Sadly, every time a company adds AI features to their tools they do so automatically and without letting people opt-out by default. And so it is necessary to exorcise AI features out of the tools that we use ourselves by following these instructions.

Do you have any old Android tablet at home? Then you have a new second screen for your laptop! With this tutorial you will be able to use any Android device to extend your screen on Linux. For this purpose we are going to use a wireless connection, but it can also be done through a USB cable. The tutorial seems very long but it is because I will explain each step in detail so that anyone can follow it.

recently migrated my self-hosted services from a VPS (virtual private server) at a remote data center to a physical server at home. This change was motivated by wanting to be in control of the hardware and network where said services run, while trying to keep things as simple as possible. What follows is a walk-through of how I reasoned through different WireGuard toplogies for the VPN (virtual private network) in which my devices and services reside.

Before starting, it’s worth emphasizing that using WireGuard (or a VPN altogether) is not strictly required for self-hosting. WireGuard implies one more moving part in your system, the cost of which is justified only by what it affords you to do. The constraints that I outline below should provide clarity as to why using WireGuard is appropriate for my needs.

It goes without saying that not everyone has the same needs, resources, and threat model, all of which a design should account for. That said, there isn’t anything particularly special about what I’m doing. There is likely enough overlap here for this to be useful to individuals or small to medium-sized organizations looking to host their services.

I hope that this review helps others build a better mental model of WireGuard, and the sorts of networks that you can build up to per practical considerations. Going through this exercise proved to be an excellent learning experience, and that is worthwhile on its own.

This post assumes some familiarity with networking. This is a subject in which acronyms are frequently employed, so I’ve made sure to spell these out wherever introduced.

The UK's Online Safety Act requires operators of "user to user services" to read through hundreds (if not thousands) of pages of documentation to attempt to craft "meaningful" risk assessments and 'child access assessments' or face £18,000,000 fines, even imprisonment. Additionally if your website or platform has content not meant for children but children might want to view it then it is a requirement to gather ID or otherwise age verify ALL visitors who might be children from the UK.

For large websites and platforms with compliance teams and lawyers this won't be much a problem. But for small Mastodon instances, blogs, wikis and any other community/hobby project it is a HUGE undertaking with a potentially quite scary downside for failing to get it right. Luckily OFCOM (the UK Government department responsible for 'enforcement' of these new rules) have confirmed that blocking people in the UK from accessing your website is a perfectly legal and acceptable way to comply with the law.

This guide was written by zorbaglorb mainly for the purpose of explaining to their friends and loved ones how to back up their files. If it can also help some strangers, that's great too.

Master Combo Locks have been known to be vulnerable to an attack reducing their 64,000 possible combinations down to 100. I've devised a new attack reducing the amount of work down to only 8 combinations to crack any Master combo lock, and have simplified the process.

The Promised LAN is a closed, membership only network of friends that operate a 24/7 always-on LAN party, running since 2021. The vast majority of documentation is maintained on the LAN, but this website serves to give interested folks, prospective members or friends an idea of what the Promised LAN is, and how it works.

We believe you have the right to control your data, devices, and services. We coordinate, develop and foster communities of Reclaimers who want digital independence. Together, we reclaim the right to a technical future of data sovereignty, digital autonomy, responsible governance, and collective care online for all.

We are a growing grassroots movement, a 501c3 seeking to help us all reclaim control over the technologies, devices, and services that dominate our lives. We love technology. But today's tools are not delivering a faster, more efficient and reliable automated future; instead they trap us in products that can feel impossible to exit or change. We believe it should be easier to leave the platforms that no longer serve us or our communities, our neighborhood businesses and our governments, to find replacements that do not compromise our connections and do so feeling empowered, not isolated!

We are building a community to connect each other with better technology, better systems, and more control as you make the transition to a different digital world, amid like-minded people seeking independence. We don't want tools that exploit us, mine us, and prey on our weaknesses. Instead we embrace tools that support our strength, resilience, and power.

This guide documents the steps to enable and configure Thunderbolt networking on your Linux system (e.g., Ubuntu, Proxmox). It covers loading the necessary kernel modules, ensuring persistent interface naming, configuring a fixed IP address, and testing throughput with iperf3. Note that Thunderbolt 3/4 hardware advertises a raw bandwidth of 40 Gbps, but practical throughput is typically lower due to half‑duplex operation, protocol overhead, and system constraints.

Forked at https://gist.github.com/virtadpt/ce6214b0a6ebc4bd7a45c8266f65362c

A gist that shows how to use fuse.js with Hugo to generate a search index for a static site. You don't necessarily have to be using Hugo to learn how to use fuse.js because it's pretty straightforward.

I forked it here: https://gist.github.com/virtadpt/f131428ba848811a8ff29dae44326120

CC65 is a mature cross-compiler of the C programming language for the 6502 processor. Some people have tried to use it (e.g. here, here, or here) and got discouraged by the quality of the generated code, often not understanding why the code generated was slow and big. This article is aiming to show that with a few changes in the coding style you can achieve both speed and size comparable to assembly language, while still having a majority of the benefits of working in a higher-level language. This article is based on CC65 version 2.18 (April 2020) and we may expect that in the future the compiler will handle more optimizations mentioned here automatically.

How to patch into the circuitry of relatively cheap digital calipers to get data out of them.

SoX is a free command line audio processing tool with a text-based interface that let's you perform powerful audio operations by typing just a few words in your computer's terminal. It is a popular tool for managing large collections of audio files, splitting audio files by silence and batch processing (eg. normalizing an entire folder of drum sounds in a matter of seconds), but really it is much more than that. If you learn to use SoX you are guaranteed to save enormous amounts of time working with audio files. This guide will help you get started.

A guide to using ffmpeg for artists. ffmpeg is a free tool that allows you to create, convert and manipulate video, really quickly and without opening a heavy GUI-based program. You can script it to make full use of it's power and convert folders of files for example. The following is a cookbook of handy examples I myself use to easily create videos for social media, websites, etcetera – mostly from a source material of audio files and/or photos.

An older website about wireless, wifi, antennas, and information thereof.

Self-hosting the things you used to put on the cloud might be appealing for you. Problem is, you'd like to be able to access your devices from anywhere. The solution is a virtual private network, or VPN. If you work remotely, you almost certainly are familiar with the process of connecting to a VPN to access your organization's network assets. Individuals can set up the same.

There are plenty of commercial implementations of Wireguard. Probably the best-known (and best-regarded) is Tailscale. And Tailscale is indeed fantastic! But in the spirit of owning as much of our stack as possible, I'm going to show you how to implement a Wireguard-based network from scratch, without third-party tools.

An acoustic coupler is a useful tool for dialing up to the internet when you have a phone available, but no phone jack to plug into. I "built" my own acoustic coupler out of a phone and a 9 volt battery. I say 'built', but really, there was almost no building involved. Here is a crude drawing of the acoustic coupler hooked up to a laptop and ready to connect to the internet through a phone booth.