Technology

A quick rundown on the state of the home-servers I run or applications I host on the cloud. Published while listening to: Malang With our temporary relocation, I currently manage two ‘home-labs’ - one which I remotely manage with a WireGuard tunnel and the other just a local-access only setup. The remote home-lab is essentially a Nextcloud server running on a DietPi OS spun on an RPi4. I pulled down the HAProxy config on the fronting server since that was no longer required. ...

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. ...

I’ve been sitting on the ledge for a while now and Whatsapp’s latest ultimatum is just what I needed to see myself out the doors. I value my freedom and privacy - way more than the perceived convenience and I’ve deleted my Whatsapp account for good. Ever since FB bought Whatsapp in 2014, they’ve been working on building a feature-set that would keep users tethered to the network - read receipts, web clients, weeding out third party clients, voice calls, removing the 1$ annual fee, file sharing, encryption, desktop clients, video calls, customer service platform for enterprises, status, enhanced video call features - you get it. The most recent move is a strategic attempt to enhance their monetizing pipeline by building the framework to better mine metadata across its various platforms - Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook and CrowdTangle. In growing economies, Payments has been one realm they have had their eyes on for a while now and this latest move will turbo-boost that intent and help them compete with PayTM, Google and Amazon Payment systems. I’m surprised they took 6 years to get here though. ...

This is fascinating! A few GPS devices apparently had a mild(?) path offset issue few days ago: The issue has to do with the ephemeris data file, also called the EPO file (Extended Prediction Orbit) or Connected Predictive Ephemeris (CPE). Or simply the satellite pre-cache file. That’s the file that’s delivered to your device on a frequent basis (usually every few days). This file is what makes your watch near-instantly find GPS satellites when you go outside. It’s basically a cheat-sheet of where the satellites are for the next few days, or up to a week or so. ...