Linux

After a good one year away from Whatsapp, I’m back on it . This time however, on better terms. All thanks to the Mautrix bridge and the Matrix protocol. Essentially, I can access my whatsapp account data on my regular phone or desktop using Elements’ pretty robust app system. Note that the whatsapp app however is either running on a Virtual Machine or in my case an old phone fronted with a VPN. Since whatsapp only needs the primary phone to connect with their servers once every two weeks, it’s pretty much just sitting there turned off while all the group and individual messages show up on the bridged element app. ...

This is a terrific intro to all things linux and the terminal. Something I wish I’d come across when I was learning the ropes several years ago. I’d almost forgotten about alias!

A quick rundown on the state of the home-servers I run or applications I host on the cloud. My ‘Homelab’ setup has not changed much since my last update in January. I did add in a switch and installed a wireguard vpn on the RPI 3B+ that fronts as a reverse proxy for the Nextcloud media devices. I also got a Seagate 2TB drive and built two partitions into it. One acts as a backup for my Nextcloud files and the other is a ‘cold backup’ of my Hetzner cloud instance. ...

My Samsung phone by default generates pretty high resolution pictures. Even with the most basic setting, captured images turn out to be ~3MB! I’m not a huge photo buff and don’t necessarily need such high clarity pictures which consume a lot of space. I recently came across two amazing utilities that help optimize images in Linux: jpegoptim and optipng Install them via terminal: sudo apt-get install jpegoptim sudo apt-get install optipng And optimize away! ...

So far I had all the micro-servers in the home network connected either to a LAN port or to an Orbi Satellite. This week I implemented a simple 8 port un-managed TP-Link switch into my ‘homelab’. Costed just about 18 bucks with a price-match from amazon and it has tremendously improved upload/download speeds! Also it’s pretty cool to visually see that the RPi3B+ boards are being throttled at 10/100Mbps while the RPi4 is rummaging at 1000Mbps. ...

A glimpse of the past week and the few things that captivated my attention: Weather’s been pretty erratic this week. We also had a mild dusting yesterday out of the blue! Might consider heading out for a hike later today. I nudged Meena to write more. We’ve had some interesting discussions on Yoga and other things over the past week and I do think she has a ton to share! She’s also planning to train for a 50miler which I am super excited about! Oh and beyond all that marketing ploy, Happy Mothers’ day. ...

PS: For step-by-step instructions read this post instead I’ve had my eyes on Trilium notes since last year. Having setup a robust docker framework earlier this year, I decided to test Trilium out. Gave it a test run this morning and am way impressed with its’ functionalities! With docker, installation was super easy and I am strongly leaning towards using Trilium as my primary note application. The yml file to get this running on docker (swarm) is in my github gist. You’d obviously need to have docker installed, docker swarm running with the traefik container and the domain mapped as needed. My Jitsi post has this outlined further. ...

To migrate my php applications that did not have a handy docker-compose available, I needed a vanilla setup for my stack-based docker environment. Known is one of those apps and so the first step was to build that PHP environment. Setting up a Dockerhub repository and building a custom PHP image [If you decide to use my image, you would not have to build this yourself. Skip ahead to the Deploying Known section] ...

Appa, who’s very active on Facebook, recently wanted an easy way to sift through his old videos and photos that were up on his account. I decided to take a dump of his data from the network using the download your information section. I initiated the process with just a few clicks and after a few days, I was able to download the zipped files of all the content he had posted on FB. including the likes, messages, shares etc. If you haven’t already, I would strongly recommend you get a copy of your data. I rarely interact on Facebook these days so it was even more interesting to see all the information they collect on you. ...

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. ...