Daril

For what it counts, I deleted my Amazon account today (and lost all my Kindle books in the process), I'll never buy anything from them again. I'll close my S3 storage account with a US company in the coming months : I'll switch to a German service. In the coming weeks, I'll also delete my GMail account (my devices are already deGoogled since many years). There a lot of European alternatives that respect our privacy, our values and principles.

I recently experienced a similar situation on a client's small ecommerce site. After struggling for 4 days to find the cause of a strange excessive server load every afternoon, I discovered that a Woocommerce site was being hammered by several bots at the same time : AHrefs, Bitespider, MJ12Bot, SemrushBot, Claude, GPT, ... I set up a proper robots.txt file (the content doesn't change frequently, so indexing it every day doesn't make sense), but also set up proper rules in .htaccess to block all these user-agents. I also banned 20 or more of the IP addresses of these bots. The next step is to set up fail2ban to automatically ban them when they change IP or add additional IP addresses.

Have you tried Slim Select ? https://slimselectjs.com/

Before HTMX I used Turbo Hotwired and Unpoly.

From my very personal and pragmatic point of view (I am a lone developer : I need to create software solutions that are robust and that simply work without the need to spend months to learn a new technology, that probably will be replaced by a new one in two months or so, that no customer is willing to pay), HTMX is the most pragmatic and useful solution.

It is complete in features and you can do literally anything with it and is easy to integrate in existing web applications.

I used it with CodeIgniter and now with Golang.

It depends on your requirements and what features you want to provide to your users. Do you want to provide only an app for mobile devices or also a desktop version?

I am working on my own PWA, source code here: https://gitea.speedtech.it/roberto/BrainMinder.

At the moment I don't use many PWA features on this PWA, like notifications for example, but in another PWA I built I used camera access to take photos and scan barcodes and it works well.

I use GoLang, HTMX, W3CSS, and Handlebars. The codebase is the same for all the environments: phone, tablet, desktop.

I considered Ionic Framework for the front end, but it uses only web components with shadow DOM and HTMX doesn't work well with this technology on forms submit.

W3CSS is fast and small, easy to understand, change and manipulate.

I have 2 VM with Debian on Contabo in 2 datacenters in 2 different physical locations connected via VPN with Wireguard. The two servers are in sync for high availability : MariaDB servers are replicated in a master-master configuration, Unison keeps in sync the files. In case one server is not available, ClouDNS automatically switches the DNS records to the other server.

I created a mesh VPN with Wireguard between the 2 VMs and my office and home serversc (Minisforum PC with Debian) (this is important for my backup and to not open external ports. The VPNs at home at office are provided by 2 Fritz!Box routers)

Just finished yesterday to re-engineering my backups as follow :

- Contabo provides 2 snapshots per VM (on my current plan), I create manually a snapshot every week (for the future I'd like to make this automatic)

- I use bot restic and borg for redundancy as follow :

-- An automysqlbackup cron job creates the encrypted data dumps every day

-- I created two bash scripts that make archives of /etc, /root (contains acme.sh ssl certificates). These archives are encrypted with my public GPG key. They are scheduled via a cron

-- The others directories I backup are /var/vmail (mail files already compressed and encrypted by vmail) and /var/www (websites and web applications), but I don't create archives of them

-- I created different repositories for : /etc, /root/, databases, vmail, sites. In case a repository or a single backup fails for every reason I don't loose everything, but only a part of the full backup

-- Restic sends the backups to iDrive e2 S3 storage : I'll replace part of the procedure using resticprofile in the near future

-- Borg sends the same backups both to home and office servers : I use borgmatic, but have different configurations, and cron jobs, for every destination, otherwise, if a backup fails on one destination, fails on both

-- If one backup fails fo every reason I receive an alert via Pushover : I'd like to substitute it with a self hosted instance of ntfy.sh

I have two additional offline external disks I sync (every week manually) with the main backup disks using rsync

Still to improve / change :

- automatic snapshots creation (via cron jobs)

- use resticprofile for restic

- use backrest to check and access the restic backups

- use Vorta to check and access the borg backups

- use self hosted ntfy.sh for notifications

Very useful! I think it is a great idea !

After many years with 2 Raspberry Pi (3 version later upgraded to 4) I bought 2 Minisforum GK41 : 1 CPU J4125, 8GB RAM, 256 GB NVME, 2 Ethernet 1Gb/s, 1 SATA connector and internal slot for a SSD disk.

It costed months ago more than 200 Euros, it is now available for less than 150 Euros.

I am very satisfied, it is running Debian testing as server at home and office.

The only drawback is the fan, but is very quiet.

I measured the power consumption and it is around 5W per hour, the same amount of the Raspberry Pi 4.

And how can we forget the war that MS waged against Linux for many years, and the copyright lawsuits brought by SCO, partly financed by MS? So ... stop for a moment and think about where we could be in terms of software and operating systems if some actors (all from the same country) didn't keep trying to kill the competition with unfair tactics in order to continue selling one of the worst operating systems ever created and the main vehicle for all the viruses, malware and ransomware.

For the ones who remember BeOS and its history, from Wikipedia : In 2002, Be Inc. sued Microsoft claiming that Hitachi had been dissuaded from selling PCs loaded with BeOS, and that Compaq had been pressured not to market an Internet appliance in partnership with Be. Be also claimed that Microsoft acted to artificially depress Be Inc.'s initial public offering (IPO). The case was eventually settled out of court for $23.25 million with no admission of liability on Microsoft's part.

Well ... perhaps we need an old bank system, with old values and principles. I have read recently a book about Amadeo Peter Giannini, the founder of Bank of Italy that later became Bank of America. A very inspiring lecture for me.

In my opinion we don't need more technology or new financial structures and ideas, but instead some old values and ethics ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amadeo_Giannini

See also this brief introduction about the foundation he created : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCYuARrz38c

FreeOffice exists since many years. It is free for personal use. It is a light and complete office suite. It is a good alternative to LibreOffice, also if not so rich in features.

Yes, I agree that this will be the critical point, but ... it all depends on the critical mass of users. About 20 years ago there was no CAD software for Linux, no IDE for rapid development and now we have tons of incredible tools in all areas: FreeCad, Blender, Lazarus, KDevelop, QT Creator. JetBrains produces incredible cross-platform development tools.

The same revolution that happened on the desktop can happen on mobile. The people at Pine64 are creating incredible and affordable devices, and this is just the beginning. The open source revolution is spreading from software to hardware (Risc-V processors for example).

In my lifetime I have seen Linux and open source software in general make incredible progress. And it is not only a technical aspect, but also a different way of living and seeing the world: hundreds of thousands of developers working together for the benefit of the most, beyond any language, geographical or political boundaries.

It also depends on the choices that each of us will make to stop supporting and encouraging predatory and monopolistic regimes, and instead make choices to preserve our freedoms as individuals, which are more important than the last "nice features" in expensive and proprietary gadgets that imprison us and our data in closed kingdoms.

I agree and the fact the governments prefer commercial and costly software instead of adopting open source solutions and hire local companies for support and custom development is very disturbing : they spend the taxpayers money to make rich a bunch of already disgusting rich companies. And when this company is a foreign company the damage for the state money balance (and citizens of course) is double.

There is hope:

- 20 years ago it was impossible to buy a PC, especially a laptop, without MS Windows : today there are several suppliers: System76, LaptopWithLinux, TuxedoComputers, to name but a few.

- It is only in the last few years (less than 10) that Linux is perfectly usable on the desktop, so I don't care what decision MS will take for Windows, it is irrelevant if you have other options. For office suites we have: LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, FreeOffice

- FreeBSD has come a long way as a desktop too,in the long run will be usable as Linux

- There are now many alternatives (free or paid) to all the Google services. What Google decides to do with its own services is irrelevant to me, there are alternatives: ProtonMail, Tutanota, Infomaniak, OpenStreetmap, MagicEarth, OrganicMaps, ...

- There are several open source alternatives to Google Android, solid, complete and usable: Iodè, e/OS, to name a few, and we already have an open source app store: F-Droid.

- Linux is also making huge improvements on mobile phones (see PinePhone). It will take a few years, but I'm sure we'll have a viable alternative to Android in the near future.

- There are many messaging apps and protocols that are decentralised and resistant to censorship.

What is really in danger, in my opinion, is net neutrality and the clamps that Google and other big tech companies and governments will try to impose, but in the recent years we have seen a rise of decentralised protocols and services.

My humble suggestions:

- don't use the services of the big tech companies : look for and use only open source alternatives, if possible

- use an open source version of Android on your phone, without the Google services

- prefer decentralised solutions whenever possible

Just installed, many thanks for the suggestion !

I cannot live without Midnight Commander !

Thanks for the suggestion, but I am on Linux Mint with Cinnamon (and evaluating to move to Debian testing with Gnome or XFCE when the Wayland support will be available). Installing Krusader would fill my GTK based system with KDE dependencies ... I'm not sure it is a good idea. It looks very well done in any case !

Very useful, I bought it years ago and used it on Windows. I've been using only Linux for about 10 years now, but I'd like to use Total Commander on Linux.

Double Commander is open source, cross-platform and written with Lazarus / FPC : https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/

But ... I am not able not to use Midnight Commander ...

There are solutions external to the browsers that work pretty well and where you have control on your data :

Floccus for bookmarks (https://floccus.org/) : it works also on mobile devices : a great plus ! You need only a webdav server (or a Nextcloud account), I use Dave (https://github.com/micromata/dave)

Vaultwarden for the passwords (https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden)

A huge advantage of this solution is that you can have synchronization also between different browsers and on mobile devices.

I don't understand if this is a joke or a desperate attempt to collect money ...

Tomorrow morning (like any other company of course) Wordpress could go bankrupt and they promise to guarantee the status quo for the next 100 years ...

As someone who has just spent a week trying to integrate the Wordpress API into an external software, I really hoped that they would make an announcement that they have decided to fix all this incredible mess of many years old APIs, incredibly survived all the technological improvements and make a professional and exhaustive developer documentation ...

IMHO, there are too many drawbacks to being forced to distribute an app through only one "self-authorised" app store and very few advantages.

Pros (ironically):

1. the app store manager is supposed to check the app for malware and viruses before publishing it, ironically all the apps full of Google ads, Google and Facebook trackers of any kind are welcome ...

2. make it very easy for the user to search, install and update the apps, if he can find what they are looking for through billions of game apps and very similar apps that are only published to send advertisements to the user or to collect his personal data.

Disadvantages:

1. you are tied to the whims of the app store manager

2. You have no control over the app publishing process: You cannot decide if you can publish your app or not, only the App Store Manager has the power to decide when and if it is convenient for him. I think only the user should have this right.

I'd prefer to install the native commercial native apps (for example, the home banking app) on my phone by downloading them from the developer's website, in a private area that I have to access with my credentials, where the app is GPG signed and I can check the integrity of the package. An auto-update feature is doable.

For open source apps, there is the F-Droid store where you can add your own repository (a bit technical and not for everyone, I admit : pre installing F-Droid on the new phones could help a lot, but I don't think Google will ever allow this).

Another viable option is PWA. In my opinion, there are very few apps that need the native features, for all the others, almost everything is now doable with PWA technology, and you do not have to bother sending updates to users or asking them to upgrade.

The monopolistic and commercial app stores, with the excuse of making life easier for users and in a supposedly "better security", are a "wonderful" way for Apple and Google to make billions on the work of independent developers and, in the case of Google, to collect and sell personal data about users and to sell ads of any kind in any way.

Some frameworks and themes to use in combination :

- https://konstaui.com/

- https://framework7.io/

Great technology, unfortunately not yet fully supported by all the major browsers. PWA could replace many mobile applications we currently have to download and install from a store.

As far as I know it supports SQLite, MariaDB and PostgreSQL.

For MariaDB you can implement logical master-master replication between 2 servers (or a Galera cluster if you have 3 or more servers).

I have done this for my servers with MariaDB (master-master logical replication) and apart from some very rare hiccups it works very well. You can do the same for PostgreSQL.

For SQLlite there are some solutions like Litestream.

At the moment I am on MariaDB but my plan is to migrate to PostgreSQL.

Alternative implementation of the Bitwarden server API written in Rust and compatible with upstream Bitwarden clients*, perfect for self-hosted deployment where running the official resource-heavy service might not be ideal.

Support for : SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL.

You can use the docker version or extract the binary and assets files and run it directly.

Works well also on ARM based SBC, like RaspberryPi.

From the same developers :

PHP framework : https://spiral.dev/

ORM PHP library : https://cycle-orm.dev/

I'm currently trying out LibreWolf. It is based on Firefox, but with extra privacy and security features. I also installed Vivaldi, also if I am not a big fan of all these extra features integrated : mail, calendar and notes.

I agree. I don't think they can abandon the Android ecosystem at all, I mean all the apps and the store, that's the real value. They could design a migration path for the apps and make them work seamlessly on Fuchsia in the meantime, gradually replacing the ecosystem with the promise of new "shiny" features for developers. Building an OS from scratch is very expensive in terms of resources and money. I cannot see a valid technical reason for this move. My view is that many projects are now using AOSP to build their own operating system and trying to get rid of Google services, which is a threat to Google and its business based on bombarding the user with ads. The biggest obstacle at the moment is getting the applications that rely on Google services to work. e/OS/ uses MicroG and in my personal experience everything works seamlessly, including banking applications. The other crucial aspect is the availability of stores for the apps. Aurora is just an alternative front-end client to Google PlayStore, but it is a huge step forward in removing direct dependency. e/OS/ has AppLounge which does the same thing. I'd certainly prefer to download and install my bank's app directly from a protected area of the bank's website rather than from a generic store. Implementing a custom authentication mechanism (e.g. signed with GPG) and an auto-update feature is certainly doable.

I use different browsers for different websites / web applications. For bank or accounting, for example I use Firefox in a container. I configured Firefox to clear everything on closing : cache, cookies, history.

I don't save the passwords in the browser. I keep them in Vaultwarden, installed locally on a miniserver.