ibizaman

I do when I forget to run the git branch comment before. But I find it still hard to understand exactly which commit to reset to in the reflog.

Tangential but reading on mobile, the font size in the code snippets are all over the place. I actually have the same issue on my blog. Anyone knows why?

Keep the good work! I am betting also on making a product that respects its users.

When the server can’t be accessed, you can’t create a secret, right? This has been quite annoying in my experience. I’d still recommend Bitwarden clients with self-hosted Vaultwarden.

More than the price, the privacy concerns and previous outrages justify using Jellyfin IMO.

Of course, I wouldn’t use their client anymore. Actually, I would have never used it from the start as it’s not open source. I think for backups there’s no better guarantee than that. I don’t mean because you could look at the source code, I mean because in my experience open source products tend to care more about their users than not. At least for such foundational tools.

Why not just use backblaze as cold storage and use restic or another tool with a GUI to backup to it?

You weren’t kidding. I just took a look and the models are gorgeous!

The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. It’s a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them.

This resonates so much with me. I don’t want to control my kids. I will never be able to protect them from everything. I hope I won’t be able because I want to die before them. I want them to be able to navigate in the world and have all the cognitive tools necessary to avoid being fooled. I want to rest in peace knowing they can in turn educate their own children. I want to trust them and be relieved that I can focus on some tasks of my own without needing to constantly worry about them.

Oh I particularly loved that you made the prompts themselves interchangeable. Very well done!

The first AFAIK customer owned self-hosting as a service company. You own the hardware, the software and your data without the hassle of needing to configure or maintain any of it. https://skarabox.com/

The technology is using my open source project https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks

I target small businesses and possibly individuals that are already aware of the issues and are okay to pay a small premium for this solution.

Also I am currently only targeting locals so I can physically go to their place and configure their server.

I don’t mind growing slowly here btw. It’s my side business and I plan to keep my current job for the time being.

I fully understand. That’s my goal too and what I want to provide here. No technical knowledge is required.

Awesome to hear that! Feel free to hang out in the matrix channel to get some updates and hopefully excitement around the project. :)

This is the reason I adore NixOS. The documentation is the code. Seriously.

You might be interested in checking out my project SelfHostBlocks which allows you to declaratively setup quite a few services with declarative LDAP and SSO integration with LLDAP and Authelia. Even if you don’t end up using it, it might inspire you. Also, all integrations are tested with NixOS VM tests using playwright to ensure no breakage.

https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks

I’m working on introducing this kind of protocol in NixOS. I called it contracts. https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/189

The idea is a contract is defined saying which options exist and what they mean. For backups, you’d get the Unix user doing the backup, what folders to backup and what patterns to exclude. But also what script can be run to create a backup and restore from a backup.

Then you’d get a contract consumer, the application to be backup, which declares what folders to backup either which users.

On the other side you have a contract provider, like Restic or Borgbackup which understand this contract and know thanks to it how to backup the application.

As the user, your role is just to plug-in a contract provider with a consumer. To choose which application backs up which application.

This can be applied to LDAP, SSO, secrets and more!

What about self-hosting as a service? You get a server in your home which you own with your open source software and data in it. And you pay a subscription to have a remote sysadmin take care of maintenance for you and can train you on the software? What happens if you don’t pay anymore is you keep everything. But like a good insurance, you’d keep the subscription because of top notch customer service.

I agree. Keeping your data private is just not a big enough motivation. For me though the big issue is making sure one keeps access to their data forever. It’s so easy these days to use everything from one vendor and then get access shut off with no recourse. That is IMO the biggest fear everyone should have these days.

Yes, the only solution is self-hosting and yes it requires being your own sysadmin and it’s hard and not convenient. That’s why I’m building https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks. It’s a NixOS collection of modules that sets up services that fit well together and have declarative setup for LDAP and SSO. They have integrated backups, https and other features required for self-hosting. Also, the LDAP and SSO setup is tested with e2e NixOS VM tests that use playwright to make sure users can login if they have access.

I’m hoping to lower the bar to self-hosting significantly.

Own Your Data — Self-hosted means your customer data never leaves your servers. No vendor lock-in, no surprise price increases, no data mining.

+1

No Per-Seat Pricing — One install, unlimited users. Pay nothing or pay for support—your choice.

+1

Open Source — AGPL-3.0 licensed. Inspect the code, modify it, contribute back. Transparency builds trust.

Fully agreed.

From reading the readme and the docs, I am left with wondering how the software would benefit me. I would like to see more screenshots and use cases.

https://simplex.chat/ Seems to take security and decentralization pretty far while keeping it convenient enough.

I was going through the list, nodding as I read all the reasons, agreeing with them all. But also thinking each time I’ll get one anyway. I guess I agree with the last sentence of the post haha. If anything, I’ll justify this by saying I want to choose with my money and encourage this further. But that’s really just to give me good conscience.

For sure, the hardest part is to create meaningful generators for the problem at hand which can test interesting cases in a finite amount of time. That’s where the combinatory explosion takes place in my experience.

I wanted to highlight one unexpected but very welcomed side effect of having those stateful property tests is we could use them to design high fidelity stubs. I wrote a follow-up blog post about it https://blog.tiserbox.com/posts/2024-07-08-make-good-stubs-w...

You’re right it’s always a trade off. One unexpected but very welcomed side effect of having those stateful property tests is we could use them to design high fidelity stubs. I wrote a follow-up blog post about it https://blog.tiserbox.com/posts/2024-07-08-make-good-stubs-w...

I actually used property testing very successfully to test a DB driver and a migration to another DB driver in Go. I wrote up about it here https://blog.tiserbox.com/posts/2024-02-27-stateful-property...

Not if the IRS verifies using the same AI. Actually, it’s probably twice the trouble.

I help privacy and data sovereignty enthusiasts take back control of their data without needing to change their habits.

I’ve been working for the past 3 years on SelfHostBlocks https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks, making self-hosting a viable and convenient alternative to the cloud for non technical people.

It is based on NixOS and provides a hand-picked groupware stack: user-facing there is Vaultwarden and Nextcloud (and a bunch more but those 2 are the most important IMO for non technical people as it covers most of one’s important data) and on the backend Authelia, LLDAP, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Prometheus, Grafana and some more. My know-how is in how to configure all this so they play nice together and to have backups, SSO, LDAP, reverse proxy, etc. integration. I’m using it daily as the house server, I’m my first customer after all. And beginning of 2025 it passed my own internal checkpoint to be shared with others and there’s a handful of technical users using it.

My goal is to work on this full time. I started a company to provide a white glove installation, configuration and maintenance of a server with SelfHostBlocks. Everything I’ll be doing will always be open source, same as the whole stack and the server is DIY and repair friendly. The continuous maintenance is provided with a subscription which includes customer support and training on the software stack as needed.

Would this scratch your itch? https://github.com/probeldev/niri-float-sticky

I didn’t try it myself though. I found it while scrolling https://github.com/Vortriz/awesome-niri

I used a similar setup a long while ago and wanted a way to connect to databases easily. So I wrote some code to parse the MySQL and Postres config files to extract database info in Emacs: https://stackoverflow.com/a/46114944

Nice tip on debugging syscall issues!