wheresvic3

Funny to see this pop up on HN! Another avid 18xx gamer here and I can highly recommend 1817 as I find it to be the best boardgame of all time!

One of the reasons that 18xx games appeal to engineers is that they are deterministic, most game do not have any random events. What they do feature though is auctions which induce variances in the game. Players are investors looking to make money. Everyone starts out with an equal amount of cash and you invest in companies. The majority shareholder of a company is its president and gets to decide what the company does. Generally, a company will build out its network and then buy equipment (trains) which will service (imaginary) passengers and make money. This money can be re-invested into the company itself or paid-out to the shareholders.

Another reason for the appeal to engineers is the track (network) building aspect. Some games offer quite a variety of network building and some games are more focused on the financial aspect.

Quite a few titles can be played online @ 18xx.games - feel free to message me (wheresvic) if you'd like a teaching game.

I used to do exactly this. However, a couple of years ago when my second child was born I got a family domain and gave them both local email addresses. Then it was just a matter of getting a cheap email host and migrating over from gmail.

I also have a regular ema backup script that backsup the inboxes so the emails are always available offline!

I use https://ewolo.fitness :)

It does not look like it is available yet: https://releases.ubuntu.com/

I just did a write-up on using imapgrab.py :)

https://smalldata.tech/blog/2020/04/07/imap-email-backup

I used migadu for a couple of years and they were great initially but over the past 4-5 months, I've experienced really degraded service when accessing email and setting tags, deleting etc.

Over the last month, I started getting login timeouts and that was the last straw. Recently I noticed that they put up an announcement saying that they are running at very high loads due to the COVID-19 situation. I'm not quite sure how people working from home affects normal email (I guess people are emailing a bit more?) but anyways once the announcement went away, I still kept experiencing issues so I migrated my primary email over to fastmail.

This post came at a very opportune time as I was having some issues recently with my email provider and was looking for alternatives. I own my main email address but I do have a few other domains which I would like to have mailboxes for.

Anyways, after some consideration I went with fastmail for my primary email but I will definitely check out purelymail for my other low-traffic domains!

Of course - this also led me into the rabbit hole of realizing that my email is not backed up anywhere :)

Thank you everyone for your detailed answers! I have finally settled on just going for fastmail.

I'll probably try mailinabox for some other low traffic domains and see how that goes :)

This is actually very interesting!

The article is mainly trying to answer the question - how do I begin with a new project? Should I make the UI first or should I make the backend first?

One of my projects where this advice was not followed was one where we decided to build something without having a clear idea of how it was going to be used. In this case we decided to focus on the backend and just had a very rough UI. This project went way overbudget because by the time we managed to get it to the users and got feedback, we had to refactor the entire data model and API due to new requirements.

I suppose one critical take-away from all of this is that proximity to users is a key component of a project's success :)

Does nomachine work if my computer is behind a firewall?

This is a great list and I would be curious to know if you have done a cost-benefit analysis when compiling this list.

E.g. something like Stripe for payments is probably much more cost effective than paying for some other services like Notion (which I assume you can get away by using google docs or whatever).

Nice! If you publish it, do send it across and I can link it :)

One small point not mentioned in the article is that the is hooked on to a wall behind the tv so it is nicely hidden.

A cheaper option would probably have been to get a proper computer (likely secondhand), which would have been more cost effective but probably take up more space :)

Yes, to be honest, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably have gone with the SSD and tried to boot off of it directly.

At the time of writing however, the pi was an experiment and I figured that I would just have an extra drive to store stuff if the pi did not work out. In any case, since it's not being used as a regular computer, the SD card works fine, even when compiling stuff :)

You're right in that it is better to only open ports that you require - will update :)

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Additionally out of the box fail2ban won't work with docker containers". fail2ban is installed locally on the pi.

I would recommend looking into Node.js for the back-end. You can then combine it with either React/Angular or even just a plain jQuery front-end.

The nice part about Node is that you'll have JS on both the front and back ends.

It really scalable and if you use typescript, you can get type safety as well :)

From the main page:

  Isn't BugJail just a reverse debugger?

     No. While BugJail does have similarities with reverse debuggers it is actually quite different ...

This is really neat and I wish I had this around 10 years ago when I had to migrate Java apps.

However, these days I rarely need to debug programs while developing - I usually use some combination of TDD with unit/integration testing and it gets the job done with the added bonus of being easy to maintain down the road.

Of course if you're on a project where time to market is critical and you need to sacrifice tests, I suppose a debugger is required. But then again, you're probably not using Java either.

This sounds like something that I could have written, heh.

I've been lifting for around 10 odd years now with a break of a few years in between. The hardest part for me was stepping back into the gym and trying to figure out what had worked in the past. After trying out a few other workout apps, I just decided to bite the bullet and build my own. It was a really fun exercise and tracking my workouts now really motivates me to keep upping my game.

I've also opened it up to the public - registration and use is absolutely free - it's been around for 2+ years so the chances of it going dark are slim: https://ewolo.fitness :)

Gitea is simply an amazing piece of software and a big thank you to all the contributors!

It really is comparable to Gitlab without the heft that Gitlab brings. Moreover, it is really straightforward to install and you can run it on a really low-end machine which makes it perfect to get up and running just to try it out.

This is a pretty cool idea - I'm not sure how intrusive the OS notification are going to be but I'm willing to give it a shot as long as they don't collect any personal info on me.

I just signed up as a content creator and added my website as a channel - interestingly my website already had some bat associated with it. Does this mean that some people have already donated some BAT to it?

Just signed up but apparently you need a hundred visits per day to qualify. If I had that sort of traffic, I would just go with adsense ...

This is what has helped me immensely: pick a service that you use and just reimplement it for your personal use.

You'll have a clear idea of the requirements and can even open source it at the end :)

Pick anything that would benefit frkm being self-hosted or something that you currently pay for. E.g. dropbox, etc.

I'm sorry but Nextcloud is getting a bit of an unfair shake here. I recently got a raspberry pi 4 and installing nextcloud on there wasn't rocket science: https://smalldata.tech/blog/2019/07/12/setting-up-a-raspberr...

In fact the biggest issue that I faced was that my router did not support NAT loopback which led me to using the pi for DNS in order to be able to use my "private" cloud.

Nextcloud is an open-source dropbox and is written in PHP. It can be very easily installed via docker and is quite mature at this point with a rich ecosystem of 3rd party apps for functionality other than file sync. Big props to the folks working on it!

I personally started with a hand-rolled static html site and some content. When I decided to self-host, I got a super cheap VPS and just ran the site off of Node.js with an nginx reverse proxy.

After around 10 blog posts, I just wrote my own static site generator: https://smalldata.tech/blog/2018/08/16/building-a-simple-sta...

Most importantly, what works for me is just writing in HTML. It is more expressive than markdown and the browser preview _just works_ (including displaying images and/or running inlined js if certain posts require it)!

Congrats on Shipping!

I'm very much interested in fitness but I don't know from the landing page what your service offers exactly.

It would actually be great if you could provide a sample of what you offer before asking people to signup. Maybe a video on the landing page, a demo account or in the best case scenario let them actually go through your UI and only ask for registration when they want to save some data.

Here's an example: https://ewolo.fitness/

I've struggled with the same so i wrote my own - https://smalldata.tech/blog/2019/06/08/docker-in-10-minutes

I would definitely recommend that you give new technologies a try but not for sole reason of getting a job. Build something that you might find useful and do it for the pleasure of learning.

You can share your experience through a blog and who knows it might even end up on the first page HN.

Also don't forget to get some exercise to get your spirits up!

this is wonderful thank you!

Kudos for getting it out there - I haven't tried the plugin as such but I find it to be very expensive for what it is.

Interestingly, there's also https://backupsheep.com/#pricing who provide a freeish service along with storage and a UI. I haven't tried them either but just wanted to throw it out there!