Guides

Leave a comment if any of this doesn’t make sense. I’ll be more than happy to help. Over the last few years, I’ve been wanting to setup a comprehensive and secure ‘handover’ document for my family - In case I cease to exist. My key priorities were it should : be easy to update and maintain when I am alive be easy to reference and access when I am dead have multiple fall-back points Now, the most straightforward way to do this would be to have all the information on a secure spreadsheet or document. But that’s not fun! So I decided to use Trilium Notes for it. When it’s time, my wife has three options to access the support checklist a) Online via a secure portal/app b) Using a secure flash-drive c) Old school printed sheets ...

Leave a comment if any of this doesn’t make sense. I’ll be more than happy to help. I recently installed Navidrome on an Odroid XU4 and configured Guacamole on my NUC. To access these applications securely on an external network, I setup a WireGuard tunnel and took this opportunity to learn how to use Caddy as a reverse proxy. Here’s a quick walk-through: Setup the VPS: Since we need a VPS just to tunnel traffic, get a lightweight one from a reliable provider. After the regular server hardening, setup your first WireGuard peer. I chose to use this script . ...

I have been using Anydesk for a while now to remote into my NUC workstation. It works great but for one big downside - It needs you to install the tool on both machines. While looking for alternatives, I came across Guacamole which is a clientless remote desktop gateway. Set it up on the server and you can access your desktops now from any browser! So technically, If needed I could access my workstation even from a hand held device. All I need is a browser that supports HTML5! ...

I wrote this guide initially for the Hetzner community. Posting here for posterity. Leave a comment if any of this doesn’t make sense. I’ll be more than happy to help. Trilium Notes is a hierarchical note taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases. See the Trilium Github page for more details. In this tutorial we will deploy a Trilium instance to install this open source and self-hosted alternative to Evernote on a fresh Debian server. ...

I was tweaking my OBS Studio settings earlier this morning and noticed I could install a virtual camera on my machine. Once this add-on is installed and activated, it essentially exposes OBS studio ‘scenes’ as an input that any conferencing software could use instead of the webcam feed. This effectively translates to sharing your screen with other participants on the conference call! Ever since I deleted my whatsapp account and moved over to using Signal as my primary communication tool, this is one feature I wish the Signal app had. And now, I could use this neat little trick not just with Signal but any conferencing app that doesn’t let me share my screen in their free-tier! ...

Here’s a quick and simple way to make and print your own passport photos[PP]. I’ve used GIMP - which is a fabulous photo editing tool. They have a nifty installer irrespective of which OS you use and have stood the test of time. There are a slew of different ways to arrive at the final product. This method has worked well for me over the past and based on your specific needs, you might have to alter a few settings. ...

Jit.si is a terrific, secure video-conferencing #alternative to #Zoom and obviously comes with all the open-source awesomeness. Call clarity is amazing and with a room capacity of 100+ (and potentially much more, driven by network and server capabilities), it’s an absolute no-brainer to switch over. Use Jitsi Meet on the desktop or use one of their slick android, F-droid or iPhone apps on hand-held devices to organise your video conferences. With the recent push to video-conferencing most meetings, I decided to setup my own instance. This was way more straightforward than I thought! I am currenty running it as a docker container, fronted with #Traefik for encryption. Configuration and installation steps mentioned below assume you have access to a domain name and server with docker already installed. ...