The Perils of Running Your Own Mastodon Instance

I swear, I'm surrounded by people who want to watch me waste my time. I was telling the Purdue Linux Users Group about the wonders of RSS and how great it is, but my friend overheard the conversation and said, jokingly, "You should do Bad Apple, over RSS". I whined, complained, claimed it would be "too easy" and that "I need a harder project"....

I walked past my server, but I noticed something amiss: the console was spitting out read errors for my hard drive. So, I shut the whole server down (which is why the server was down for the past week). I got a new Samsung 870 EVO 1TB for Christmas, then installed it and copied over the data. However, some data was unreadable on the disk. Most of...

I've spent the last week or so writing a plugin for my website to render LaTeX without any client-side Javascript. As a demo, I'm publishing my high-school paper on RSA. Cryptography is the foundation of modern online communications. Without it, online banking information, private data, and much more could be intercepted and read by anyone with...

This is meant as a tutorial on how to use a VPS to get a public IPv4 address for self-hosting reasons. Often, people want to run a server out of their college dorm that doesn't give them a public IPv4 address, or out of their house from behind CGNAT. It's a simple solution and an excellent alternative to software like Rathole or Cloudflare Tunnel...

"Behold, student, and behold the place Where you with typesetting must arm yourself." How frozen I became—and powerless then, Fear for yourself now, have you an ounce of wit, What I saw, a being of life deprived. The Spirit of College Students sorrowful Entombed within their LaTeX plight NixOS "broke" my Obsidian install. Instead of fixing the...