I’ll try to keep this to lesser known apps:

• Catima (saves barcodes for gift cards, gym memberships, etc so you don’t have to worry about the physical card)

• Cofi (nice timer for active guidance through coffee brewing recipes)

• 10,000 Sentences (a language practicing app that doesn’t have a mildly threatening owl 😉)

• OSMAnd+ Mapillary, Overlay Maps, and 3D Features (seriously, the best. I only use Google maps to get around traffic these days since, unfortunately, Magic Earth doesn’t work very well in my area)

• Obtanium (as a gateway to lesser known software, no shipping to an app store required!)

• RethinkDNS (an absolutely amazing piece of software that gives you fine-grained control of the domains your apps are talking to. A bit of a battery sync but it’s been a game changer for me. On my GrapheneOS setup I use it in the Google sandbox to reduce the amount of data scraping servers my Google apps can talk to)

Real men use Incus NixOS containers for reproducible builds instead of wimpy dockerfiles 😤😤

/s – for real though, I hope someday you finally remove the stick from where the sun doesn’t shine ;)

What no love for Incus round these parts?

How long until “works on my machine” becomes “works on my config”

Maybe you should learn to read the manual or debug your system without hand holding 😉

Exactly this. In a fucked up way a rule like that would actually incentivise whistleblowers to become martyrs.

I’d agree with you in the context of standard (google) android.

One caveat that I’d like to highlight, though, is that for me GrapheneOS and F-Droid handily achieve the privacy and rich FOSS ecosystem parts. Useful terminal depends on your definition :) but for my use case Termux fills the void.

It doesn’t feel like Linux (you can’t even use Wifi and Ethernet at the same time for crying out loud) but for a relatively cheap low-power device, I like the flexibility.

It’s far enough from being a foot gun that I can give a Pixel 5 with GrapheneOS and some F-Droid apps to my grandmother and know she’ll have no problems. Balancing that with having enough extensibility to scratch the itch for 99% of tinkerers is a feat to appreciate in my view.

Oh cool! I didn’t realize pandoc was extensible enough to deal with this kind of conversion. I’ll give it a look!

With the rise of these .md based personal knowledge database applications it would be amazing to see some conversion software.

I understand that each has their special sauce. Does anyone know what would be the most difficult part about building a tool like that to copy in Logseq data to SB for example?

As an avid NewPipe user I like that it’s an approximately identical tool with more functionality!

It seems like a fork where (I wish) a plugin could (ideally) be in NewPipe. It may also be a nice nod to the original devs to change the default color scheme of the fork so nobody gets confused as to who forked from who.

Overall very cool work! I hope they continue to have success and make progress.

Right!! Just like anything there’s a trade-off.

Glad you phrased the well-intentioned (and fair) critique in a kind way! I love it when there’s good discourse around these topics

You make a great point. I really shouldn’t contribute to the boogeyman-ification of port forwarding.

I certainly agree there is nothing inherently wrong or dangerous with port forwarding in and of itself. It’s like saying a hammer is bad. Not true in the slightest! A newbie swinging it around like there’s no tomorrow might smack their fingers a few times, but that’s no fault of hammer :)

Port forwarding is a tool, and is great/necessary for many jobs. For my use case I love that Wireguard offers a great alternative that: completes my goal, forces the use of keys, and makes it easy to do so.

Couldn’t agree more! Tailscale also lets you use Mullvad (up to 5 devices per Mullvad account, across all clients) as an exit node.

I’ll assume you mean what I mean when I say I want to be safe with my self hosting – that is, “safe” but also easily accessible enough that my friends/family don’t balk the first time they try to log in or reset their password. There are all kinds of strategies you can use to protect your data, but I’ll cover the few that I find to be reasonable.

1. Port Forwarding – as someone mentioned already, port forwarding raw internet traffic to a server is probably a bad idea based on the information given. Especially since it isn’t strictly necessary.

2. Consumer Grade Tunnel Services – I’m sure there are others, but cloudflare tunnels can be a safer option of exposing a service to the public internet.

3. Personal VPN (my pick) – if your number of users is small, it may be easiest to set up a private VPN. This has the added benefit of making things like PiHole available to all of your devices wherever you go. Popular options include Tailscale (easiest, but relies on trusting Tailscale) or Wireguard/OpenVPN (bare bones with excellent documentation). I think there are similar options to tailscale through NordVPN (and probably others), where it “magically” handles connecting your devices but then you face a ~5 device limit.

With Wireguard or OpenVPN you may ask: “How do I do that without opening a port? You just said that was a bad idea!” Well, the best way that I have come up with is to use a VPS (providers include Digital Ocean, Linode to name a few) where you typically get a public IP address for free (as in free beer). You still have a public port open in your virtual private network, but it’s an acceptable risk (in my mind, for my threat model) given it’s on a machine that you don’t own or care about. You can wipe that VPS machine any time you want, the cost is time.

It’s all a trade-off. You can go to much further lengths than I’ve described here to be “safer” but this is the threshold that I’ve found to be easy and Good Enough for Me™.

If I were starting over I would start with Tailscale and work up from there. There are many many good options and only you can decide which one is best for your situation!

It’s definitely a skill that I haven’t mastered either! That being said I think it’s one of the pillars of being a bonafide “super user” and I’d like to set there one day :)

Maybe I’ll take inspiration from this post and write something up about what I learn in the future about manpages.

Cheers and happy tinkering!

Thanks for putting this out for public benefit! I haven’t messed around with MacOS much but the things you’ve mentioned are nice to know.

I believe that’s a shell/bash standard variable, but I need to learn where it came from and how it works

You may know this already, but I’ve found the man (as in manual) utility to be one of the most useful things in GNU/Linux user space. I don’t have much insight into ‘${file##*/}’ off the cuff, but I can tell you there’s manual entries for file, sh, and bash that may help you track it down.

# simply type man [some-command]
man file
man sh
man bash
man man # very useful for getting started!

Manpages are local to your system so they’re extremely fast to pull up and searchable!

Here’s some online info on man if you’re interested:

(30 sec read) Unix stack exchange tips & tricks

(5 min read) It’s FOSS writeup

Exactly what I came here to say.

Prompt me for Ubuntu Pro once (in the GUI on first login)? Shame on you, but I’ll move past it.

Put an ad in the terminal every time I update my system though? Straight to jail.

*testing :)

Socialism has to to with collective ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, not cost to the consumer. Goods and services may typically be free at the time of use (funded by taxes ahead of time) but that does NOT mean free as in without cost.

Again, like most of the other people in this thread, you’re confusing free as in freedom (software movement), and free as in without cost.

I agree that socialism is not the scary term that staunch capitalists seem to believe that it is. However, perpetuating misunderstandings about what socialism means will not help find a healthy balance.

You’re missing the entire point of the free software movement. Free as in freedom does NOT intrinsically mean free as in absence of cost. Linux exists because of companies like Cygnus who successfully marketed the Bazaar, as opposed to the Cathedral, to investors.

Stallman and Torvalds themselves have gone on record multiple times stating the utter lack of political motivation in being able to modify the software on your machine.