point became clear. I really like this vision of self-hosting and I think it’s way more inspiring than “avoid SaaS and gain privacy”. It’s also a great pitch for their product, as it happens. It’s a fantastic pitch for any self hosting stuff beyond reclaiming privacy.
This line really stood out to me: > Ah technology. Just when you get cynical, something like Midjourney turns us all into children again.
As a growing adult working in tech, I feel like I’m often chasing that childhood feelings from holding and playing with technology. I think that’s why certain technology (often more hype than reality) catch our attention and drive discourse: they’re the ones that leave us like children playing and exploring something cool.
That first link shows fake results. 3 of the ~20 results for my IP are real and something I've torrented. The vast majority are mistakes. I assume this holds true for the entire database.
I know I'm the only person with my IP. It changed to this one about 3 months ago. I am the only one living here, I don't use wifi (all ethernet), and my network is secured by an out of network pfsense transparent firewall to monitor the LAN<->WAN(modem) link.
The second link also shows a selection of cities within a 100 mile radius but never mine.
Yeah same for me, 3 out of 19. Strange how it would get false results like that, I wonder how they end up there...
To the right set of people, your IP (plus a timestamp) reveals precisely where you sleep unguarded each night. It's linked in a database (accessible to government and law enforcement) with the service address.
The consequences of this are heavily dependent upon what sort of material you post on your blog. Those exposing local police or public official corruption might want to go with datacenter-based hosting.
The right set of people already knows my home address (e.g. any government agency). For the complement of that set I think it will be difficult for them to figure it out based my IP address.
Thats some massive USA mindset right there ;)
If I open that page, I see 4 sources.
3 of the 4 sources provide the correct European country where I am located.
2 of the 4 sources show correctly the European city with millions of inhabitants where I am located.
Only 1 source shows beyond the correct city a postal code, but that is not mine, it is a postal code for some building of my ISP, very far from me, in a completely different part of the city.
So not even the country is provided with 100% certainty, much less the location within the city, which is provided correctly by no source.
And I have owned that IP for 20 years, it is not a dynamically allocated IP.
IPLocation is accurate to the city level, but that info is freely available on my website's homepage and several work and personal social networks.
(The author even briefly mentions that in the post on step 3 as a solution to being able to host things at all, but it can also be used just for straight up privacy)
You could argue that's not "hosting at home", as you depend on another service to provide you with a connection, but I argue you'd still keep all the ownership benefits, as most tunnel services have similar TOSs to ISPs, and if it becomes a problem, you can easily switch providers.
First time I've seen my local IP in one of these, genuinely impressed.
If someone is putting up content that might make them fear for their safety, of course they're not going to host it at home without obfuscation.
that nullifies some of the advantages being touted.
I have my dev domain on Cloudfront with my origin server being my very own laptop. I have Certbot working great and the only permissible traffic to my home router is from the CDN.
CDNs still have advantages when sending everything through uncached in how it cuts down on the handshaking needed to deliver static content.
This arrangement enables me to develop on a range of devices without having to do anything complicated with DHCP so my phone can see a dev domain on my laptop. It just works.
Having got this far and it working so well, I now wonder if I even need a properly hosted website if I can just patch through to an old PC under the stairs for that to manage the content the CDN can't just render. It would be a lot cheaper that way. CDNs are brilliant even if people in marketing tout their benefits without knowing how to set one up.
> Ghost is hot shit, but Wordpress is also available. Ghost is brilliant for home hosting - many of its assets are hosted from free CDNs, leaving your home-server free to simply deliver text to the user
Which I find to be an entirely different kind of "farce" because it's then 100% dependent on a CDN / third party hosting. I very much prefer to have 100% self-contained self-hosting and put a front rev proxy / LB / mirroring CDN that can be switched from or entirely dropped by updating a DNS record.
We’re pragmatic and not idealistic - otherwise none of this would exist
Remember heartbleed?
It's nice to see that the story linked here has nice images that aren't .webp.
I think I’ll be fine with WebP-only in all but specialist applications by the end of this year.
At EUR 320, you can buy a NUC-like computer with an i3 or even an i5 CPU. For much less, even under $200, you can buy a computer with Jasper Lake, which is far more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
For the cheapest possible server bought as new, a better choice would be one of the ODROID models, while the best performance per $ would be provided by an old NUC-like computer, either repurposed or bought 2nd hand.
The only price point that makes sense for these self hosting boxes is around 50$. More than that and the hardware already exists and is more than capable.
A bit vague; eggplantsuccotash.com is available at the moment.
The most popular discussion linking helpful tools was 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470977
edit: Lol just realized you meant [g]ood, oh well.
What's faster: downloading an uncompressed 5KB file or downloading a compressed 3KB file and decompressing it?
I use Caddy, the files would be precompressed.
What the tech world really needs is a better shared hosting software/standards. CPanel is far too manual. Kubenetes is far too complicated and was intended to solve an entirely different set of issues.
It's an entirely corrupt racket, but they're the only game in town, so you'd best not jeopardize your only option for high speed internet.
Additionally, your home connection IP is PII that points uniquely and unambiguously at the place that you and your children sleep unguarded at night. Don't draw attention to it.
I pay extra for unlimited transfer, even before this.
Swine, they are.
Speak for yourself... Maybe I don't have children. Or maybe they are guarded.